Time of Day

Another time of day, the small dark hours of the morning, and yet another change in style. With the frequent use of the personal pronoun 'you', the poem becomes somewhat more personal and individual. It is not clear to whom the section is addressed. It could possibly be the narrator's wife or partner or an anonymous inhabitant of the city, or perhaps to each individual reader, who could recognise elements of his own life in the lines. Despite, however, the change in voice and style, the themes that run through the poem are still evident, though with some semantic differences. There are here some examples of revelation, but not of a helpful or hopeful kind. 'You tossed a blanket from the bed': there is finally an uncovering, but what is being uncovered is unclear and dirty. The person, like the horse and the coffee drinkers, is waiting - once again, it seems, for nothing important or particular, since each day is hopelessly the same - simply for morning. Whilst waiting, the 'you' is dozing; neither asleep nor awake, perceiving neither dreams nor reality fully. Like the time of day, this person is in a half and half world between night and morning, and between slumber and wakefulness. The reader cannot therefore be certain how 'real' the images to follow are. The darkness of the night here seems not to be obscuring, but revealing, although the images revealed are far from hopeful or comforting. For the first time, we see the interior of a soul, instead of the landscape. The soul was constituted of a '...thousand sordid images.../that flickered against the ceiling'. The soul is dirty and unclear, insubstantial yet squalid. It is hidden by its grime and at the same time by its flickering transience.

* Finally, the morning comes, and with it sound and vision. However, hope does not arrive with the morning. The light, like so many other things, is obscured, and can but '[creep] between the shutters'. Small, drab city sparrows sing in the squalor of the gutter. Yet through all this, Eliot gives the subject what seems to be a true vision of the street, 'As the street hardly understands.' The reader is lead briefly to find a ray of hope in this grim day. However, it does not last. 'You' returns to the empty routines. With the return to routine, Eliot once again limits his description of this person to isolated body parts: the hair, the feet, and the dirty hands. All these pieces of this person are again obscured by filth; the feet are yellow, and the hands, like the soul, are soiled.

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PART IV

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Part IV reprises the evening from the first part and the soul from the third. It ties the images and themes from the previous sections together. The soul is 'stretched tight across the skies'. I do not think it matters whether this is the same soul from the previous section. All souls in this city are sordid and troubled. This time, the soul