Themes and Techniques for T.S Elliot

Resource Description

Emotional and Moral Decay:

Eliot sustains a strong theme of the decay of the human spirit. He perceived the rise of modernisation and the lessening importance of traditional values as the cause of this decay.

Prufrock: The process of Prufrock’s emotional and moral decay is evident in the poem’s structure. The opening stanzas are of length and often digress, representing Prufrock’s dithering personality, while the ending stanzas are short and vague, representing his lack of energy and unwillingness to continue.

Through the poem’s free verse, there is an insertion of iambic pentameter in lines 111-119 – “No! I am not Prince Hamlet…” Combined with other intertextual references, namely the epigraph taken from Dante’s Inferno and the biblical allusions to John the Baptist and Lazarus, Eliot proves Prufrock’s lack of imagination, to the extent that he cannot even claim originality over his own thoughts.

Preludes: Eliot presents us with an aggregation of negative urban images, “burnt out…grimy scraps…muddy feet,” which reflect the disintegration of the modern world. Further, the inextricable connection between the internal and external world is expressed with the assimilation of the persona’s soul with the city street (“trampled by insistent feet”) reflecting how the modern city and lifestyle assists in the decay of the ‘soul’ of humanity. Allied to this, Eliot explores the decay of emotion through the paradox of some “infinitely gentle/infinitely suffering thing”. This reduces pain in the modern world to a commonplace and merely “gentle” emotion.

Rhapsody: To represent the replacement of romanticism with modernism, Eliot uses the dichotomy between the natural light of the moon as a symbol of love and the artificial light of the streetlamp as a symbol of it’s decay. This is prominent through the gross imagery the cat and his “rancid butter”, symbolising Eliot’s perception of the reality of life, and of the moon and her “paper rose”, symbolising the frailty of love in the modern world. The olfactory imagery of “female smells” and “cocktail smells” that “cross and cross across her brain” conveys the heightened value of sex and its prominence over love and morals in the contemporary context.

Hollow Men: Lifelessness and aridity are recurring images throughout the poem, such as “This is the dead land/This is cactus land.” This reflects Eliot’s perceived moral “dryness” in modern society. Similarly, he compares “our dried voices” through similes to “wind in dry grass” or “rats feet over broken glass”, representing a lack of energy and emotional decay. Eliot characterises humanity as “empty men”, essentially ‘soulless’, and through the allusion to ‘eyes are the window to the soul’ (“the eyes are not here/there are no eyes here”) Eliot creates further meaning about the hollow men’s capacity to emote.

Magi: Symbolic of Eliot’s own conversion to Christianity, the process of decline is evident in the structure of “The Journey of the Magi”, as a sense of decay does not arise until the final stanza. Within the final stanza, Eliot conveys his consistent stance that the modern man leads a life devoid of any significance, through the binary opposites in “I had seen birth and death,/But had thought they were different.” This depicts decaying humanity in which birth is of no greater importance than death.

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