Rhapsody on a Windy Night

Decay of the Modern World

Representation of Women

Isolation

Memory

I: "the street held in a lunar synthesis, whispering lunar incantations dissolve the floors of memory"

I: "every street lamp that I pass beats like a fatalistic drum"

III: "a twisted branch upon the beach eaten smooth, and polished as if the world gave up"

Phantasmagoric imagery

Metaphor

ideas of the unpredictability of memory and the perpetual resurfacing of the past

The presence of a faux light highlights modernity

simile - creates a rhythm which further emphasises musical allusion

I: "Midnight shakes the memory as a madman shakes a dead geranium"

Midnight is a catalyst for realisation

simile

"dead geranium" contrasts traditional ideas of romanticism

Context

Heavily influenced by Paris, the decadent aesthetic avant garde tradition

draws heavily on the French symbolists to show a fragmented broken image that captures the sordid, squalor of life

I: "Twelve o'clock"

timestamp creates an abrupt start to the poem

shows the flaneur on a midnight walk

personification of the street

'fatalistic' is a reference to modernistic ideas

represents the modernistic idea of modernity

intertextuality to Laforgue

II: the street lamp sputtered, the street lamp muttered, the street lamp said..."

repetition and personification

light exposes memory

the street lamp is a paradox of modernity

II: "regard that woman who hesitates towards you in the light of the door which opens on her like a grin"

alludes to the idea of prostitution

the door is personified

simile where grin = temptation

II: "you see the border of her dress is torn and stained with sand, and you see the corner of her eye twists like a crooked pin"

sordid imagery

simile

III: "the memory throws up high and dry"

reoccurring motif of memory

personified memory has higher agency than the flaneur

exposes the death and decay of the modern world

depicts the debris of modernity (urban wasteland)

IV: "remark the cat which flattens itself in the gutter, slips out its tongue and devours a morsel of rancid butter"

rhyming sordid imagery

the use of 'rancid' highlights the decay of modern life

IV: "so the hand of a child, automatic... i could see nothing behind that child's eye"

the idea of 'eyes are the window to the soul' creates ambiguity and signifies sightlessness and isolation for the future generation

'automatic' depicts the child a a robot thus dehumanising

IV: "I have see eyes int he street trying to peer through lighted shutters"

synecdoche

'shutters' echoing preludes in that they aid to masquerade

IV: "remark the cat", "the hand of a child" and "a crab one afternoon in a pool"

the bizarre imagery of the cat, child and crab are used to show disconnection of the world and society

avant garde imagery

dialogue from an object highlight modernism

V: "La lune ne garde aucune rancune"

intertextuality with Laforgue

V: "she winks a feeble eye, she smiles into corners... a washed-out smallpox cracks her face"

moon is personified and represented as sordid, decayed and diseased

contradicts the representation of the moon in romantic poems

V: "her hand twists a paper rose"

represents 'faux beauty'

contradicts romanticism by using ideas of natural beauty and adding a sordid persona to them *HERfljhedfl

V: "of sunless dry geraniums"

intertextuality to Baudelaire highlights the themes of modernism int he poem

VI: "the bed is open; the tooth-brush hangs on the wall, put your shoes at the door, sleep, prepare for life."

V: "smells pf chestnuts in the streets and females smells in shuttered rooms"

juxtaposing olfactory imagery

olfactory imagery used to represent women as dirty and 'smelly'

accumulation signifies the mundane return to a routine life

VII: "the last twist of the knife"

stand alone line to place emphasis on the futile life of the modern person

poem uses intertextuality to Baudelaire and Laforgue

moonlight is like a magical drug that replaces normality with dreamlike madness

exploration of dreamlike imagery that is bizarre and threateningly transgressive

the 'lunar synthesis' memory provides strange hallucinatory, dreamlike images

the moon is depicted as a deranged, diseased, decadent goddess of modernity who becomes an iconic version of the sordid nature or the modern world