Rhapsody On A Windy Night

The poem mixes end-stopped lines with enjambed lines. In an end-stopped line, the grammatical unit is complete at the end of the line. In enjambment, also known as a run-on line, the unit carries over into the next line. The reader must “run on” to the next line to get the meaning. The second stanza of Eliot’s poem provides an example. It begins with three end-stopped lines, describing the street lamp. Starting in the fourth line of the stanza, when the lamp speaks, there are several enjambed lines, such as here:

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 19-22).

In contrast, in the fifth stanza, the lines the streetlamp speaks about the moon are mostly end-stopped. The last stanza is also notable because all nine lines are end-stopped:

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’ (Lines 69-77).

These end-stopped lines mirror the shift from internal to external time. As the lamp instructs, the nighttime memories are over and a more regular time is approaching, one that demands a more orderly, sequential, compartmentalized approach to the speaker’s life.

Anaphora is a literary device in which a word or a phrase at the beginning of a line is repeated in subsequent lines. Eliot employs anaphora a number of times, such as with: “The street-lamp sputtered, / The street-lamp muttered, / The street-lamp said” (Lines 14-16), which is repeated in slightly different form in Lines 47-49. Anaphora occurs again in the description of the moon: “She winks a feeble eye, / She smiles into corners, / She smooths the hair of grass” (Lines 52-54).

With personification, a thing, an abstraction, or a nonhuman entity is presented as if it were a person or sentient being. In this poem, the streetlamps and the moon are personified. The streetlamps speak and communicate; one of them “sputtered” (Line 14) and “muttered” (Line 15), and another one “hummed” (Line 49). One of the streetlamps speaks of the moon, personifying it as a woman and emphasizing her face, including her “feeble eye” (Line 52) and her smile. Her face is pitted with smallpox scars, and her hand clutches a “paper rose” (Line 57).