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What is this?
The Genius annotation is the work of the Genius Editorial project. Our editors and contributors collaborate to create the most interesting and informative explanation of any line of text. It’s also a work in progress, so leave a suggestion if this or any annotation is missing something.
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One of The Beatles’s undisputed masterpieces, the groundbreaking and influential “Strawberry Fields Forever” (1967) was based on John Lennon’s childhood memories in Liverpool. Lennon described it as one of his most personal songs, “psychoanalysis set to music”. His apparent vulnerability brings an ethereal quality to his singing. The song was one of The Beatles’s most complicated recordings to date, and made use of an arrangement of trumpets and cellos written by their classically trained producer, George Martin.
The orchestral textures were enhanced by the use of a relatively new instrument, the Mellotron, a precursor to the modern digital sampler. The Mellotron uses a keyboard to play samples of acoustic instruments and other real-world sounds that are recorded on magnetic tape. It is first heard in this song in the flute-like introduction, as played by Paul McCartney.
“Strawberry Fields Forever” was originally intended to appear on the band’s seminal Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album, but was instead released the same year (1967) as a double-A side with Paul McCartney’s “Penny Lane.” George Martin has publicly stated that taking both “Penny Lane” and “Strawberry Fields Forever” off of Sgt. Pepper’s was the biggest mistake of his career. Both songs are named after sites in Liverpool and are steeped in childhood and English nostalgia.
The song’s infamous “Cranberry sauce” outro, misheard by some fans as “I buried Paul,” became the locus of widespread rumors and conspiracy theories, making “Strawberry Fields Forever” one of the most obsessively analyzed songs in music history.
Gatepost to Strawberry Field, Liverpool. Image via Wikimedia
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What is this?
The Genius annotation is the work of the Genius Editorial project. Our editors and contributors collaborate to create the most interesting and informative explanation of any line of text. It’s also a work in progress, so leave a suggestion if this or any annotation is missing something.
To learn more about participating in the Genius Editorial project, check out the contributor guidelines.
What is this?
The Genius annotation is the work of the Genius Editorial project. Our editors and contributors collaborate to create the most interesting and informative explanation of any line of text. It’s also a work in progress, so leave a suggestion if this or any annotation is missing something.
To learn more about participating in the Genius Editorial project, check out the contributor guidelines.
What is this?
The Genius annotation is the work of the Genius Editorial project. Our editors and contributors collaborate to create the most interesting and informative explanation of any line of text. It’s also a work in progress, so leave a suggestion if this or any annotation is missing something.
To learn more about participating in the Genius Editorial project, check out the contributor guidelines.
Prufrock uses the image of a patient under ether, a potent anesthetic, to suggest his complacency and impotence. The imagery of sickness here may also suggest the sickened state of language or even youth/manhood in the early 1900s—a time when the old romantic vocabulary of the Victorian Era was being used by politicians to justify ending young men’s lives in war.
After the sing-song rhyme of the first two lines, Eliot’s initial readership were primed for something more pretty-sounding from the rest of the poem. But the next line doesn’t rhyme, and the image he chooses is stark and deathly. The abrupt departure from a regular rhyme scheme and macabre imagery suggest, at the start of the poem, a break with the older, Romantic tradition and poets like Shelley, Keats and Wordsworth.
In the simile “like a patient etherized upon a table,” Eliot has linked two seemingly unrelated and totally unexpected images. (In this he was following in the tradition of the 17th-century writers Samuel Johnson called the Metaphysical poets; in their work, Johnson griped, “The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together.”)
There are multiple interpretive possibilities. The “ether” might evoke Prufrock’s addled mind, unable to think or act decisively. The atmosphere is also misty and fluid, constantly changing, like the indecisive Prufrock. The image of the operating “table” suggests that Prufrock himself is sick, psychologically or spiritually paralyzed, perhaps socially “unconscious” or sexually impotent.
At the time, anesthesia using ether was still rather high-tech (it had been around for over fifty years, but technology moved slower back then).
Ether has also been used since the 19th century as a recreational drug. Eliot would have known this somewhat scandalous history.
What is this?
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What is this?
The Genius annotation is the work of the Genius Editorial project. Our editors and contributors collaborate to create the most interesting and informative explanation of any line of text. It’s also a work in progress, so leave a suggestion if this or any annotation is missing something.
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What is this?
The Genius annotation is the work of the Genius Editorial project. Our editors and contributors collaborate to create the most interesting and informative explanation of any line of text. It’s also a work in progress, so leave a suggestion if this or any annotation is missing something.
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This classic sonnet uses a decaying statue of
Ramesses II, also called Ozymandias, as a symbol of the decline in time of personal possessions and power. Far from standing forever, even the most imposing of man’s creations wear away.
Shelley’s poem is thought to have been inspired by the news of the 1821 acquisition of a statue of Ramses II by the British Museum in London. It was also written in competition with Shelley’s friend Horace Smith, who produced his own “Ozymandias” sonnet and published it a month later.
Signed “Glirastes”– meaning roughly a “preaching doormouse”–Shelley’s “Ozymandias” has become one of his most famous poems.
The essence of the message is the hubris of a man who believed that he would be remembered forever. Shelley points out the power of nature, and its ability to destroy, a classic theme of Romanticism.
It is also a comment on humility — or the lack of it. The traveller is an ordinary man, yet he is the one who tells the story, not the great king. Shelley chose to give a voice to the ‘nobody’, often at that time forgotten by literature.
The poem gained renewed popular attention in 2013 when “Ozymandias” was used as the title of an episode of TV’s Breaking Bad. Actor Bryan Cranston recited the poem in promos for the show (see video above).
The sonnet structure also gives it formality and ‘dignity’, as does the stately, rhythmic iambic pentameter construction of the lines. Furthermore, sonnets are usually associated with love and harmony, however ironically, the only love here was the self-love of Ozymandias.
NB For more on sonnets see Glossary.
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The remains of a statue of the great king Ramses II stand in the desert, the only part of a much larger statue still existing.
Ozymandias is the corrupted Greek version of the name of the actual Egyptian pharaoh, Ramses II.
‘trunkless legs’ informs the reader of the statue’s lack of body and therefore lack of heart. Additionally, this may signify a lack of connection between his body and his brain. Ozymandias had presence, but no insight or intellect to recognise his limitations.
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