"Rhapsody On A Windy Night" by T. S. Eliot

Twelve o'clock.
Along the reaches of the street
Held in a lunar synthesis,
Whispering lunar incantations,
Dissolve the floors of memory
And all its clear relations
Its divisions and precisions,
Every street lamp that I pass
Beats like a fatalistic drum,
And through the spaces of the dark
Midnight shakes the memory 
As a madman shakes a dead geranium.


Half-past one,
The street-lamp sputtered,
The street-lamp muttered,
The street-lamp said, "Regard that woman
Who hesitates toward you in the light of the door
Which opens on her like a grin.
You see the border of her dress
Is torn and stained with sand,
And you see the corner of her eye
Twists like a crooked pin."


The memory throws up high and dry
A crowd of twisted things:
A twisted branch upon the beach
Eaten smooth and polished
As if the world gave up
The secret of its skeleton,
Stiff and white.
A broken spring in a factory yard,
Rust that clings to the form that the strength has left
Hard and curled and ready to snap.


Half-past two,
The street-lamp said,
"Remark the cat which flattens itself in the gutter,
Slips out it tongue
And devours a morsel of rancid butter."
So the hand of the child, automatic,
Slipped out and pocketed a toy that was running
   along the quay.
I could see nothing behind that child's eye.
I have seen eyes in the street
Trying to peer through lighted shutters,
And a crab with barnacles on his back,
Gripped the end of the stick which I held him.


Half-past three,
The lamp sputtered,
The lamp muttered in the dark.
The lamp hummed: 
"Regard the moon,
La lune ne garde aucune rancune,
She winks a feeble eye,
She smiles into corners.
She smooths the hair of the grass.
The moon has lost her memory.
A washed-out smallpox cracks her face, 
Her hand twists a paper rose,
That smell of dust and eau de Cologne,
She is alone
With all the old nocturnal smells
That cross and cross across her brain."
The reminiscence comes
Of sunless dry geraniums
And dust in crevices, 
Smells of chestnuts in the streets,
And female smells in shuttered rooms,
And cigarettes in corridors
And cocktail smells in bars.


The lamp said,
"Four o'clock, 
Here is the number on the door.
Memory!
You have the key,
The little lamp spreads a ring on the stair.
Mount.
The bed is open; the tooth-brush hangs on the wall,
Put your shoes at the door, sleep, prepare for life."


The last twist of the knife.



The music of Preludes is followed by a very different composition, a ‘rhapsody,’ which may be defined as a “musical composition of irregular form having an improvisatory character.” Reading the twelve perfectly assured lines of the first stanza, though, you would never think they were improvised. Yet there are signs that the speaker of this poem, having announced the time of day, or night—"Twelve o'clock"— is making it up as he goes along. For instance, the grammar of the second sentence—if it is a sentence—is unobtrusively confusing: there ought to be a subject and a verb but finding them is not easy. At first you might be inclined to define “whispering lunar incantations” as the subject and “dissolve” as the verb; but then you realize that this sentence does not end with a period but a comma. So, are lines 3-5 merely a long parenthesis, leading up to the sentence, “Every street lamp that I pass beats . . .”? These grammatical questions lead to a substantive one: what exactly is the moon doing to the speaker of these oddly disjointed lines?


As our nightwalker observes the seemingly empty "reaches" of the street, they seem to be "held in a lunar synthesis" i.e. they seem to form a coherent whole, but that  may be an illusion, for the moon is having the opposite effect on the the structure of memory that makes him what or who he is: its whispered "incantations" "dissolve the floors of memory/ And all its clear relations. . ." leaving him vulnerable to despair: now every street lamp that he passes "Beats like a fatalistic drum" the message that all his choices are blocked off, and that he is locked into the life he has made for himself. The last two lines are truly horrifying: "Midnight shakes the memory/ As a madman shakes a dead geranium."
He is that dead geranium.


Now the character of the street itself turns mean, sordid and vaguely threatening. A woman in a dirty dress sidles towards our nightwalker out of a  grinning doorway,
giving him a twisted look out of the corner of her eye, which reminds him of other twisted debris thrown up by the sea of memory: a twisted branch eaten smooth and polished, like a skeleton, a broken spring in a factory yard, almost rusted through. It is a stunning image:


Rust that clings to the form that the strength has left
Hard and curled and ready to snap.


Is that how our nightwalker is beginning to see himself?


As memory turns fragmentary, so also does the quality of what he remembers: the sight of a cat in the gutter licking up a morsel of rancid butter reminds him of a boy he saw once stealing a toy and slipping it, "automatically" into his pocket. The eyes of this boy reveal as little as the crooked eyes of that woman, or the eyes he has seen peering into or out of closed shutters, or the crab that, long ago, instinctively grabbed the end of a stick
he had held out to it. The meaning of these images, like that of the rusted spring, is highly suggestive: grab what you can, as soon as you can; don't think about it, just do it.


The street lamp that has so far been directing the speaker’s attention, randomly, toward the various denizens of this sordid street, now begins to take a more active—or ironic?—interest in his education:  take another look at that moon, it says, in French, not very reassuringly: she bears no grudges (why should she?) and anyway she’s so feeble and feeble minded she doesn’t count. Forget that lunar synthesis; this senile moon is incapable of holding anything together: “She winks a feeble eye, she smiles into corners” says or hums the street lamp; she has “lost her memory”—like the speaker? “A washed-out smallpox cracks her face.” She is a study in senile irrelevance, isolation and futility:


Her hand twists a paper rose,
That smells of dust and eau de Cologne,
She is alone
With all the old nocturnal smells
That cross and cross across her brain.


Rhyme is used sparingly in this poem; 'Cologne'-'alone' is one of the few that the poem allows itself. When they occur, they affect us powerfully, like a spring suddenly unwinding to deliver a powerful blow—or spring shut like a trap. Lines 9-12, for example, rhyming “drum” and “geranium” hits us between the eyes, as also the rhyme “grin”-”pin” in lines 18-22. And, of course, “life” and “knife” at the end.


The street-lamp’s description of the moon as a senile old lady, reminds the speaker of sights and smells that he (like Prufrock?) has known all too well. (Line 7, "divisions and precisions," sounds like a deliberate echo of Prufrock's "visions and revisions".)


The reminiscence comes
Of sunless dry geraniums
And dust in crevices,
Smells of chestnuts in the streets
And female smells in shuttered rooms,
And cigarettes in corridors
And cocktail smell in bars.


Is this the world that speaker has been running away from? (The only good thing is the smell of chestnuts in the streets.) Lunar incantations dissolved the floors of memory at first; here that edifice is reconstructed with a vengeance. This is your life, says the street-lamp, and don’t you forget it:


Here is the number on the door.
Memory!
You have the key,
The little lamp spreads a ring on the stair.
Mount.
The bed is open; the tooth-brush hangs on the wall,
Put your shoes at the door, sleep, prepare for life.”
(Or is it death?)


The last twist of the knife.