POEM SUMMARY

The poem evokes the individuals increasing isolation in a dwindling, worn-out society. Eliot paints a bleak picture of urban life in the early 20th century, to which the perspective of the poem is unknown, watching from the shadows.

FORM

• Strophes – irregular rhetorical units of free verse, determined by rhythmic or emotional completeness rather than by metrical pattern.
• Poems may appear to be a collage of fragmented images
• Eliot’s deliberate choice of unpoetic diction and lexicon attempts to reflect the complexity of modernity.
• The use of allusions and repetition create a sense of dislocation, distance and monotomy in the reader.
• The poem reverts the romantic connotations of the title “Rhapsody”

Rhapsody on a Windy Night

Isolation of the individual

Eliot utilizes the characterisation of the omniscient persona to serve as a representative of isolation and alienation within the human condition. The avid imagery of the desolate streetscape emanates the individual’s reclusive personality; coinciding with the world he sees as reeking of loneliness and decay. The visual simile prescribed in “midnight shakes the memory as a madman shakes a dead germanium” portrays the collapse of inner rationality as a condition of modernity; as internal rationality gives way to a highly mechanical lifestyle and renders it needless. Eliot captured the atomization of the individual in the modern industrialised world; mirroring his own struggle with modernity within his context.

Despondency/Lack of communication

Eliot’s description of the madman as he ‘shakes a dead germanium’ generates a mood of pandemonium, emphasizing the narrator’s chaotic state of mind. Ultimately, the inserted quotations that become consistent within ‘Rhapsody’ evident in the example: ‘Remark the cat which flattens itself in the gutter…” illuminates the illusion of the omniscient narrators fear of asserting his opinion in the fear rejection. The symbolic imagery in “I could see nothing behind that child’s eye” evokes Eliot’s greatest criticism towards societies failure of communication; vindicating the next generation’s inability to escape the vicious cycle of miscommunication.

Decaying society

The composition of ‘Rhapsody’ emanates the similar characteristic manner of the French symbolists, concentrating on fragmented, broken images to suggest the sordid life and squalor of a modern city.