For some reason it's taken me nearly five years to get to understand this short poem. The revelation, when it hit me at 2am today, was as beautiful and simple as these things ever are: it's a poem about the human soul, the "infinitely gentle / infinitely suffering thing" of the closing stanzas. We see the soul trapped in an urban environment of squalor and even misery, yet an environment nonetheless which provides life and a possibility of happiness.
Eliot conveys this idea through a series of simple images of working-class city-dwellers and the world that surrounds them: "smell of steaks in passageways... newspapers from vacant lots... short square fingers stuffing pipes". None of the sketchy figures in the poem are particularly happy or unhappy; they are merely humanity struggling with a setting that they don't even know is alien, each of them vitally alive and "impatient to assume the world". They are adapted to their oppressive surroundings, and in this perfect adaptation, the beauty of the soul shines against the darkness of "a city block".
Preludes is the third poem in the Gutenberg etext of Prufrock and Other Observations. My paper copy of the collection is the sexiest book of poems I have ever owned.
This, incidentally, is my 50th post :)
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