It’s getting close to Valentine’s Day, and so I thought we would take a look at T. S. Eliot’s poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”.
First of all: Why Prufrock?
I studied this poem in my high school and college English classes, and I am sure many of you did as well. Though I did fairly well in English, it was not my strongest subject. My recollections of this poem consist mainly of being frustrated at my inability to see the meaning that my teachers said was right there if I would just look at it, wondering how on earth they could get the words of this poem to mean the things they said it did. So I just let it go and went on with my life. Then, this year at Christmas I stayed with my older sister, and this poem came up during the course of conversation. (My older sister was an English major in college, and she did a paper on this poem in one of her classes.) This got me interested again, as things that I did not understand before became clear to me. So I did some research on my own, and here is what I have come up with.
Now, before we begin, I am assuming that all of you have already read “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”. If you have not, you can find it here. Even if you have already read it, you may want to read it again, especially if it’s been a while. So go there, read the poem, and then check back with me. I’ll wait.
Read T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
Now then. Let’s start with the title: ”The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”. This is a stroke of irony, because the structure of the poem–to whatever extent it can be said to have a structure–is mainly blank verse with little bits of rhyme, repeated refrains, and partial sonnet form all thrown together. Not exactly a love song, by any stretch of the imagination. Also, love songs and poems up until the time that this was written dealt mainly with unrequited love for one woman in particular. But Prufrock, though at times he seems to have his affections focused upon one woman, seems to be feeling unrequited love, and all the despair, frustration, and other feelings attendant with that state, for the female gender as a whole.
Another bit of irony inherent in the title is the name J. Alfred Prufrock. Usually the man who sings love songs to a lady is a valiant hero, a knight in shining armor–or at least, someone who wants the object of his affections to perceive him as such. But Prufrock is the complete antithesis of that. Prufrock’s last name suggests a combination of the words “prude” and “frock”, i. e. a prude in a frock.
J. Alfred Prufrock is presumably a middle-aged man. We don’t know this for sure, but most of the evidence in the poem, especially frequent references to Prufrock’s balding head, seems to indicate that he is middle-aged, or at the very least in his mid-thirties. (Kinda like me, minus the balding head–at least for now. Scary.) But whatever his age, it is fairly evident that he perceives himself as getting older, and this is a source of frustration to him–if it is possible at all to consider him as feeling anything resembling frustration. Because what he feels during the course of this poem could probably be best described as a hopeless melange of many things, including frustration, self-pity, revulsion, anxiety, etc.
Prufrock is much older than T. S. Eliot was at the time that he wrote the poem. Yet it is likely that T. S. Eliot identifies with Prufrock to at least a certain extent, because both signed their names in the same way. At the time that he started writing this poem, T. S. Eliot signed his name “T. Stearns Eliot”.
Here is where the rant part comes in: I can identify with Prufrock. I know what it is like to feel the same frustrations and despair and God knows what else he feels. That’s scary, because Prufrock is not someone I want to be. I will unpack this in greater detail later on.
Wow. All of that–and we still haven’t made it past the title!
The poem begins with six lines of Italian. These lines are taken from Dante’s Inferno. They are spoken by the character Guido da Montefeltro, who is imprisoned within a flame in Hell which vibrates as he speaks, in response to a question from the author. They translate into English as follows: “If I thought that that I was replying to someone who would ever return to the world, this flame would cease to flicker. But since no one ever returns from these depths alive, if what I’ve heard is true, I will answer you without fear of infamy.”
This basically sets the tone that this poem is going to be a descent into Prufrock’s own self-imposed personal hell, just as Dante’s Inferno is a descent into hell. Guida da Montefeltro confesses all his sins to Dante because he thinks that Dante will never return to the outside world to tell anyone. In the same way, Prufrock lays bare the secrets of his inner mental workings because he thinks that his audience will not return from the depths of his own personal hell to tell anyone from the outside world.
“Let us go then, you and I”. This line makes it clear that Prufrock is inviting his audience to be a witness to his thought processes, which he is about to relate. And yet, this confession is apparently addressed to someone who would understand Prufrock’s thought processes and be able to relate. Since there is presumably no one in Prufrock’s world he can relate to, Prufrock is content to keep it as a reflection inside his own head.
So we embark upon our descent, starting at the city. We see the skyline lying flat and sterile against the evening sky, “like a patient etherised upon a table”. We go down into a seedy neighborhood of “half-deserted streets, …one-night cheap hotels and sawdust restaurants with oyster shells…”, to a tea party where “the women come and go, talking of Michelangelo.” It is not clear (to me at least) whether this is a real live tea party happening in real time, or something which Prufrock is recollecting while sitting alone in his apartment.
“In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo.” First of all, Michelangelo is a creative genius that Prufrock can never hope to equal. His “David” is the epitome of manly strength, the complete opposite of everything that Prufrock is. If the women are busy talking of Michelangelo, then Prufrock doesn’t have a chance. This is a source of frustration to him. Also, it is a source of frustration to Prufrock that these women have reduced Michelangelo to the level of something that you chit-chat about while flitting about a drawing room at a tea party. A modern-day equivalent might read something like, “In their SUVs the soccer moms come and go, talking on their cell phones about Michelangelo.”
Next we see the evening fog rolling in, moving through the city just like a cat. Now, almost every cat you’ve ever seen will march boldly into whatever space it considers its own, without any apparent regard for anyone or anything that may be present there. But this cat is different. This cat does not have the boldness to dare to come into the house; it just curls up around the outside and falls asleep. Kind of like Prufrock, who does not have the courage to enter into the life of the woman he desires and ask for her affection; he simply remains on the outside, paralyzed with indecision.
“And indeed there will be time”. This is an allusion to Andrew Marvell’s poem “To His Coy Mistress”, which opens with the line “Had we but world enough and time”. In the Marvell poem, that line says that the coy courtship games which the lady is playing would be fine if people lived forever. But people do not live forever. Time is marching steadily on, pushing us toward our death. And when we die, your beauty and virginity will all come to nothing. So let us hurry to consummate our love. Let us move so swiftly that time has to run to keep up with us.
But in the case of Prufrock, this line takes on an entirely different meaning. Prufrock says to himself that “there will be time”, and uses this as a justification for his state of indecision and paralysis. Prufrock feels the sense that time is marching on, pushing him toward his eventual death, but it does not inspire in him any sense of urgency to make a move for the affection of the lady he is interested in–if in fact he does have his eye on one lady in particular. Given what the poem says, this is highly debatable.
“To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet”. Functioning in the social life of Prufrock’s day required a high degree of hypocrisy; that you construct a face (presumably not your own real face) to meet the faces of those whom you meet. Everyone else was doing the same thing; they all had faces prepared to meet the faces that they met. This is clear because Eliot says “the faces that you meet”. If that was not the case, more than likely Eliot would have used a different word, i. e. “a face to meet the people that you meet”. As this stanza progresses, it seems as if Prufrock is working through his indecision, but at the beginning of the next stanza he returns to the place where he was at the beginning of this stanza: “And indeed there will be time”.
Well, we’ve still got more than half the poem left to cover. I can see that if I were to attempt to cover it all at once the length of this post would be quite unwieldy, so I will break it off here.
