A Comparison Of The Ways Eliot Creates And Makes Use Of The Different Settings In Preludes And The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock Essay

Eliot demonstrates a wide range of stanzaic structures, imagery and fragmentation of verses to depict the changes of settings in Preludes and The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. The story line for Preludes is merely the narrator’s daily life in the depressing, working class residence of an ambiguous city. In contrast, Prufrock is a traumatic monologue of an upper class, reserved narrator who is in a confused state of mind throughout the poem. His aim is to fit and submerge with the other members of society yet his anxiety and self-consciousness takes hold of him so he is always alone and refers to himself as ‘you’ in the poem. Nevertheless the settings in Prufrock are constantly changing as he takes a different train of thought. In disparity, the settings in Preludes vary only slightly from the general unanimity of the city from the outside and a feeling of loneliness inside the house. One feels in this poem that the narrator could be anyone yet he is so isolated from the rest of the world that it is similar to Prufrock’s confused and secluded position in the city.
The most important way in which Eliot contrasts his settings in the two poems is by his illustration of time passing. Only through the form of the poem, ‘Preludes’ is structured in five distinct sections marking the constantly moving time showing the city moving by quickly during the day and slowly in the night -‘the morning comes to consciousness’. In this line the city comes back to life with the ‘sawdust-trampled streets’ once again giving way for people to pass. Eliot has also personified ‘time’ itself in Preludes as he mentions that ‘when time resumes one thinks of all the hands’ and it seems that time seems to be bringing forth a new change in the setting with it. Furthermore the poem has several references to the actual time itself throughout the continuous day such as ‘at four and five and six o’clock’ which reiterate the relevance of the changes of time altering settings and fragmentation of...