Preludes
by T. S. Eliot
I
The winter evening settles down with smell of steaks in passageways.
Six o’clock. The burnt-out ends of smoky days. And now a gusty shower
wraps the grimy scraps of withered leaves about your feet and
newspapers from vacant lots; the showers beat on broken blinds and
chimney-pots, and at the corner of the street a lonely cab-horse
steams and stamps. And then the lighting of the lamps.
II
The morning comes to consciousness of faint stale smells of beer from
the sawdust-trampled street with all its muddy feet that press to early
coffee-stands.With the other masquerades that time resumes, one thinks of
all the hands that are raising dingy shades in a thousand furnished rooms.
III
You tossed a blanket from the bed, you lay upon your back, and waited;
you dozed, and watched the night revealing the thousand sordid images
of which your soul was constituted; they flickered against the ceiling.
And when all the world came back and the light crept up between the
shutters and you heard the sparrows in the gutters, you had such a vision
of the street as the street hardly understands; sitting along the bed’s edge,
where you curled the papers from your hair, or clasped the yellow soles
of feet in the palms of both soiled hands.
IV
His soul stretched tight across the skies that fade behind a city block,
or trampled by insistent feet at four and five and six o’clock; and short
square fingers stuffing pipes, and evening newspapers, and eyes assured
of certain certainties, the conscience of a blackened street impatient to
assume the world.
I am moved by fancies that are curled around these images, and cling:
the notion of some infinitely gentle infinitely suffering thing.
Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh; the worlds revolve
like ancient women gathering fuel in vacant lots.