T.S. Eliot: Rhapsody on a Windy Night

At New London Theatre on May 11th, 1981, Elaine Paige first performed the legendary ballad “Memory” in a dance musical entitled Cats, with music by Andrew Lloyd Webber and lyrics by T. S. Eliot. “Memory” is an extremely famous song, but few have ever learned the poem it based off of; T. S. Eliot’s “Rhapsody on a Windy Night.” T. S. Eliot was a well-rounded writer, the author of everything from the light-hearted Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats to the famously dark critique on society, “The Wasteland.” This free verse poem is more similar to “The Wasteland” in its nightmarish mood (“Rhapsody” n.p.). The narrator, who is never specified, is perceived as male because of the role of men at the time the poem was written (Lin n.p.). Women were not on streets at night unless they were prostitutes, and they never lived alone, so the speaker must be a man (Lin n.p.). This poem is a commentary on the darker aspects of society in this or any time period, and uses sound devices and imagery to paint a picture of desolation and loneliness in the world and in the life of a man walking the streets at night.

The first stanza is setting up for the rest of the poem. It describes a street at midnight, and specifies the street lamps, which become an important part of the poem. At the end of this stanza, it says “Midnight shakes the memory / As a madman shakes a dead geranium” (Eliot n.p.). This is a significant simile. The madman is an outcast, alienated from society (Parsons n.p.). Geraniums are known for being very difficult to kill, they can live almost anywhere and still flourish, yet these ones are dead (Parsons n.p.). They once were beautiful, like the memories the narrator has, but now they are pointless (“Rhapsody” n.p.). The second stanza mentions that time has passed; it is now 1:30 AM. The narrator sees a woman, presumed to be a prostitute, because of her torn dress and the fact that she is out this late at night (Lin n.p.). She triggers memories, and the narrator feels negatively towards her (Lin n.p.). The third stanza includes many descriptions of twisted and broken things, such as the spring that is “hard and curled and ready to snap” (Eliot n.p.). All the descriptors portray something as brittle and easily broken, and represent the impotence of the narrator (Lin n.p.). This relates to the fact that the narrator is not as strong and masculine as he feels he should be; rather, he has no control over the memories (Lin n.p.). On this, Yuxi Lin states that he “feels emasculated by his inability to forget” (Lin n.p.). The fourth stanza is again introducing the concept of the street lamp being another narrator for the main character to project his thoughts through (Williamson 80). The street lamp mentions the cat “which flattens itself in the gutter, / Slips out its tongue / And devours a morsel of rancid butter”, a descriptor that furthers the mood of despair in this poem by presenting an innocent animal that is also suffering from the state of the world (Eliot n.p.). The fifth stanza is longer by far than all the other ones, being 23 lines as opposed to ten. In this stanza, another significant character is officially introduced; the moon. The moon is the opposite of the narrator; she is peaceful and at ease while the narrator is tormented by memories (Lin n.p.). In this stanza, the street lamp says “La lune ne garde aucune rancune”, which is French and translates to “The moon holds no resentment”; the lamp also says “The moon has lost her memory” (Eliot n.p.). The moon is often a symbol for inconstancy and fickleness, and this is how the narrator sees her; because she has lost her memory, she is unfaithful (Lin n.p.). In the poem, the moon and the street lamps each serve purposes; the street lamps invoke memories and the moonlight returns the narrator to a neutral and uniform state of mind (“Rhapsody” n.p.). In the last stanza, the narrator ends his moonlit walk. He has nowhere else to go, so he must return to his world of routine (Chakraborty 5). At the end, the street lamp says, “Sleep, prepare for life” (Eliot n.p.). Usually, one would say prepare for death, so this implies that his everyday life is such a mundane existence that going back to it is like death, a fact made more obvious by the last line of the poem; “The last twist of the knife,” as he returns home (Parsons n.p.).

The structure of a poem can add a lot