Preludes is a set of 4 short poems composed by T. S. Eliot in 1910. Each poem in the collection signifies a vague time during the day from morning to evening, depicting the psychological journey of living in a modern concrete forest.

The theme, just like any other of T.S. Eliot’s, focuses on the alienation of urban life. The poetic usage of synecdoche in lines like “One thinks of all the hands/That are raising dingy shades” further suggest that the subject is alienated from the object of life.

The poem is composed loosely in iambic terametre and the rhyme scheme is unpredictable with internal rhymes and stress rhymes. This unconventional utilization of rhyme scheme denotes Eliot’s transformation to what we later call the “free-verse” writing. This modernist approach is also observable narratively where the speaker uses the third-person narration that seems to cut off from both the reader and the character within the story, again, suggesting an alienated feeling.