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Rhapsody on a Windy Night (1911) - Coggle Diagram
Rhapsody on a Windy Night (1911)
Subversion of Romantic, lyrical performance of allure and power
"Regard the moon... she winks a feeble eye"
Connotations of the feminine beauty, purity and empowering allure of the moon destroyed by the dilapidation and hostility of the modern metropolis. Corruption and grittiness. Scars as a symbol of the trauma she has endured in the urban environment.
"A washed-out smallpox cracks her face"
"Midnight shakes the memory/As a madman shakes a dead geranium"
Resilience of geraniums has been invaded by the corruption and decay of urbanisation. Dislocated comparisons. Iambic pentameter --> ends the stanza with a powerful and resounding Symbolist image.
Parody of Romanticism.
Shift in thinking and sense of disengagement between individual and their city.
Modern man is suspended between life and death through the persona’ instability of memory and ironic account of reality.
"Held in a lunar synthesis/Whispering lunar incantations/Dissolve the floors of memory"
Paralysis of time (Bergsonian marking) --> Modernism characterised by the individual's internal experience. Eliot iterating the distortion of time and memory as a result of the permanence of his existential despair in finding meaning in the urban detritus.
Continued flaneur conveying the drug-like, dreamlike trances of the streets -->
The persona struggling to connect with his environment.
"Dissolve" --> Anxiety of trying to grasp onto experiences that have meaning in an artificial world and with deep-seated alienated to others.
Streets that are being ‘held’, the verb implying a sense of constraint, held prisoner, or held in some kind of time warp in a ‘lunar synthesis.
Flux of time divided by the chiming of precarious hours.
"Twelve o' clock"
Stanzas beginning with mechanic and rigid structure of time,
imposed by industrial world.
Directly juxtaposes the individual's distortion and unreliability with time and memory as they delve into the value of their experiences in the modern world
The experience of time in the individual consciousness as fluid and indivisible challenged by the rigid, economic, modern world.
Structured through a passage of time, fragmentary memories exploring protagonists’ response to the disjointed mental images
"Every street lamp that I pass/Beats like a fatalistic drum"
Dramatic, trance-like vignette of the drum beating --> Auditory propelling into journey of consciousness.
Suggesting social fabric disintegrating. We struggle to face our truths, we hide in our memories, we are ashamed of what might be revealed.
Repeated images of personified “street lamps”
Baudelaire flaneur to reveal the incoherency and lack of meaning in the modern world. Eliot’s incomprehensibly despondent and fragmented perception of the sensibilities of the human condition.
"And you see the corner of her eye/Twists like a crooked pin"
Disfigured, distorted images --> Inability to connect with other humans.
Reflects the desolation of both the tangible present world and that of life preserved in memory.
"I could see nothing behind that child's eye"
Subversion of child innocence. Symbolism and synecdoche of "eye" as the gateway into the soul, the person's truth. Instead, it communicates once again the distance and inability to connect.
Depersonalises and fragments human qualities
The motif of the transcendence of time within a context of eternal ennui.
"Here is the number on the door/memory!/You have the key"
Memory does not help an epiphany of escape and freedom from the constraint of the urban decay --> instead it emphasises once again the monotony of routine and mechanical nature of industrialism.
Bathetic discourse/anticlimactic resolution.
"Put your shoes at the door, sleep, prepare for life/The last twist of the knife"
Sedation in order to get through the drudgery and monotony of a decaying, industrial zeitgeist.
Motif of "twist" until the end. The distortion of memory his connection to the sordid reality of the atropy and stasis that characterises his zeitgeist.
Bathetic discourse/anticlimatic resolution
Short, clipped, commanding tone and syntax of stanza.
Emphasises ingrained nature of urban routine on individual’s psyche.
MACRO
First stanzas, enjambment gives us the impression that the persona is being drawn through the streetscape on a journey through dreams and memories over which he has no control
Juxtaposed to the final stanza which uses a combination of short and long lines – images of the past are ruptured as the persona arrives at his residence. Return to the present does not offer clarity.
Eliot forces us to face our sense of confusion and to challenge our reveries, not to dismiss them or get lost in them.
Constructs atmosphere of sordid gloominess, of disillusionment and disharmony that characterizes the superficial life of the metropolis where existence lacks identity, defines one of the individual freedom and thought, subverting perennial images of hope and renewal.
CONTEXT
Fractured existence of humanity, man’s alienation in a hostile universe and the inevitability of death in a world incapacitated by the devastations of war
French Symbolist Movement
Image or symbol as representative of emotion or abstract ideas
Dreams, visions and associative powers of imagination in poetry
Conflict in the mind creates discord, between what we see, what we experience and how we record it as memory - indicative of anxiety to grasp experiences that provide meaning