Rhapsody on a Windy Night by T. S. Eliot

First published: 1915; collected in Prufrock and Other Observations, 1917

Type of poem: Lyric

The Poem

“Rhapsody on a Windy Night” is a lyric poem in free verse. It is divided into six stanzas that vary in length from nine to twenty-three lines each, with a separate closing line at the end of the poem. In one way, the title seems to reflect the poem’s form, since in music a rhapsody is an irregular, unstructured piece. The poem at first appears to be an uncontrolled jumble of oddly juxtaposed images in lines and stanzas of irregular length, with no consistent rhyme scheme but with scattered rhymes, repetitions, and variations throughout. “Preludes” and Four Quartets (1943) are other poems showing T. S. Eliot’s interest in using musical forms.

From another perspective, the title is ironic, since the label “rhapsody” suggests a mood of enthusiasm or frenzy that the poem does not convey. A situation that could be romantic—a midnight stroll in the lamplight and moonlight—is actually dominated by images of sterility, decay, isolation, and despair. Moreover, the only sign of the wind is found in the two lines stating that the street lamps “sputtered,” although the wind is emphasized in the title and is an important image associated with decay and spiritual emptiness in other poems, such as “Preludes” and “Gerontion.”

“Rhapsody on a Windy Night” is written in the first person, but the reader learns less about the speaker as a distinct personality than he or she does in Eliot’s other early monologues, such as “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” On his nocturnal walk, this speaker does not express his thoughts or emotions directly or effusively, as one would expect in a “rhapsody.” As he passes a succession of street lamps, moving in and out of their pools of light, he seems controlled by their commands to consider the sordid images in the streets and the distorted images thrown up by his memory. In the last stanza, he obeys mechanically as the lamp, illuminating the entrance to his apartment, orders him to return to his daily routine and prepare for bed.

The speaker’s strange nocturnal visions are unified by some fairly consistent patterns, as the first or second line of each stanza (except the third) marks the time from midnight to four in the morning, and each stanza (except the first and third) quotes the lamps that direct his observations. He notices and remembers a woman with a torn and stained dress lingering in a doorway; the moon appearing as a similar aging, diseased woman; a cat licking up butter; eyes peering through shutters; dry geraniums; and stale smells of chestnuts, females in closed rooms, cigarettes, and cocktail bars. Although the memory interjects other images that seem out of place—such as driftwood, a useless rusted spring, a child grabbing a toy on a quay, and an old crab gripping a stick—the images all are united through the dominant characteristic of twisting or distortion. This “crowd of twisted things” culminates in the speaker’s final sensation as he is compelled, at the poem’s end, to return to everyday life—“The last twist of the knife.”

Forms and Devices

Eliot believed that poetry must be difficult in order to reflect the complexity of modern civilization. He also believed that the poet’s first concern should be his language. He wrote that “the only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an ‘objective correlative’; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion” (The Sacred Wood, 1920). A poem such as “Rhapsody on a Windy Night,” therefore, does not explain feelings or thoughts in any general, conventional way. Readers must work to discover the complex patterns of meaning, sound, and structure underlying the stream of bizarre and banal images that make up the poem.

Metaphors and other figures of speech provide one method for connecting disparate images. The first two stanzas contain the most complex figures of speech, as abstract ideas about the nature of memory give way to the concrete objects that dominate the poem. The memory has floors that can be “dissolved” under the influence of midnight and moonlight, preventing it from dividing perceptions logically or precisely. Time and memory become concrete when the midnight spell on the memory is compared to a madman shaking a dead geranium. As rational memory is destroyed and nonrational forces take control, strange combinations of images are shaken from the depths of the memory.

Other similes connect different sensory experiences. Light and sound are combined when each street lamp “Beats like a fatalistic drum,” reinforcing the incantatory rhythm of the poem and anticipating the speaker’s realization of his own entrapment in a futile existence. Then the personification of the street lamps, with their ability to order the speaker to observe what they describe throughout the poem, gives him a detached, impersonal perspective that reflects Eliot’s determination to break away from the lyrical subjectivity of nineteenth century Romanticism. The speaker receives impressions from the objects lighted in the street and his memory responds with free associations, comparing (in stanza 2) an open door to a grin and the corner of an eye to a crooked pin.

The rest of the poem consists of more fragmentary juxtapositions of images, with fewer explicit connections provided by similes, but with other poetic and linguistic devices helping to make connections. Eliot rejected the label vers libre (free verse) when it implied absence of pattern, rhyme, or meter. Although there seems to be something undisciplined or unexpected in the way lines and sentences are developed in this poem (suggesting subconscious or involuntary utterances), there is a complex interplay of syntactic patterns, semantically related words, internal rhymes, intermittent end rhymes, alliteration, and other sound patterns linking the woman in stanza 2, the woman in the moon in stanza 5, the particularly fragmented details of the branch and broken spring in stanza 3, and the glimpses of human and animal actions in stanza 4.

By stanzas 5 and 6, the romantic idea of incantations is replaced by a monotonous effect in these patterns and repetitions. The parallel lists of dry and stale images, the short imperatives, and the rhymes and alliteration that create ironic links in “Cologne” and “alone”; “Mount,” “Memory,” and “key”; and, finally, “life” and “knife” emphasize the limitations of memory and the mundane, isolated lives of individuals.

Bibliography

Ackroyd, Peter. T. S. Eliot: A Life. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984.

Browne, Elliott Martin. The Making of T. S. Eliot’s Plays. London: Cambridge University Press, 1969.

Donoghue, Denis. Words Alone: The Poet, T. S. Eliot. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000.

Eliot, Valerie, ed. The Letters of T. S. Eliot, 1898-1922. Vol. 1. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988.

Gordon, Lyndall. Eliot’s Early Years. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.

Gordon, Lyndall. Eliot’s New Life. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988.

Gordon, Lyndall. T. S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life. New York: Norton, 1999.

Litz, A. Walton, ed. Eliot in His Time: Essays on the Occasion of the Fiftieth Anniversary of “The Waste Land.” Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973.

Schuchard, Ronald. Eliot’s Dark Angel: Intersections of Life and Art. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.