MODULE B: Quotes Flashcards
“The winter evening settles down with the smell of steaks in passageways.”
The winter setting reflects its connotations of death, sterility and aridity.
Eliot’s personification of the cityscape illustrates a cramped society wherein people can smell other people’s meals: sauded and squalled imagery.
“The grimy scraps of withered leaves about your feet.”
Images of bits, fragmentation and dying imagery reflect the decay of society.
The synecdoche of feet indicates the incompleteness of an individual with the implied references to the
masses.
“To early coffee-stands. With the other masquerades that time resumes.”
A sense of mindless, automatic and mechanised routine.
The masquerade imagery highlights the pretence of life, that people are simply performing life and not
meaningfully going through it.
The notion of time is reflected as an artificial thing; people are moving in relation to clockwork.
“The world revolves like ancient women gathering fuel in vacant lots.”
The ugly image of an old, aging women reflects the decay of society.
“Held in a lunar synthesis, whispering lunar incantations.”
Moonlight has connotations with the non-rational and like a spell it removes the barriers of normal memory, clock time and the rational.
“Every street lamp that I pass beats like a fatalistic drum.”
This simile suggests that the street lamps are connected to clock-time and there is a sense that modern life is inescapable.
“An old crab with barnacles on his back, gripped the end of a stick which I held him.”
Eliot compares the instinctive and automatic response of crabs to the masses of modern society which
reflects the rigidness and soullessness of life.
“Of female smells in shuttered rooms.”
The sexual and stale imagery reflets the moral decay and may be a continuation of the female prostitute and Demimonde motif.
“Put your shoes at the door, sleep, prepare for life.”
The repetition of commands demonstrates the pointlessness of everyday routine.
“The last twist of the knife.”
Eliot suggests that life and routine is awful with the image of a person being killed.
“The women come and go talking of Michelangelo.”
This chorus is a motif that populates the poem. It symbolises a tonal shift to demonstrate Eliot’s use of fragmentation and stream of consciousness.
It is also a critique on the social civility that are ultimately meaningless.
“There will be time, there will be time.”
The overuse and repetition of the word ‘time’ both renders it meaningless and lends the reader a state of anxiety, that no matter how much Prufrock focuses on time, he can never quite have enough to achieve his goals. Prufrock’s indecisiveness and his stating thereof increases the poem’s pace.
“And when I am pinned and wriggling on the wall.”
This metaphor shows the inactivity that currently thwarts Prufrock which reflects the way he is suspended in animation and in time. Here, Prufrock’s insecurities are highlighted under the social gaze and wishes to look like everyone else.
“Till human voices wake us, and we drown.”
Here, reality wakes Prufrock up from his fantasies which simultaneously kills him. This criticises the stifling and suffocating nature of society.
A penny for the old guy.
Is thought to refer to Charon. In ancient Greek mythology, Charon was the ferryman who had to be paid a coin to ferry dead souls over the River Acheron to the underworld. Without a coin to pay him, one would become stuck. This is partially the situation that the Hollow Men are in.
