Preludes

Are there scenarios in real life you can relate to the text? elaborate.

Prelude by daryll delgado

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Preludes" contains many images of human life reduced to something partial, sinister, and broken. In the third prelude, this is expressed most directly as “The thousand sordid images/Of which your soul was constituted.” A soul, which should be infinite, is limited to a thousand ignoble images. Humans are described by their feet and hands—body parts that move and work, and get “muddy,” “yellow,” and “soiled”; the speaker does not mention the more personal, "spiritual" areas of faces and hearts. Their lives are also directed by their appetites for food, sex, alcohol, and coffee. Life is described as a “masquerade,” a false pretense of reality. Symbolically, the songbird in the tree representing the hope of spring, is replaced by the degraded sparrow in the gutter. The city dwellers are so preoccupied that they blacken the holy street with their “insistent” feet; their debased state ignores the possibilities of grace and salvation. Even old women at the end are reduced to scrounging for fuel.