Year 12 IB Extended Essays 2018

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‘smells of beer’ and the ‘sawdust-trampled’ streets on their dreary trudge to work to carry on the false pretence that passes for life. The morning has not brought renewal to the city but rather the detritus of previous days remains. The personification of the street vividly embodies the hordes of people reluctantly making their way to work, stopping for an early cup of coffee to make it through another endless day. The lower working class live in “A thousand furnished rooms” in grubby boarding houses, suggesting that for these people, they work to exist. Here we have the complex ideas that Eliot propounds; on the one hand, these are lives of meaningless repetition and are a consequence of the loss of faith and spirituality and yet at the same time, he finds beauty in the quiet diligence of these lives in the face of their grim realities. These themes are brought to the reader through stylistically ambitious new techniques, such as the lack of consistent rhyme and the structure of the verses which serve as a metaphor for these mundane yet compelling lives. The narrative perspective of the third verse of Preludes then changes to a second person perspective that focuses on one of these ‘thousand furnished rooms’ to talk to the reader directly as one of these people. Not even the night provides relief from life as we are beset by insomnia, and tormented by the ‘sordid images’ our minds concoct. Even dreams do not allow escape from the repetitive unpleasantness of life. Even when ‘all the world came back’ and the morning begins, no respite from the nightmare is brought as they are awoken not by songbirds but by grubby sparrows foraging in dirty gutters. In the final verse, ‘The fade behind a city block’ truncates a city view to one block, whereas in the country the view is endless. Eliot uses this to illustrate that these people’s aspirations, perspectives and their entire existence are restricted by urbanisation. They are hemmed in by trampling of people with ‘insistent feet/ At four and five and six o’clock’. They are told what to think by the ‘evening newspapers’ that assure of ‘certain certainties’, basing their principles on the information reported in their city, assuming that it relates to the whole world. Eliot is saying that there is something better to be found if you look outside the generally accepted mores of society, proposing the idea that that we can be more compassionate and connected with our fellow men. Eliot appears to offer hope for change. The line ‘the worlds revolve like ancient women’ suggests that traditionalist beliefs like