Year 12 IB Extended Essays 2018

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Prufrock’s life as he imagines a dream of beautiful ‘sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown’ later being destroyed by the grim realities of life. The connections to grimness and spiritual aridity of 20 th century life in the Preludes is obvious here. In many ways, Prufrock may be a reflection of T.S Eliot’s own experiences and his sense of loss in the triviality of modern life. This is not in the romantic tradition, as the hero, Prufrock, is merely a bit player, “almost a fool” and deals with the difficulties and frustrations of modern life. Eliot uses the aforementioned modern-literary techniques to dramatically accentuate traditionalist opinions that condemn the changes brought about by modernity which he suggests can lead individuals to embrace nihilism, like the protagonist Prufrock. The third poem, The Journey of the Magi takes a softer note and yet conveys a similar message to Prufrock, where the birth of the saviour brings hope to a hope-less world. The Journey of the Magi: 1927 “Journey of the Magi is usually discounted as an unassuming Christmas poem” as T.S Eliot wrote it for a Christmas card that was to be issued by his publishing house. (Harris, 1980, p. 837) Written in 1927, it is one of his later poems that “[occupy] a central position in his poetic development” as it chronicles the journey of the wise men to Bethlehem to symbolise a “grim, demythologised treatment of a difficult search for faith” brought about by modernism. (Harris, 1980, p. 837) It is written in free-verse and in that respect appears to be modern, but traditional ideas and values are told through a “single-individuated voice” throughout the narrative poem. (Harris, 1980, p. 837) The Journey of the Magi does not romanticise the aspirations and motivations of the journey but details the hardship and frustrations of the journey. It details the fact that it was ‘the worst time of the year’ and how it was ‘the very dead of winter’. The wise men were homesick for the comforts they had left behind and they feared it ‘was all folly’. However, this sentiment changes when they reach a stopover, in a ‘temperate valley’ with a ‘tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel’. Whilst it appears to begin to romanticise the landscape, the narrator merely describes it as ‘satisfactory’, further highlighting the modernist theme of the poem due to the lack of superlative language.