describe the scenes of city life as described in the poem " Preludes" by T.S. Eliot.

Eliot's Preludes is in the form of a
sequence of impressionist observations of a metropolitan journey. A series of four
observational sequences, the poem explores a fragmented city-scape with emphases on the
monotony, disgust, squalor and disillusion of modern world as the narrating persona
leads us on from image to image, from one scene to another, with the focus on dirt and
filth, aridity and decadence, subjugation and tyranny.

The
first three sections move from evening to morning, the fourth returns to the evening
hours with a cynical mockery of the earth's repetitive circumambulation.The point of
view of an impersonal, objective description of a city street on a “gusty” winter
evening in section shifts to a more subjective first-person response in the middle of
section IV. The second person addressee “you” in preludes I and IV  is presumably a
reference to the reader or to anyone who has walked the city streets. The scene moves
from the dirty streets to dingy rooms at the end of II. A woman in such a room is
addressed as “you” in section III, which describes her actions and thoughts as she wakes
up in the morning after a vision of her own self. Prelude IV contains three separate
parts, beginning with a third-person description of a man’s soul in relation to the
street scene, followed by a more lyrical, subjective, and illusory glimpse of hope and
salvation expressed in the first person. The closing lines again cancels out the glimpse
as the poem ends with a cynical laughter, and a typically Eliotesque sardonic image of
“ancient women”  moving round and round in  “vacant lots”, reinforcing the image of the
same vacancy in section I.

Eliot's vision in these
vignettes majestically suggests the hopeless monotony, the decadence, the fragmentation,
the dirt and filth, and the denial of salvation in the modern metropolitan life.
References to claustrophobic urban existence, routine city life, the street-walker in
her dingy room, the futility of the old women's fuel-gathering rotation etc constitute
an urban landscape of of alienation and disillusion and
emptiness.