The Condition of Mankind Flashcards
“With all its muddy feet that press to early coffee stands”
“One thinks of all the hands that are raising dingy shades”
Literary Device / Technique:
- Synecdoche
- A figure of speech in which a part is made to represent the whole
Link to theme / effect
- Eliot represents the people of the city as their feet and hands
- These are the parts of the body that perform the most repetitive and mundane tasks and functions
“When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall”
“I should have been a pair of ragged claws, scuttling across the floors of silent seas”
Literary Device / Technique:
- Animal Imagery
- A subversion of the romantic natural escapism “Oh for the wings of a dove”
Link to theme / effect
- Prufrock views modern life as a relentless dissection of different people
- Crabs are scavengers, garbage eaters that live off the refuse that makes its way to the sea floor
“So the hand of a child, automatic, slipped out and pocketed a toy that was running along the quay”
Literary Device / Technique:
- Modernism and the French symbolists are concerned with the motives behind seemingly ordinary actions
Link to theme / effect
- This subverts the traditional romantic trope on the beauty of the child
- In humanity’s current state, even the child has been corrupted by greed
“Here the stone images are raised, here they receive the supplication of a dead man’s hand, under the twinkle of a fading star”
Literary Device / Technique:
- During the time Eliot was writing, naturalism was taking root in the literary community
Link to theme / effect
- Connotations with idolatrous worship
- Eliot argues that belief in God is gone, but man still has need for spiritual validation
- Faith in God is replaced with faith in idols already doomed from conception
“This birth was hard and bitter agony for us, like death, our death”
“But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation, with an alien people clutching their gods”
Literary Device / Technique:
- New Dispensation refers to the reign of Christianity
- During the time of Eliot’s writing, man as questioning to which dispensation they belonged
Link to theme / effect
- The Magi recognise the coming of Christ means the end of their people’s society
- Embracing faith means accepting the insignificance of your own way of life
