
1️⃣ T. E. Hulme (1883–1917)
T. E. Hulme was born on September 16, 1883, in Endon, England. He attended St. John’s College, Cambridge, but left without taking a degree. In 1912, the literary magazine New Age featured five of his poems, which were then reprinted in Pound’s poetry collection Ripostes. Although he published very few poems during his lifetime, he was one of the founders of the imagist movement and an important figure in twentieth century poetry. T. S. Eliot writes,
“Hulme is classical, reactionary, and revolutionary; he is the antipodes of the eclectic, tolerant, and democratic mind of the end of the last century.”
His poem:-

👉 The Embankment
(The fantasia of a fallen gentleman on a cold, bitter night)
Once, in finesse of fiddles found I ecstasy,
In a flash of gold heels on the hard pavement.
Now see I
That warmth’s the very stuff of poesy.
Oh, God, make small
The old star-eaten blanket of the sky,
That I may fold it round me and in comfort lie.
➡️ "Modernist" symbols, imagery and metaphors :-
The poem starts from London's Embankment which is an area well-known for homeless people sleeping rough and a ‘fallen gentleman’ reflects on his past and how he found pleasure in worldly social activities. Afterwards the ‘finesse of fiddles’ suggesting musical gatherings and beautiful women – probably given the ‘flash of gold heels on the hard pavement prostitutes. The poet probably sleeping rough on the streets. The poem’s speaker beseeching God to make a blanket of the starry sky so that the speaker’s wish for warmth might be granted. Here the blanket is also a symbol of vastness which covers larger parts. Basically the poem is short but it is not that much easier to analyse. They had written about ‘fallen gentlemen, not just men down on their luck, but often, by implication, those who had succumbed to sexual temptations and been subsequently ruined emotionally or financially, and had treated the stars in the night sky as an appropriate topic for their poetry.
Therefore that is precisely what the ‘old, star-eaten blanket of the sky’ achieves through a concise compacting of the two ideas, with the starry sky being overlaid with the less grand (or typically poetic image of the moth-eaten blanket. The starry sky is a more fitting subject for poets to sing or write about: we think of the night sky as beautiful and romantic and a moth-eaten blanket as squalid and unattractive, but to the speaker freezing to death on London’s streets, the blanket is more immediately valuable and beautiful than the sky above him.