A critical assessment of TS Eliot's poem, 'Rhapsody on a windy night'.

Rhapsody on a windy night was written directly after Preludes and echoes many of its themes. Rhapsody... charts the night-time journey of a man through the streets of a city. Held in a trance by the moonlight, he is shown various sights by the street lamps he passes, and these sights evoke images, feelings and recollections. From the sights revealed by the lamps, and the responses they induce, a portrait of the city life is …

…the passing of time, and about memory. There is a sense of the "fatalistic drum", not only beating the time to the end of the "lunar synthesis", but to the end of life itself. This adds an urgency to the desires for escape expressed in the poem - soon it will be too late. Perhaps it is already too late for the midnight wanderer, and this is why his thoughts seem mainly in the past.