Skip to content

Every Writer

Every Day Poems

Menu
  • Home
  • Reading
    • Blog
    • On Writing
    • Interviews
    • Famous Authors
    • Stories
    • Poetry
  • Writing
    • Writing Tips
    • Writing Inspiration
    • Playground
    • Writing Prompts
  • Publishing
    • Publishing Tips
    • Literary Magazines
    • Book Publishers
  • Promotions
    • Book Promotions
    • Promoting Tips
    • Classifieds
    • Newsletter
  • Submit
Menu

Rhapsody on a Windy Night by T. S. Eliot

Posted on June 24, 2010 by Every Writer

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
Disolve 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 its 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 one afternoon in a pool,
An old crab with barnacles on his back,
Gripped the end of a 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 smells of dust and old 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.

Related Posts:

  • Tsesig
    Preludes by T. S. Eliot
  • The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
    The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere by Henry Wadsworth…
  • Nightmare: A Tale for an Autumn Evening by Amy Lowell
    Nightmare: A Tale for an Autumn Evening by Amy Lowell
  • Tse
    Aunt Helen by T. S. Eliot
  • Street Life
    Street Life by Fran Schumer
  • The Warrior by John McCrae
    The Warrior by John McCrae
  • bridge poem
    Crossing the Brightman Street Bridge by Cynthia Elder
  • The Jack-O’-Lantern
    The Jack-O'-Lantern By Madison Julius Cawein
Category: 1900s, Eliot, T. S.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Find a Poem or Poet

Call for Submissions

summer call for submissions

Open Submissions for fiction and poetry. See our submission guidelines.

Free Magazine and Ebooks

When you sign up you get 2 free horror ebooks and digital copies of our magazine for free!



Categories

  • 1500s
  • 1600s
  • 1700s
  • 1800s Poetry
  • 1900s
  • 2000
  • Brooke, Rupert
  • Carroll, Lewis
  • Cat Poems
  • Charles Baudelaire
  • Christmas Poems
  • Classic Poems
  • Classic Poets
  • D.H. Lawrence
  • Death Poems
  • Depression Poems
  • Dickinson, Emily
  • Edgar Allan Poe
  • Eliot, T. S.
  • Erotic Poems
  • Family Poems
  • Friends Poems
  • Frost, Robert
  • Funny Poems
  • Halloween Poems
  • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
  • Horror Poem
  • Inspirational Poems
  • Kilmer, Joyce
  • Kipling, Rudyard
  • Laurence Paul
  • Lord Byron
  • Love Poems
  • Lowell, Amy
  • Mary Elizabeth Coleridge
  • Millay, Edna St. Vincent
  • Moon Poem
  • Mythology Poems
  • Nature Poems
  • Owen, Wilfred
  • poem
  • Poems about Life
  • Poems about Mom
  • Poems about Poetry
  • Poems about stars
  • Poems about Truth
  • Poems about Women
  • Poems for Kids
  • Political Poems
  • Psychological Poems
  • Rainer Maria
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • Religious Poems
  • Robert Herrick
  • Rossetti, Chrstina
  • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
  • Sara Teasdale
  • Siegfried Sassoon
  • Summer Contest 2013
  • Summer Poems
  • Tennyson, Alfred Lord
  • Thanksgiving Poems
  • Thomas
  • Today's Authors
  • Travel Poems
  • Updated
  • Urban Poem
  • villanelle
  • War Poems
  • Whitman, Walt
  • William Cullen
  • William Shakespeare
  • Yeats, W. B.
© 2025 Every Writer | Powered by Minimalist Blog WordPress Theme
Go to mobile version