Time Flashcards
“The winter evening settles down, with smell of steaks in passageways.
Six o’clock”
“And then the lighting of the lamps”
Literary Device / Technique:
- Disruption of form
- In Prelude 1 the first two lines are written in iambic tetrameter, interrupted by a short third line
Link to theme / effect
- Demonstrates the obsession of the modern world with time and the rituals that surround it
- Suggests that although modern life appears ordered it is actually fragmented
“There will be time to murder and create”
“Time yet for a hundred indecisions, a hundred visions and revisions”
Literary Device / Technique:
- This echoes the words of the prophet in Ecclesiastes
- “A time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot”
Link to theme / effect
- The purpose of the Book of Ecclesiastes is to relate the meaninglessness of life
- Prufrock’s inability to find the perfect time paralyses him from acting on his desires
“The street lamp sputtered, the street lamp muttered”
“Held in a lunar synthesis, whispering lunar incantations”
Literary Device / Technique:
- Symbolism
- French symbolists like Bergson concerned themselves with different types of time and memory
Link to theme / effect
- The streetlamp represents chronological time, analytical and objective, measured by the conventions of the clock striking hours
- The moon represents psychological duration, based on private internal rhythms and past experience
“This is the way the world ends, this is the way the world ends, this is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper”
Literary Device / Technique:
- This refers to the ‘Hollow Men’ (Fawkes, Kurtz, Brutus) who undertook their actions because they desired immortality
- In the Book of Revelations, the end of the world is promised as an apocalypse
Link to theme / effect
- These lines subvert expectations of the end
- Readers are placed in the position of the hollow men who ultimately died alone and empty handed
- The “whimper” can be interpreted as the hopeless plea for immortality
“A cold coming we had of it, just the worst time of year, for a journey, and such a long journey”
Literary Device / Technique:
- Pastiche
- These lines come from the 1622 Nativity sermon of bishop Lancelot Andrewes
Link to theme / effect
- The Magi can be seen as a persona for Eliot’s own conversion experience
- Eliot relates the difficulty of finding faith – it can be as long and difficult as a journey across a desert
- Many (consider Prufrock) will be put off by the massive spiritual motivation needed for such a journey
