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Modern Nights in Eliot’s Poems

The main aim of this article is to examine the significance of the city’s night in Eliot’s early poems, such as “The Little Passion,” “Goldfish,” “Prufrock’s Pervigilium,” “Suite Clownesque,” and “Rhapsody on a Windy Night.” In these poems, the city’s night becomes the contest zone in which both the metropolis’s beauty and ugliness, and its seduction and horror conflictingly coexist. Eliot’s flanuers, who stroll on urban streets at night, are shocked to confront the horror of high modernity. To some of them, as in “Prufrock’s Pervigilium,” it is not just the darkness of “problematic” modernity but that of their own inside that they encounter at their strolling. Another agenda that Eliot’s early poems register is the urban night as a gendered time-space, in which both urban landscape and female bodies are transfigured into spectacular objects under the gaze of the desiring males. Instead of foregrounding the agenda of desire and sexuality, Eliot’s flanuers, however, constantly erase their own desire by deploying the strategy of disavowal. In “Suite Clownesque,” the speaker’s transgressive desire is effaced by the self-deconstructive parody of his performative acts. “The Little Passion” presents another type of disavowal by displacing the speaker’s sexual desire into his own self-projected tragic characterization. Rather than opening up a new/meaningful horizon of experience, the transgressive desire in Eliot’s poems is recaptured by the logic of modernity and the city’s night, as exemplified in the prostitute-moon in “Rhapsody on a Windy Night,” becomes a telling sign of the “ugly” city.