The Full Text of “Rhapsody on a Windy Night”
1Twelve o'clock.
2Along the reaches of the street
3Held in a lunar synthesis,
4Whispering lunar incantations
5Dissolve the floors of memory
6And all its clear relations,
7Its divisions and precisions,
8Every street lamp that I pass
9Beats like a fatalistic drum,
10And through the spaces of the dark
11Midnight shakes the memory
12As a madman shakes a dead geranium.
13Half-past one,
14The street lamp sputtered,
15The street lamp muttered,
16The street lamp said, "Regard that woman
17Who hesitates towards you in the light of the door
18Which opens on her like a grin.
19You see the border of her dress
20Is torn and stained with sand,
21And you see the corner of her eye
22Twists like a crooked pin."
23The memory throws up high and dry
24A crowd of twisted things;
25A twisted branch upon the beach
26Eaten smooth, and polished
27As if the world gave up
28The secret of its skeleton,
29Stiff and white.
30A broken spring in a factory yard,
31Rust that clings to the form that the strength has left
32Hard and curled and ready to snap.
33Half-past two,
34The street lamp said,
35"Remark the cat which flattens itself in the gutter,
36Slips out its tongue
37And devours a morsel of rancid butter."
38So the hand of a child, automatic,
39Slipped out and pocketed a toy that was running along the quay.
40I could see nothing behind that child's eye.
41I have seen eyes in the street
42Trying to peer through lighted shutters,
43And a crab one afternoon in a pool,
44An old crab with barnacles on his back,
45Gripped the end of a stick which I held him.
46Half-past three,
47The lamp sputtered,
48The lamp muttered in the dark.
49The lamp hummed:
50"Regard the moon,
51La lune ne garde aucune rancune,
52She winks a feeble eye,
53She smiles into corners.
54She smoothes the hair of the grass.
55The moon has lost her memory.
56A washed-out smallpox cracks her face,
57Her hand twists a paper rose,
58That smells of dust and old Cologne,
59She is alone
60With all the old nocturnal smells
61That cross and cross across her brain."
62The reminiscence comes
63Of sunless dry geraniums
64And dust in crevices,
65Smells of chestnuts in the streets,
66And female smells in shuttered rooms,
67And cigarettes in corridors
68And cocktail smells in bars.
69The lamp said,
70"Four o'clock,
71Here is the number on the door.
72Memory!
73You have the key,
74The little lamp spreads a ring on the stair,
75Mount.
76The bed is open; the tooth-brush hangs on the wall,
77Put your shoes at the door, sleep, prepare for life."
78The last twist of the knife.
The Full Text of “Rhapsody on a Windy Night”
1Twelve o'clock.
2Along the reaches of the street
3Held in a lunar synthesis,
4Whispering lunar incantations
5Dissolve the floors of memory
6And all its clear relations,
7Its divisions and precisions,
8Every street lamp that I pass
9Beats like a fatalistic drum,
10And through the spaces of the dark
11Midnight shakes the memory
12As a madman shakes a dead geranium.
13Half-past one,
14The street lamp sputtered,
15The street lamp muttered,
16The street lamp said, "Regard that woman
17Who hesitates towards you in the light of the door
18Which opens on her like a grin.
19You see the border of her dress
20Is torn and stained with sand,
21And you see the corner of her eye
22Twists like a crooked pin."
23The memory throws up high and dry
24A crowd of twisted things;
25A twisted branch upon the beach
26Eaten smooth, and polished
27As if the world gave up
28The secret of its skeleton,
29Stiff and white.
30A broken spring in a factory yard,
31Rust that clings to the form that the strength has left
32Hard and curled and ready to snap.
33Half-past two,
34The street lamp said,
35"Remark the cat which flattens itself in the gutter,
36Slips out its tongue
37And devours a morsel of rancid butter."
38So the hand of a child, automatic,
39Slipped out and pocketed a toy that was running along the quay.
40I could see nothing behind that child's eye.
41I have seen eyes in the street
42Trying to peer through lighted shutters,
43And a crab one afternoon in a pool,
44An old crab with barnacles on his back,
45Gripped the end of a stick which I held him.
46Half-past three,
47The lamp sputtered,
48The lamp muttered in the dark.
49The lamp hummed:
50"Regard the moon,
51La lune ne garde aucune rancune,
52She winks a feeble eye,
53She smiles into corners.
54She smoothes the hair of the grass.
55The moon has lost her memory.
56A washed-out smallpox cracks her face,
57Her hand twists a paper rose,
58That smells of dust and old Cologne,
59She is alone
60With all the old nocturnal smells
61That cross and cross across her brain."
62The reminiscence comes
63Of sunless dry geraniums
64And dust in crevices,
65Smells of chestnuts in the streets,
66And female smells in shuttered rooms,
67And cigarettes in corridors
68And cocktail smells in bars.
69The lamp said,
70"Four o'clock,
71Here is the number on the door.
72Memory!
73You have the key,
74The little lamp spreads a ring on the stair,
75Mount.
76The bed is open; the tooth-brush hangs on the wall,
77Put your shoes at the door, sleep, prepare for life."
78The last twist of the knife.
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“Rhapsody on a Windy Night” Introduction
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"Rhapsody on a Windy Night" is an early poem by one of the 20th century's foremost literary figures, T.S. Eliot. It was written in 1911, around the time Eliot was studying at the Sorbonne in Paris. Often considered one of Eliot's most difficult poems, "Rhapsody" is above all an investigation into time, memory, and the mind. It follows its narrator wandering an urban street from midnight until 4:30 a.m. The world around the narrator seems at once familiar and strangely nightmarish, and a sense of futility and hopelessness invades the speaker's experience of the world as time goes on. The poem ends with its speaker arriving home with the prospect of the next day feeling like the "last twist of the knife"—perhaps the ultimate insult, to have to get ready for the day ahead despite the creeping sense that life lacks any purpose or meaning. The poem was first published in 1915 in Blast 2, the second and final edition of an influential literary magazine edited by Wyndham Lewis.
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“Rhapsody on a Windy Night” Summary
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It’s midnight. The whole street seem to be held together by the moonlight. The moon whispers spells that blur the boundaries of memory—all those things that memory relates to, the way memory helps divide a person's experience of the world, and how memory brings a sense of precision to life. The speaker walks down the street, feeling that every street lamp he or she passes beats like a drum and reminds the speaker that fate is inevitable. In this darkness, midnight disrupts memory like a madman waving a bunch of dead flowers.
It’s now 1:30 a.m. A street lamp coughs and then mutters, before talking directly to the speaker. The streetlamp tells the speaker to look at a woman in a doorway. She is hesitant, and the talking lamp compares the light of the doorway that shines down onto the woman to a leering smile. The lamp then draws the narrator's attention to the woman's dress, the bottom of which is ripped and sandy. The corner of the woman's eye seems to twist disconcertingly, like a pin that's been bent.
Memories flash through the speaker's mind, inspired by that twist of the woman's eye. The speaker thinks of a twisted branch on a beach that had been polished smooth by the waves, wind, and sand. The speaker compares this stiff, bleached branch to a bone offered up from the skeleton of the world itself. This prompts another memory to come to mind—that of a rusty spring in a factory yard. The spring has grown so stiff that it's ready to snap.
It's 2:30 a.m. now. The street lamp speaks again, drawing the speaker's attention to a cat making its way through the gutter. The cat gobbles up some old rotting butter that it's found. The quick movement of the cat's tongue as it laps up the butter brings to mind another memory for the speaker—this time of the way that a child had adeptly slipped a toy into his or her pocket while running along a wharf. The speaker remembers seeing a vacant, empty look in the child's eye. The thought of eyes then calls forth another memory, this time of people peeking out onto the street through their shuttered windows. The speaker then recalls the memory of being in wading pool, and an old, barnacle-covered crab holding tightly to a stick held by the speaker.
Now it's 3:30 a.m, and the lamp talks to the speaker again. This time it tells the speaker to look at the moon, and then says, in French, that "the moon holds no grudges." The lamp describes the moon as a winking and smiling old woman, whose light reaches into dark corners and washes over the grass. The lamp says the moon's memory has gone, and describes her face as being covered by dents that look like smallpox scars. In her hand the moon tightly grips a paper rose that smells like dust and old aftershave. The moon is lonely, with no company apart from the old smells of the night that cross her mind again and again. The lamp's words stir the speaker's memory. The speaker thinks of dead flowers and dusty corners, as well as of the smell of chestnuts being roasted on the street, of women behind closed doors, of cigarettes in hallways, and of cocktails in bars.
It's now 4:00 a.m. The talking lamp gives the speaker instructions, pointing out the number on the door (likely of a house or apartment building) before the speaker. The lamp calls out to "Memory," before saying that the speaker (or, perhaps, "Memory" itself) has the key. The lamp then shines on the staircase and tells the speaker to climb up, into the house/apartment. The bed inside is all ready to be slept in, and the speaker's toothbrush is ready to be put to use. The lamp tells the speaker to leave his or her shoes by the door and to then get some rest—to get ready for the day to come (and life itself). The speaker views this instruction as the ultimate insult, or perhaps the final nail in the coffin.
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“Rhapsody on a Windy Night” Themes
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Meaning, Purpose, and Control
"Rhapsody on a Windy Night" follows an unnamed speaker walking down a street at night. The moonlight makes the world appear menacing and unfamiliar, and the speaker's mind grows troubled as memories bubble unbidden to the surface. Far from the distracting light of day, the darkness reveals the speaker's sense of control over and purpose to be illusions.
The speaker moves through a moonlit city scene populated by the kind of objects one would expect: street lamps, doorways, cats, and so on. But the night distorts reality, making these mundanities strange and even threatening: the cat laps rancid butter, the street lamps beat like "fatalistic" drums, and the only other person around looks disheveled and has a crooked glint in her eye.
The speaker walks through a world that's been twisted out of shape, in the sense that things don't behave how they should; their purpose is confused, as though a layer of chaos has been added over everything in the dark. The street lamp even begins to talk directly to the speaker: an inanimate object suddenly has a kind of consciousness, upsetting the order of the world and drawing various memories to the speaker's mind.
Importantly, these memories are tied to a sense of decay and uselessness. The speaker thinks of a branch that's been worn smooth by the elements and resembles a bone, a spring so rusty and stiff that it's about to snap, and dried up flowers. None of these items can fulfill their designated purpose anymore—the branch won't grow leaves, the spring won't bounce, the flowers won't pollinate new plants. The fact that these are the images that the speaker thinks about suggests the speaker's own dawning sense of futility. The speaker, too, has perhaps been "eaten smooth" by the march of time and the struggle to define a sense of meaning in life.
This is in part because of the realization that the speaker isn't in control of his or her life, any more than the speaker is in control of the memories being "thrown up." Instead, the speaker walks along to a "fatalistic" drum beat, with the sense that there is nothing the speaker can do to change the future. Indeed, his or her actions are being dictated by the environment—the lamp tells the speaker where to go and what to do.
This revelation of a lack of control is explicitly linked to the night. Perhaps this is because there is little to distract the speaker at night, free as it is from the responsibilities and social niceties of waking hours. In any case, the speaker compares the way "midnight shakes the memory" to the way that "a madman shakes a dead geranium," as simile that links irrationality to nighttime—as though the world undergoes some twisted fairy tale spell when the clock strikes twelve. Memories, meanwhile, are like a dead flower, a memento of past experiences that will never actually be again. Midnight "shakes" the memory, causing elements of it to break loose and rush forth of their own accord. Yet just as the madman cannot bring the flowers back to life, the speaker cannot relive these memories—cannot return to a time when life maybe did have meaning (or, at least, seemed to in the speaker's comparative ignorance).
At the end of the poem, the speaker is instructed by the lamp to go home, get into bed, and "prepare for life." Yet the idea of going about business as usual with the knowledge that it's all likely meaningless is "the last twist of the knife." What an insult to have to keep trudging on, the poem suggests, when there might be no point to any of it.
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Time, Memory, and Mortality
Time and memory build a sense of atrophy (that is, wasting away) throughout the poem. Instead of comforting the speaker, memories only highlight the passage of time and the inevitability of death. Furthermore, everything the speaker experiences while walking along the street provokes images and memories of decay, suggesting that all the speaker can see in life is, paradoxically, death. Whether it’s the dead geraniums, the rusty spring, the old crab, or the senile moon, everything the speaker thinks of is dead or dying. These memories underscore the relentless march of time, each one a kind of symbol of the speaker's own mortal journey.
The poem is literally marked by the passage time, with five stanzas beginning with a statement of the hour. This creates a sense of anxiety, of life is slipping away. The end of the first stanza also references time: "Midnight shakes the memory / As a madman shakes a dead geranium." Essentially this is saying that time and memory play tricks on the brain. The unstoppable passage of time means all life must die, and memory is a way of trying to keep things alive for a while. Yet ultimately shaking up memories as a means to hold onto life is as useless as shaking a dead flower; for one thing, memory is unreliable and has a logic of its own. More importantly, memory is rooted in the past—meaning memory by default represents time passing by.
Again, the speaker's memories themselves directly link to atrophy and death. The branch—once part of a living tree—evokes a skeleton, having been whittled away over time into a stark reminder of mortality. In stanza five, meanwhile, the sight of a stray cat conjures the memory of a child at the beach. As this memory, like the branch before, is linked to the beach, perhaps the atmosphere of decay and menace in the speaker’s adult world is drawing the speaker's memory back to a more innocent time of childhood vacations. This might be an attempt to assuage the dread of mortality by retreating to a happier past, yet it's ultimately of no use; again, the mere existence of these memories is a sign that time has gone by and that the speaker is closer to death than ever before.
As the poem progresses, the sense of atrophy and decay intensifies. Even the moon has “lost her memory,” which itself represents a kind of death; memory creates a set of reference points from which one may construct an identity, and thus without it that identity ceases to be. For the speaker, almost the opposite happens: the onslaught of memories intensifies as the poem builds towards its conclusion, becoming increasingly random as if the speaker is trying to grasp onto anything to comfort his or her anxious mind.
In the penultimate stanza, the street lamp says that the speaker has the key to get into his or her house, and exclaims “Memory!” But this might be a sarcastic joke on the lamp’s part. The speaker should hold the key to his or her own life, but the speaker's mind is totally overrun by experiences and memories that evoke death, and which thus undermine any sense of purpose in even the most commonplace of tasks.
According to the poem, then, time and memory almost have a life of their own, as capable of destabilizing someone’s mind as offering it reassurance—through turning life into a constant reminder of death.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Rhapsody on a Windy Night”
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Lines 1-7
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,The poem opens as the clock strikes midnight, setting up a quiet, nocturnal atmosphere when most people would be asleep. A number of stanzas start in the same way—with a reference to the time—which helps establish the speaker's diminishing sense of control as the night wears on. Midnight is particularly associated with the supernatural, and so here hints at that loss of control to come.
Lines 2-6 suggest a dreamlike blurring of the boundaries between time, the speaker's memory, and the world itself. Line specifically 2 establishes the urban environment through which the speaker walks, while lines 3-6 suggest that this environment is under some kind of spell, perhaps cast by the moon.
Indeed, the street seems to be "held" in the moonlight, the assonant /l/ sounds linking "held" with "lunar." It's not too clear yet what is actually going on in the poem, but things certainly seem dreamlike and somewhat unnerving. And already the question of who is in control—the moon, the speaker, or someone/something else altogether—is starting to be asked.
Line 4 introduces the idea of "lunar incantations." An incantation is a kind of spell or charm, suggesting that the usual logic of the world can be undermined late at night. In other words, the night makes ordinary things—the same street that the speaker has perhaps walked down casually during the daylight—seem strange, mystical, or foreign. Sibilance throughout these lines—especially apparent with the /s/ and /sh/ sounds in words like "whispering," "synthesis," "dissolve," "relations," and "precisions"—adds to the hushed, mysterious quality.
Throughout history, the moon has been associated with magic and witchcraft, both of which are ways of disrupting the way the world usually works. But it's not clear who or what is actually doing the whispering here—the syntax of the lines allows for the source of the "incantations" to be disembodied (that is, it's not explicitly connected to a subject). However, the most likely source of these magical "incantations" seems to be the moon itself. That is, rather than a person appealing to the moon for supernatural assistance, here the roles are reversed: the moon offers incantations of its own.
Lines 5-7 make clear the effects of these "incantations." Namely, they:
Dissolve the floors of memory
And all its clear relations,
Its divisions and precisions,In other words, these spells destabilize the certainties of the speaker's human existence. Memory, rather than being kept in a little box or room in the mind, is starting to seep into the speaker's lived experience of the world, blurring the line between reality and imagination. The assonance of /o/ sounds ("dissolve the floors of memory") creates a feeling of slowness that mimics this process of dissolving.
Likewise, the matching "-ion" suffixes on "relations ... divisions and precisions" links these words together sonically—they are all part of the way in which human beings usually make sense of the world, and are under threat in the darkness of the night.
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Lines 8-12
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. -
Lines 13-18
Half-past one,
The street lamp sputtered,
The street lamp muttered,
The street lamp said, "Regard that woman
Who hesitates towards you in the light of the door
Which opens on her like a grin. -
Lines 19-22
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." -
Lines 23-29
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. -
Lines 30-32
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. -
Lines 33-39
Half-past two,
The street lamp said,
"Remark the cat which flattens itself in the gutter,
Slips out its tongue
And devours a morsel of rancid butter."
So the hand of a child, automatic,
Slipped out and pocketed a toy that was running along the quay. -
Lines 40-45
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 one afternoon in a pool,
An old crab with barnacles on his back,
Gripped the end of a stick which I held him. -
Lines 46-54
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 smoothes the hair of the grass. -
Lines 55-61
The moon has lost her memory.
A washed-out smallpox cracks her face,
Her hand twists a paper rose,
That smells of dust and old Cologne,
She is alone
With all the old nocturnal smells
That cross and cross across her brain." -
Lines 62-68
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. -
Lines 69-78
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.
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“Rhapsody on a Windy Night” Symbols
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Flowers
The poem makes three mentions of flowers, in lines 12, 57, and 63. Flowers are often used as symbols of vitality and beauty; they're associated with spring, a season of renewal and rebirth after the winter months. Yet the symbol here works by not playing into those usual associations. Instead, the flowers in the poem represent decay, fatalism, and the inevitability of mortality.
The geranium, which is mentioned twice in the poem, is a common flower that looks pretty. Accordingly, people often put geraniums in their homes. In this sense, then, geraniums are usually a kind of symbol of everyday life—nothing particularly remarkable, but a small way of making the world a more visually appealing place. Roses, meanwhile, are often representative of romance and love.
However, the geraniums in this poem are dead. They are a reminder of a life that once was, but is no longer. They once possessed beauty, but they have been neglected (the geraniums in line 63 are "sunless") and therefore have been denied what they need to thrive and grow. This is perhaps like the speaker of the poem, who walks in the moonlight, rather than sunlight, and whose life is filled with a sense of fatalism—a sense that life is pointless and out of the speaker's hands. The speaker, like the flowers, is perhaps withering away in the dark.
The geranium is specifically tied to memory in line 12. Memory being akin to a "dead geranium" suggests that the former is itself a marker of decay and mortality; after all, memories by default reference the past, meaning they can only accrue as time passes. In that sense, making memories—essentially, living one's life—brings one closer to death. The flowers in the poem, so often used in art to symbolize a sense of vivacity, are just reminders of the fact that everything will fade, and everything will die—just as memory itself is a reminder of a time that has since passed, of a part of life that is over.
The rose in line 57 is notably made of paper, meaning it's a flimsy imitation of the flower itself. This rose is not alive, and is being twisted in the hands of the moon—a figure that throughout the poem exerts a strange control over the world around the speaker and itself becomes representative of an identity breaking apart. Together, this imagery adds to the poem's sensation of futility, of its sense that life is random and meaningless, and that death is inevitable. Momentary distractions like beauty and romance are no match for the hands of fate, which "twists" and "shakes" them along with the speaker's own mind.
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The Moon
The moon has a central role in "Rhapsody on a Windy Night," largely as a means for the speaker to illustrate the feeling of losing control and the disintegration of one's identity. The moon is personified as a female figure and is first mentioned in lines 3 and 4, when the moon is said to exert a control over the street. The moon whispers quiet spells that blur the boundary between experience and memory. This image relies upon the long-standing association between the moon and magic, or the supernatural more generally. For centuries, humankind has believed in a "lunar effect"—that the moon exerts a hold not just over the tides but on human behavior itself. Indeed, many cultures have held or continue to hold the belief that the moon can induce temporary madness. The word "lunacy," of course, has its original etymology in just such a belief, traceable as far back as Aristotle and Pliny the Elder (thinkers from Ancient Greece and Rome).
In a way, then, the moon represents a sort of chaos—the destabilization of the mind that occurs when the familiar world is covered by darkness. But the moon is also a kind of silent witness here, a face that has looked down on the entirety of humanity's toil and trouble with nothing to say. In this sense, the moon represents a kind of meaningless life, as expressed in line 55: "The moon has lost her memory." Here, the moon has forgotten everything she has seen, questioning whether these events ever had any purpose at all. If identity is essentially the sum of a person's memories—those mental recordings of their experiences—then to lose one's memory is basically to lose one's identity. Despite seeming to assert control over the speaker, the moon itself is thus in a state of confusion and crisis.
Finally, the moon also functions as the opposite of the sun. If the sun is the celestial giver of life, the moon can only offer a pale imitation. Where sunlight would allow things like flowers to flourish, in the moonlight the "sunless" geraniums are dry and dead. The moonlit setting thus adds to the general sense of atrophy and mortality in the poem.
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“Rhapsody on a Windy Night” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Anaphora
"Rhapsody on a Windy Night" uses anaphora intermittently throughout. It occurs in lines 14, 15, 16, 47, 48, 52, 53, and 54 (and also in 66, 67 and 68, but these use polysyndeton specifically).
In the first half of the second stanza, the anaphora helps carve out the prominent role for the street lamp in the poem. Each line insists on the street lamp's existence and ability to talk, emphasizing its personification. It also creates a slightly sing-songy, nursery rhyme sound that is at odds with the actual content of the poem and is therefore quite unnerving. Lines 47 and 48 serve a similar function, bringing the "sputtering" and "muttering" back once more. This repetition of the repetition creates a sense of ritual, as though the street lamp has to sputter and mutter in order to take on the ability to communicate with the speaker (of course, the lamp can also be interpreted as an expression of the speaker's mind itself).
In the sixth stanza, the anaphora adds to the image of the moon's as a faded glory, both in terms of beauty and memory. The anaphora in lines 52, 53, 54—"she winks," "she smiles," "she smoothes"—creates a very simple grammatical structure as the lamp outlines the moon's actions. The moon is illuminating the world, but her light is "feeble" as she does so. The next line reveals that the moon has lost her memory, which casts these previous steps in an almost pathetic light—the pitiful attempts of the moon to illuminate the world even as she herself is lost in darkness. The anaphora helps create the sense that the moon is struggling even with her common actions—and this, in turn, foreshadows the speaker's struggle to go on with the mundanities of life in the poem's ending.
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Apostrophe
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Alliteration
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Assonance
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Personification
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Simile
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Consonance
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Sibilance
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Polysyndeton
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Enjambment
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"Rhapsody on a Windy Night" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Reaches
- Lunar
- Synthesis
- Incantations
- Fatalistic
- Geranium
- Morsel
- Quay
- Barnacles
- La lune ne garde rancune aucune
- Smallpox
- Reminiscence
- Crevices
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Across every part of the street.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Rhapsody on a Windy Night”
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Form
A rhapsody is a long, highly emotional, irregular (and perhaps meandering) written or spoken work. It's thus an appropriate title for this poem! The form of "Rhapsody on A Windy Night" is highly irregular, mimicking the poem's sense of instability and the speaker's lack of control. Though the form may appear rather random, a close look reveals it to subtly mirror the poem's content throughout.
On the broadest level, there are eight stanzas that, in order from first to last, consist of twelve, nine, nine, twelve, three, nineteen, eight, or just one line. This irregular stanza length reflects the strains and shifts in the speaker's mind. The form embodies the way that, as line 23 says, "the memory throws up [thoughts] high and dry" throughout the poem; the speaker doesn't stick to a standard length because whenever a memory is "thrown up," the stanza expands to accommodate it.
Despite their varying lengths, many of the stanzas are connected by their mention of time. In particular, stanzas 1, 2, 4, 5, and 7 all start by stating what time it is. The attention to the constant passage of time heightens the anxiety of the poem (the night keeps marching on, towards morning and, it's implied, eventual death) while also adding a clear marker to the speaker's increasingly agitated state of mind. Of course, the poem unfolds in real-time much more quickly than the amount of time that passes within the poem might suggest (i.e. you can read the poem in a minute or two, yet four hours pass in the world of the poem itself)—which perhaps adds to the overall sense of instability, or of memory collapsing and dissolving.
Again, a close reading of the poem reveals the specific content of the stanzas to be complemented by their form. Take stanza 4: this is a combination of speech by the street lamp and the speaker’s own internal monologue, which together create a link between the movement of the cat’s tongue and a childhood memory. The fact these moments—the lamp's direction to look at the cat, and the speaker's subsequent memory spurred by that cat—aren’t split by a stanza break shows the increasingly blurry boundary between perception and memory.
The shortness of stanza 5, meanwhile, can be thought of as emphasizing the lateness of the hour. It’s as though there are no other sounds apart from the speaking street lamp, the isolation of the three lines hinting at the speaker’s inability to bring his mind to rest.
Stanza 6 is by far the longest of the bunch, facilitating a quick-fire list of descriptions of the moon and smell-based memories. The speaker’s mind almost has no filter here, and the length of the stanza lends the lines a frantic quality as thoughts ping off one another and bring disparate memories to the surface in a frenzy of thought before the speaker returns home.
Of course, the most dramatic moment form-wise arguably comes at the very end of the poem. The stanza break before the final line heightens the sense of drama, introducing a violent conclusion that leaves the poem on a harrowing and mysterious note. The isolation of line 78 underscores its finality—that there is nothing more to say, that there is nothing else for the speaker to do. This reflects the poem's general sense of fatalism—that life is outside of the speaker's control.
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Meter
"Rhapsody on a Windy Night" is written in free verse, and so has no overall regular meter. This helps the reader get a sense of the speaker's unstable mind. As the night draws later and later, the speaker suffers at the whims of perceptions and memories, seemingly losing control. If the poem were in, say, iambic pentameter, the reader might not get that same feeling of a loss of agency because the rhythm of the poem would be so tightly controlled.
That isn't to say, though, that Eliot as a poet isn't in full control of the meter in this poem. A regular metrical scheme would be too ordered and controlled, but the poem still makes use of metrical effects.
Line 8, for example, starts to establish a sense of trochaic rhythm that is disrupted by the start of line 9—adding a violent heaviness to the word "beats" that emphasizes the way the street lamps make the speaker feel as though he or she has no control over the surrounding world.
Every street lamp that I pass
Beats like a fatalistic drum,The reader might expect an unstressed syllable after "pass" to continue the pattern of trochees, but "beats" completely upends this expectation.
In line 12, the total absence of metrical regularity embodies the idea of insanity that the poem suggests throughout:
As a madman shakes a dead geranium.
Yes, you can break this down into various metrical feet, but there's no discernible pattern to them. Here the metrical sense of the line is itself shaken, mimicking the action of the madman. The randomness here is crafted to reflect the meaninglessness of the madman's behavior.
Meanwhile, lines 14 and 15 have the same pattern of stressed/unstressed syllables, which helps create the sound of a nursery-rhyme. There is something unsettlingly childlike about the da-DUM rhythm of these lines, that is perhaps suggestive of the warped imagination of the speaker as fantastical elements take hold over his interior state.
The street lamp sputtered,
The street lamp muttered,This is true of lines 47 and 48, too, when these lines are repeated.
Line 39 is the poem's longest, and its length visually evokes the memory described. The speaker remembers seeing a boy run the full length of the quay, and the delay in line break creates this sense of someone running a horizontal distance.
Overall, then, despite the irregularity, Eliot still clearly knows what he's doing metrically; as with form, he uses irregular meter in a deliberate way to reflect the poem's thematic content.
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Rhyme Scheme
"A Rhapsody on a Windy Night" does not have a defined rhyme scheme. However, it does make occasional use of rhyme.
In lines 4-7, for example, there are four word that end in "-ions": incantations, relations, divisions, and precisions. As this section discusses "incantations"—spells—the effect of the rhyme here is to make the lines sound like they are casting magic.
There is a rhyme between line 9 and line 12, with "drum" and "geranium." Given that the drum beat is "fatalistic" and a "madman" is shaking the geranium, the rhyme between these words links the idea of madness with the idea of fate, hinting at the increasingly tortured state of the speaker's mind as the poem progresses.
As one of the most obvious rhymes in the poem, "sputtered" and "muttered" in lines 14 and 15 (and again in lines 47 and 48) create a couplet that feels almost childlike. As they essentially signal an imaginative act—the street lamp coming to life and talking—the rhyme helps to mark these lines out as something fantastical, akin to the kind of language that might be found in a fairy tale or nursery rhyme.
Lines 35 and 37 also rhyme explicitly with "butter" and "gutter." They help to conjure the image of the low-lying cat, searching along the floor of the urban environment for anything to eat.
Lines 50 and 51 also rhyme. These lines are both part of a speech by the street lamp. The speaker's mind is unstable by this point, and the rhyme here is almost arbitrary, rhyming "moon" with the French "aucune rancune" (essentially translating to "no grudge"). The triple rhyme featuring words likely unfamiliar to English-speaking readers contributes to an atmosphere of nonsense that helps create the feeling that the speaker is losing his or her mind.
The most dramatic rhyme of all comes in the last two lines of the poem, lines 77 and 78. Across the tense pause of the stanza break, "life" is rhymed with "knife." Conceptually, this links life with violence and death. The preceding lines describe the small, menial actions that the speaker will need to go through to continue living from moment—but the suddenness of the last line casts doubt on whether this will ever happen. The rhyme helps the poem end on a dramatic twist, with no indication as to whether this is a literal or imaginative action, and what its implications for the speaker actually are.
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“Rhapsody on a Windy Night” Speaker
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It's difficult to pin down who the speaker is in "Rhapsody on a Windy Night." Sometimes the voice has a detached quality, as though it is merely reporting on the events within the poem. Elsewhere, the first person pronoun crops up, suggesting that the poem does have a single, unified voice. But that in turn is also disrupted—primarily because the street lamp speaks too. Indeed, by the end of the poem it feels as if the "I" has become distanced from any particular identity, overruled by the speaker's imagination, sensory impressions, and memories.
The first-person perspective is first introduced in line 8 as the speaker discusses walking by street lamps that beat like "fatalistic drums." This introduction helps establish the main preoccupations of the speaker's mind: time, fate, and memory. The speaker's mention of madness just a few lines later hints at the way his or her mind becomes seems to become increasingly unstable as the poem progresses.
The star of the show, though, is undoubtedly the street lamp. It coughs into action as the clock strikes half-past one at the start of the second stanza. Generally, the street lamp offers the main speaker of the poem instructions, pushing him or her to make particular associations (e.g. between the woman's eyes and the twist of pins in the second stanza). The prominence of the street lamp's voice helps to cast doubt on the speaker's internal state. The talking street lamp might well be the product of the speaker's overactive—or overanxious—mind. And by the end of the poem, the street lamp has become increasingly authoritative. Here, it dictates instructions to the speaker for the smallest (and easiest) of actions—where to find the toothbrush, for example. This underscores the sense that the speaker is in the process of losing control.
The dramatic last line is very ambiguous in terms of its speaker. It could be the lamp having the last word, or the main speaker. It could even be another voice. The line feels disembodied, ensuring that the poem ends on a tense and mysterious note.
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“Rhapsody on a Windy Night” Setting
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"Rhapsody on a Windy Night" is set between the hours of midnight and around 4 a.m. on a dark city street largely devoid of anyone other than the speaker. There are regular street lamps and the odd stray cat, but otherwise the speaker is alone. The speaker walks through this quiet nocturnal environment, which is teeming with a vague sense of threat. The sense of time and the sense of place are both vital to the poem's overall setting.
The announcement of the time in the first line establishes the possibility of the supernatural. It's midnight, a time traditionally associated with magic and the temporary loss of individual control, perhaps through being under a spell. Line 4 then foregrounds this link between the time of the poem and magic through the phrase "lunar incantations." It's quickly becoming clear that the familiar world is quite different during the night, in the light of the moon.
The urban environment exerts a strong hold over the speaker's mind, as stated in lines 8 and 9. The regularity of the streets and the way they are lit starts to undermine the speaker's sense of agency—the speaker feels as if each street light is a "fatalistic drum," a reminder as the speaker walks past that he or she is being governed by something external. This intensifies as the poem goes on, with sensory impressions from the street provoking memories in his or her mind.
The poem, then, also takes places within the speaker's mind. Things the speaker notices—or is made to notice—in the present call memories to mind, situating the reader within both the speaker's present and past. This adds to the sense that the speaker's reality is being held together by a very fine thread, and that this walk home might be the process of that thread unravelling. By the end of the poem, the speaker makes it home—but the last line indicates that the quiet threat of violence continues.
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Literary and Historical Context of “Rhapsody on a Windy Night”
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Literary Context
T. S. Eliot wrote "Rhapsody on a Windy Night" during a period of widespread literary experimentation known as modernism. Modernist writers such as Eliot, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf challenged the literary norms they had inherited from the 19th century. These norms were both formal—related to the structure and style of poems, plays, and novels—and social: sex, drugs and alcohol, feminism, and working-class life all became new subjects for serious literature during this period.
"Rhapsody on a Windy Night" is one of Eliot's earliest poems, first published in the short-lived literary magazine Blast (1915). and later included in Eliot's first collection, Prufrock and Other Observations (1917). But its beginnings can be traced to Eliot's time at Paris's prestigious university, the Sorbonne. There, Eliot attended the philosopher Henri Bergson's infamous lectures, which questioned the relationship between the human experience of time and the way in which time is measured (a theme explored in this poem).
In 1981, the poem was adapted for the stage as part of Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical, Cats—specifically the famous number "Memory."
Historical Context
"Rhapsody on a Windy Night" is an anxious poem firmly situated in the early 20th century, which was a time of profound change. Inventions such as the airplane and telephone altered daily life significantly in a short time. Cities grew denser as people began flocking from the countryside to urban centers. New technologies and industries improved the quality of life for some, while creating polluted environments and unsafe working conditions for others.
When poems from Prufrock and Other Observations were first printed, World War I had just begun. The immense violence of the "Great War" shook ideals inherited from the previous century and shattered the old European order. The new technologies that had seemingly improved life for so many were used to kill on an industrial scale. All these developments made modernist artists deeply skeptical of the modern world. At the same time, modernist thinking stirred up animosity towards older ways of living; after all, it was the old European empires that had led the continent into war.
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More “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” Resources
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External Resources
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An Animation of the Poem — A quirky and interesting visual interpretation of Eliot's poem.
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Blast 2 — A PDF copy of the short-lived but influential Blast magazine, in which the poem first appeared.
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"Memory" in Cats — A clip from the Andrew Lloyd-Webber musical, Cats, in which the poem is reinterpreted as a song.
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Other Poems and Related Essays — A wide range of resources, featuring work by and about T.S. Eliot.
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A Reading by Jeremy Irons — A reading of the poem by Jeremy Irons, set to music as part of as BBC series.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by T. S. Eliot
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