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Rhapsody On A Windy Night
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Rhapsody* on a Windy Night
1 Twelve o'clock.
2 Along the reaches (1) of the street
3 Held in a lunar synthesis,
4 Whispering lunar incantations (2)
5 Dissolve the floors of memory
6 And all its clear relations,
7 Its divisions and precisions, (3)
8 Every street lamp that I pass
9 Beats like a fatalistic drum, (4)
10 And through the spaces of the dark
11 Midnight shakes the memory
12 As a madman shakes a dead geranium. (5)
13 Half-past one,
14 The street lamp sputtered,
15 The street lamp muttered,
16 The street lamp said (6), "Regard that woman
17 Who hesitates towards you in the light of the door
18 Which opens on her like a grin. (7)
19 You see the border of her dress
20 Is torn and stained with sand, (8)
21 And you see the corner of her eye
22 Twists like a crooked pin." (9)
23 The memory throws up high and dry
24 A crowd of twisted things; (10)
25 A twisted branch upon the beach
26 Eaten smooth, and polished (11)
27 As if the world gave up
28 The secret of its skeleton,
29 Stiff and white.
30 A broken spring in a factory yard,
31 Rust that clings to the form that the strength has left (12)
32 Hard and curled and ready to snap. (13)
33 Half-past two,
34 The street lamp said,
35 "Remark the cat which flattens itself in the gutter (14),
36 Slips out its tongue
37 And devours a morsel of rancid butter."
38 So the hand of a child, automatic (15),
39 Slipped out and pocketed a toy that was running along the quay.
40 I could see nothing behind that child's eye.
41 I have seen eyes in the street
42 Trying to peer through lighted shutters (16),
43 And a crab one afternoon in a pool,
44 An old crab with barnacles (17) on his back,
45 Gripped the end of a stick which I held him. (18)
46 Half-past three,
47 The lamp sputtered,
48 The lamp muttered in the dark.
49 The lamp hummed:
50 "Regard the moon,
51 La lune ne garde aucune rancune, (19)
52 She winks a feeble eye,
53 She smiles into corners.
54 She smoothes the hair of the grass.
55 The moon has lost her memory.
56 A washed-out smallpox cracks her face, (20)
57 Her hand twists a paper rose (21),
58 That smells of dust and old Cologne,
59 She is alone
60 With all the old nocturnal smells (22)
61 That cross and cross across her brain." (23)
62 The reminiscence comes
63 Of sunless dry geraniums
64 And dust in crevices (24),
65 Smells of chestnuts in the streets,
66 And female smells in shuttered rooms,
67 And cigarettes in corridors
68 And cocktail smells in bars." (25)
69 The lamp said,
70 "Four o'clock,
71 Here is the number on the door.
72 Memory!
73 You have the key,
74 The little lamp spreads a ring on the stair,
75 Mount. (26)
76 The bed is open; the tooth-brush hangs on the wall,
77 Put your shoes at the door, sleep, prepare for life." (27)
78 The last twist of the knife. (28)
*Rhapsody: In music, rhapsody is a composition with emotional effects,
irregular in form, and with an improvisational nature. It also means:
and enthusiastic talk full of intense expressions; however, in both
definitions, the aspects of perplexity and unexpectedness are traceable, and
so thus the poem is irregular and perplex in form, and is constituted by
the synchrony of divergent tones.
1. The extent or distance which something can reach. Also means area.
2. The lunar charms are whispering alongside the moonlit extents of the street.
3. The clarity of the memory vanishes and its territories overlap and
interweave by the magical whispers uttered by the lunar charms.
4. Three particular figures of speech are used in this imagery:
a. Animism: the act of striking or pulsing is attributed to an inanimate
object (the lamp).
b. Simile: the lamp (tenor) is identified as a drum (vehicle)
c. Synesthesia: the distortion or combination of the ordinary senses,
here, instead of light, an auditory effect is pictured for the lamp.
5. Personification of the midnight shaking the memory and its metaphoric
relation with the adjoining line are, in fact, elements used to portray a memory
which is embodied in the speaker’s mind.
6. Speaker’s belief in the utterance of the lamps and their capability of
commenting on his life might represent the particular schizophrenic syndromes.
7. Simile between the door light and a grin signifies the woman’s own smile.
8. Due to the verb “hesitate toward” and the woman’s impoverished
appearance, it is probable that she is a prostitute waiting to see whether or not the
speaker enters her place.
9. The speaker’s trembling from the fragile description of the
woman’s smile under the door light to the repulsive way of picturing her eyes
emphasizes on his obsessive thoughts and his melancholic state.
10. “High and dry” is used as an adverb meaning that persona’s memory
inevitably reveals all the twisted objects which he has born in mind from the past,
although to his inconvenience.
11. The branch was smoothened and polished by the waves.
12. The rust has thus coated the spring that any liveliness or movement is not
expected from it.
13. By considering the broken spring, overwhelmed by rust, as the secret of
the skeleton of the world, or, in better terms, the reflection of the world, and with
respect to the fact that the speaker possesses a
melancholic thought, it can be inferred that he suspects the destruction of the
whole world or at least his disturbed mind as a rusty and frail object.
14. Rainwater channel on a road.
15. The boy grasps the toy and puts it in his pocket swiftly as if he has done
it without any previous thought.
16. Refers to the eyes of those who were inside the houses trying to view the
outside through the darkness of the street.
17. A small marine organism with a shell that clings to rocks and ships and
draws food by using slender hairs
18. The crab clenches the stick that the speaker holds in front of it.
19. `The moon holds no grudges,' from Jules Laforgue's "Complainte de
cette Bonne Lune"
20. The subject of description in this line is quite ambiguous and it is
difficult to decide whether he is describing the moon or a woman’s facial
characteristics or both of them, since in the following line (57) he suddenly
shifts to utter about a woman who “twists a paper rose with her hand”.
Moreover, the same radical change of tone in describing is considerable.
There is a rough contradiction between the delicate terms that are used to
picture the tender deeds of the moon and that of the moon/woman’s face.
“Being cracked with washed-out smallpox”.
21. An artificial rose made by paper.
22. These nightly odors are probably the scents of cigarettes and colognes
remained from the customers of the brothel.
23. The smells are repeatedly affecting her sense.
24. A narrow crack or opening.
25. From line 57 to 68, the images are fragmentarily assimilated in order to
picture a brothel. Images like: “female smells in
shuttered rooms” or “cigarettes in corridors”. In addition, The reappearance
of the “sunless dry geraniums”, which is mentioned in the preceding lines
(line12), connotes the significance of this place in speaker’s thought and the
supposedly emotional relationship which he had or still has in that place
with the lonely woman who is probably one of the prostitutes. The picture of
a crazy man shaking a dead geranium which is mentioned in the first stanza
vaguely indicates that something unpleasant has happened between the
speaker and the woman.
26. The act of climbing, here probably the staircase. It is written as if the
lamp ordains him to do so.
27. Evidences like the bed being open, not by himself, and the fact that he
ought to take his shoes off at the door to be probably cleaned before the
morning (by the staff), suggest that he resides alone in a hotel. .
28. The immediate appearance of this expression signifying the extreme of
pain precisely after the line that ends with the expression;
“Prepare for life.” Besides, these two final lines being rhymed together to
function as a symptom of the speaker’s reluctance and contempt towards
life.
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Analysis
Everyone must know the tantalizing effect of the blank rhythm of some forgotten verse,
restlessly dancing in one's mind, striving to be filled out with words.
William James
Prior to analyzing “Rhapsody on a windy night”, one should define the critical concept of “objective correlative” by which Eliot, as a critic, introduced a criterion to ascertain whether or not a poem is artistically developed. “Objective correlative”, a term that Eliot has used in his criticism on Hamlet (1919), is a way by which the poet can express a particular emotion in his work. In other terms, by gathering and integrating such external facts as events, images, symbols etc., the poet must create a formula that functions as an invocator of a precise emotion (1).
This poetic formula, after a thorough reading, in “Rhapsody on a windy night” reveals itself and helps us extricate the significance of the poem from among the structural complications, and fragmentariness of its images.
As the title of the poem suggests, there is no concrete evidence or direct utterance within the persona’s delirium-like speech that uncovers to us a rational interrelation among the fragmentary retentions coming to pass in his mind.
In music, rhapsody (2) is an improvisational composition with an irregular form. In this kind of composition, musical parts interpose each other unexpectedly, and it is difficult to discern a mainstream progression in the composition. Furthermore, the nature of improvisation is based on simultaneous creating and performing without any earlier thought or preparation. Both of these two elements, irregularity in form and improvisation, occur in the persona’s way of speaking and thinking.
Beyond this, the rest of the title, “windy night”, symbolizes the persona’s mental condition. The “night” symbolizes obscurity, unconsciousness, oblivion, ignorance, hidden potentials, and the sexual arousal (3) (most of these traits are indicatively signified in the poem.). And “windy” is adjoined with the wind’s suddenness and swiftness in the acts of blowing and departing. Also, in accordance with its literal denotation, “windy” is attributed to a hollow speech, full of empty and meaningless words. Hence it is not a far-fetched critical analysis if one claims that the persona’s mind is, indeed, a “windy night”, and his utterance is a rhapsody performed in it.
As asserted above, there are certain emotions to be provoked through the medium of a particular formula within the poem. The title autonomously bestows an insight upon this specific formula, yet it is better to give a final and definite shape to it through analyzing and correlating the images, symbolical, and psychological aspects of the poem.
The poem begins with the persona declaring that it is “midnight”, the gloomiest hour which divides a day into two equal halves. At midnight the darkness is so intense that the only source of light is the lunar one. Thus, there is no way to sight but through the moonlight. That is exactly how the moon comes into the center of the importance from the very opening lines of the poem. Among the various concepts which the moon symbolizes are: femininity, rhythm of time (due to its cyclic embodiment), a realm between consciousness and unconsciousness (for it is a middle ground between the sunlight and mere darkness), and finally, with regard to its equivocal role of illumination resulted from its erratic phases, the representation of both the dark side of the nature and enlightenment is significant.
Moon as a symbol of femininity is pivotal since the woman, and her features, about whom the persona hysterically thinks and utters are metaphorically coincided with its presence. And the second symbolic feature of the moon, which is almost the scaffold of the poem’s structure, is its state of being exactly in the middle of the two opposing qualities, i.e. consciousness and unconsciousness, darkness and enlightenment, hallucinating and awareness. When the analysis reaches its closing stages, this symbolic function becomes clearly distinguished.
In lines 3, the expression “lunar synthesis” creates a lack of distinctiveness in the atmosphere of the poem. This condition is supported by the equivocally symbolic role of the moon (as mentioned above.). Later on, it will be discovered that the subjects of this synthesis are the memories and observations, or in other words, the past and present.
In line 3 and 4, the mysterious but colorful presence of the term “lunar” connotes lunacy or insanity (4); this specific condition can be attributed to the persona in accordance with the following syndromes (5):
1. Persona’s imagination that hinges on his psychological disorder:
“Every street lamp that I pass, beats like a fatalistic drum,” lines 9 and 10
“Midnight shakes the memory, as a madman shakes a dead geranium.” Lines 11 and 12
“The street lamp sputtered, the street lamp muttered,” lines 14 and 15
“And you see the corner of her eye, twists like a crooked pin." Lines 21 and 22
2. Persona’s incapability of concentrating on a memory or thought. For instance, when he describes the prostitute with whom he has encountered, after a few lines, from the beginning of the third stanza, his thought suddenly (like the musical movements of a rhapsody) drifts away by focusing on the twistedness of the trivial objects which are stuck in his memory. Another instance is in the sixth stanza, where his mind deviates from describing the moon and begins to fragmentarily picture a brothel.
3. In an overall review of the terms and expressions uttered by the persona, the image of psychological instability emerges. Terms like: fatalistic drums, spaces of the dark, a madman who shakes a dead geranium, mad, the torn and stained dress, eyes that twist like a crooked pin, rust, broken, curled, ready to snap, dust in the crevices, and the moon’s or woman’s face cracked with a washed-out smallpox (the ambiguity takes place because of the sudden shift of description from observation to memory which happens during this line.)
4. Persona’s despair from being captivated and tortured by his own memories, and his incapability of forgetting them:
In lines 8 and 9, he says:
Every street lamp that I pass beats like a fatalistic drum.
What can be interpreted by this image, as far as the term fatalistic (relating to submission to fate) suggests, is the persona’s wariness of the inevitable reminiscence of his past experiences.
In line 23, he says: Memory throws up high and dry a crowd of twisted things…
The verb “throws up” and the expression “high and dry” (used as an adverb meaning helplessly) signify the sense of intensity in what the memory does; besides, those twisted objects that pass through his mind symbolically represent the distortedness of his own mental condition.
In lines 25 and 26, the twisted branch probably smoothened and polished by the waves, symbolically stands for the persona’s mind being frequently affected by the bitter memories to the degree that having no strength left to endure “the broken spring in the factory yard which is ready to snap”. The fact that he is tormented and helpless upon these memories is supported by two other symbolic images:
In lines 31 and 32, the rust that clings on the spring, represent the repugnant memories which are tenaciously adhered to his mind.
In lines 43 to 45, the old crab connotes the persona and the barnacles (small marine organisms which cling to the stiff aquatic creatures) symbolize the perpetual presence of those memories in his mind.
In the sixth stanza, from line 51 to 55, he describes the moon’s calmness in exposing herself to the nature, and he enviously concludes that this tranquility hinges on the fact that moon has lost her memory (unlike the persona) and cannot hold any hatred.
5. The persona is incapacitated from distinguishing between what he presently sees and what he recollects. Lines 4 to7 depict such status quo. It should not be overlooked that it is under the mysterious impression of the moon “whispering lunar incantations” that his mind gets impregnated with the memories infusing into one another.
Whispering lunar incantations
Dissolve the floors of memory
And all its clear relations,
Its divisions and precisions,
For as much as the structure is concerned, this is the essential feature by which the whole poem looks like a delirium. These sudden shifts from observation to memory, and the moon’s symbolic role of standing in between the consciousness and unconsciousness, dream and reality, and its function in resurrecting vague memories out of the concrete observations are, as the external facts, the compartments of the formula by which a quintessential emotion is artistically evoked.
Although Elliot, in The Use of Poetry, asserts that even if the poet’s visual images hold symbolic merits, it is still difficult to identify them since they connote inscrutable emotions, as indicate by the function of “objective correlative”, one should not have it confused with the represented emotion of the persona or the narrator of the poem.
Concerning the “objective correlative” and its function as a revelatory formula, a relatively factual explanation for the shade of emotion or the stream of feeling which the poet has artificially developed within his work has to be provided. And in our case, under the circumstance that any interpretation is not given with latitude, a number of certain visual images which are subtly interrelated in the poem can shed light on the emotional complication with which the persona is tenaciously obsessed.
In the first stanza, after he indulges into his thoughts, the first impression which calls his attention and sets his memories in motion is the image of a “crazy man shaking a dead geranium”. In the sixth stanza, while the reminiscence comes to his mind, and he begins to describe a group of visual images of the brothel where the woman resides, this “dry sunless geranium – line 63” again, is the first image to be depicted. With respect to the point that he is mentally off balance, it can be interpreted that by picturing “a crazy man who shakes a dead geranium” he is referring to himself.
The hysteric act of shaking a dry plant is expectable from someone with extreme sadness or hatred. This particular feeling is strengthened where, from line 51 on, he regrets the moon’s negligent forbearance (6). And afterward, we have the sorrowful description of a lonely woman’s who twists a paper rose with her hand and is abandoned among the smells of dust and old Cologne (probably remained from customer of that brothel). Moreover, what he says in the final lines approves his residence in a public lodging house (probably a small inn) and thus his solitude (7).
The “rose” is a symbol of love, and the geranium is characterized with lively development and productiveness, and since in the poem the rose is made by paper and the geranium is dead, and their both loneliness is implied, between the persona and the woman a relationship once intimate but now split apart is represented. Consequently, it is inferable that something sentimentally disagreeable has happened to him in relation to the woman.
Finally, it can be concluded that this incident has taken place for quite of time, and from then on, he has started his midnight-journeys. There are various references in the poem to prove this fact, for instance: In line 9, he refers to the street lamps as the “fatalistic drums”, and regarding the term fatalistic, it is understood that he is familiar with the delusion which is going to be predeterminately the source of his self-loathing inculcations, like so, it is a foreordained situation which has happened before. The other underlying indication is in lines 40 and 41, when, after remembering the boy’s soulless eyes, he mentions:
I have seen eyes in the street trying to peer through lighted shutters.
Such statement (identical to his melancholic correspondence to the street lamps) is a symptom of his frequent wanders at midnights and his concentration on the experiences which they encompass.
There are two philosophical explanations for the particular way through which the “time” and “memory” are represented in the poem:
Eliot, under Henrie Louis Bergson’s impression (8), believed in an essential difference between the essence of time in man’s thought “psychological time” and the “clock time” in physics. According to Bergson, the outer or clock time consists of infinite amount of instants all similar to one another and repeated for evermore. But the inner or psychological time is formed by the moments which can superimpose each other and exhibit no palpable boundary. This sort of time as Bergson proposes is formed by “duration”, and is dynamic and qualitative; hence past and present can instantaneously lay over each other and surpass the definite limits of the quality of the “clock time”.
The sudden shifts from present occurrences to the memories are the repercussions of this “psychological time”. Whenever, in the poem, the streetlamp indifferently announce the time (the beginning of each stanza with the exception of the first and sixth), the clock time is performed. And the qualitative time portrays itself in the seemingly irrelevant or fragmentary memories.
In addition, as it was recounted in the symbolic roles of the moon, there is a middle ground between consciousness and unconsciousness, memory and present, which links them together. This fluctuation is observable in the relation between persona’s habitual behavior and deep experiences. Again with reference to Bergson, two layers of memory exist in our mind. In the surface, there is a memory sorted out by our habitual behaviors which Bergson calls: “conscious automata” (9). But in the depth of our mind, a fragmentary or episodic memory exists which preserves all our experiences. Our normal behavior is the result of the constant interaction between these two layers of memory. But when we are in crisis and our habitual memory is unable to guide us out of it, the episodic memory becomes predominant. One of the major functions of our profounder or episodic memory is to relate the unfamiliar objects that we see to the reminiscences of our memory.
The situation which the persona is experiencing is minutely justified by Bergson’s definition of the episodic memory. As we elaborated, the persona is in crisis, thus his deeper memory is activated and connects all the objects and incidents that he encounters to his recollections. For instance, when he comes across the prostitute in the street (lines 16 to 22), the twisting corner of her eyes makes him to recall a number of twisted objects that he has seen before, or at the moment that he sees a cat devouring a piece of butter (lines 35 to 37) his mind floats toward the memory of his encounter with a boy in the quay.
The experience which underlies all these fragmentary images and relates them to each other reaches its ultimate embodiment in the finale of the poem when the persona uses the expression, “the last twist of the knife” in place of the life itself. In other words, what unifies these fragmentary memories in his mind, as a rhapsody played in a windy night, is the overwhelming agony which he endures to the utmost of his tolerance, to the extreme of being ready to snap (line 32). (10)
The other question which might arouse in mind is about the formation of the memories, whatever he recalls is molded in the form of an environment, or actually they appear as the spatialtized atmospheres: a beach, a factory yard, a quay, the shuttered rooms, bars, and corridors where the cigarette smoke is spread. It looks as if he is simultaneously wandering in two different cities. One is an external city wherein it is after midnight and he recognizes its locations with a map which is delineated by his habitual memory, and the other, a surreal and internal city with no perceivable time span and with a group of fragmentary spaces representing particular emotions and displayed on the map of his deep or episodic memory.
The concept of the spatialized memories and their lack of chronological succession are best developed in the works of Walter Benjamin, German aesthetician and the literary critic of the 20th century. He considers every incident of one’s life as a reaction to another incident, and all the memorized places as the apparition of the emotions which that person has experienced in there.
Moreover; in his brilliant biographical work “Those years in Berlin” he asserts that, for many years, he has been concerned with the idea of drawing a map of his memories consisting of all those places, or better to say the spaces, wherein he has experienced certain emotions. From Brothels and his beloveds’ houses to the rendezvous of young Communists and speech halls. The very same map depicting various spaces with emotionally intricate backgrounds is represented in the persona’s mind. For example, the quay where he discovered the soulless look of the strange boy (lines 38 to 40). (11)
As the final conclusion, in order to put the complicated function of the memory and its relation to the present incidents and objects, and with the aim of displaying the emotion which has got discharged by this relation on the ground of “objective correlative”, Eliot limits his reader’s knowledge about the persona into the rhapsody-like and obscure development of the stream of his thoughts and recollections, and thus materializes what circulates in the deepest layer of the persona’s mind.
Notes:
1. Theory of Literature, Rene Wellek and Austin Warren, see the section of “Psychology and Literature”.
2. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, third edition.
3. The on-line symbolism dictionary, see the following web-address: (http://www.umich.edu/~umfandsf/symbolismproject/symbolism.html/)
4. With acknowledgment to Maryam Akbari, one of Tehran Hopkins Club members, who discerned this lexical similarity.
5. Although most of these symptoms (like anxiety, difficulties with memory, hallucination, social withdrawal, and disorganized thinking and speech) are attributable to Schizophrenia, there is no firm ground for speaking of this disorder, or ascribing it to the persona with definitude.
6. In a brilliant article, Andrew Nicole* gives the following elaboration on the moon’s imagery and its meaning in the poem:
As the poem progresses, the image of the moon becomes tainted; by half-past three “The moon has lost her memory” and she is presented as being a prostitute who lacks the feminine traits that Western mythology typically associates with the moon. She is now feeble and unable to illuminate the world. This image is consistent with Eliot’s view of ideological developments of his time. Rapid scientific development in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries caused widespread intellectual confusion, and the even celestial bodies were stripped of their mythological significance. In the twentieth century, mankind has lost the guidance of spirituality, even the comfort of tradition; we are, in the words of Sartre, “condemned to be free”.
*LiteratureClassics.com / Andrew Nicole / Form and Content in Eliot's Poetry / techniques and content in Eliot's 'Rhapsody on a Windy Night' and 'The Hollow Men'
In fact, he considers the moon to be demythologized and associated with the Sartre’s Existentialism, based on the fact that the moon is described through its metaphoric similarities with a prostitute, but he has overlooked the delicacy which is used in lines 53 and 54, in order to indicate the persona’s envious approach toward the moon’s forgetfulness which is in opposition to his own mental state.
Furthermore, to limit the circle of the symbols which the moon represents in Western symbolism merely to the feminine traits, is actually ignoring the role that moon plays as a middle ground between consciousness and unconsciousness (an aspect on which the whole structure of the poem is constituted).
7. Representative Poetry online (http://eir.library.utoronto.ca/rpo/display/poem787.html)
8. ibid
9.”Conscious Automata” is the mechanical operation of the consciousness. (The word automata, as the plural noun for automaton, stands for a self-operating machine, or a person who behaves mechanically.)
10. A Companion to The Philosophers, edited by Robert l. Arrington, Blackwell Publishers, pages 165 to 167.
11. See Susan Sontag’s article on Walter Benjamin’s “One Way Street”.
Ali Sobati