Discuss how the four different scenarios in Eliot's 'Preludes' can be read as a single picture of urban squalor and decadance.

All you really have to do is consider the first stanza of the poem. The first prelude of the poem is set on a winter evening in a city, at the time of day when people are returning home from work, during a rainstorm. It’s a dirty, sinister, pungent, lonely place filled with waste. Motifs are introduced that continue throughout the poem: time, light, newspapers, discarded and broken objects, the street, and vacant lots. The cozy domesticity and occasional rhyming meter is disrupted by images of desolation and routine depersonalization.