Katie's Post (Stanza 2)

I wrote something, it's a bit long but you did say "approx"..



T.S Eliot gives the impression that there is a male and a female persona. It can be seen that the female persona is female as she is referred to by ‘she’, but as the poem is written in first person identifying the male persona is more subtle. We naturally assume the persona is male because T.S. Eliot is, but there is further evidence such as lines like “I take my hat” and “reading the comics and the sporting page” – things that women would be unlikely to do at the time.

Beyond this, we are given the impression that the woman is pretentious through her repetition of phrases, as in “ah, my fried, you do not know, you do not know”, and that she is old, as suggested when she refers to herself as “one about to reach her journey’s end”. She is also shown to be dominant, in the high modality of the language she uses and the frequent use of the second person pronoun, such as in “I am always sure you understand/ My feelings, always sure that you feel”.

The male persona, on the other hand, is portrayed as being disrespectful when he appears to be focusing on what the women is doing rather than saying – “(slowing twisting the lilac stalks)”, and through similie likens her voice to unpleasant music: “like the insistent out-of- tune/ of a broken violin”. Eliot also gives the impression that the male person in introverted as he frequently uses “I”: “I take my hat: how can I make cowardly amends”, while is also somewhat pretentious, as suggested in the line “I keep my countenance”.

The impressions given of these personas suggest that Eliot has negative opinions of his own society and believes that everyone is flawed.