Analysis of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, by T.S. Eliot

The poem was written between 1910 and 1911, but published only in 1917. The title specifies two main issues of the lyric: it’s a love poem and regards a man named Prufrock. In particular the first part of the title seems to indicate a traditional theme (love) and a traditional structure (a song), but in the second part, the name “Prufrock” is far from being traditional and complicate to pronounce. “Prufrock” sounds as a name compound by “proof” and “rock”, reminding the idea of a “touchstone”: the stone used to prove the quality and purity of gold. Mr. Prufrock can be the “touchstone” of the contemporary society of Mr. Eliot.   

Indeed the poem is an examination of the thoughts of the protagonist, that can be considered  the prototype of a modern man. He has the main features of the modern man: he’s obscure, cultured, eloquent, neurotic and incapable to act and to conform to the society’s changes. In a word Prufrock is an anti-hero and the  symbol of the paralysis. He seems to address a potential lover, but Prufrock knows too much of life to “dare” an approach to the woman: in his mind he hears the comments of others people about his inadequacies.

At the beginning of the lyric Mr. Eliot quotes a part of  Dante’s Inferno (Canto XXVII, 61-66), where Dante meets Guido da Montefeltro, who asks the great poet to keep his words secret. Prufrock, as Guido, speaks freely as if he would speak just for himself, just to his conscience. The epigraph seems also to describes Eliot’s ideal listener: one who is as lost as Dante and as the speaker.

The “song” is arranged into stanzas of verses of different length. The rhyme is irregular, indeed sections of it may resemble free verse. Anyway the lyric seems carefully structured for its amalgamation of poetic forms.

One of the most noticeable formal characteristics of this work is the use of refrains, typical of traditional ballad form. In the case of this text the repetition helps Eliot to describe the consciousness of a modern, neurotic individual with his isolation. Another important formal feature is the use of fragments of sonnet form, particularly at the poem’s conclusion.

The reader can know Prufrock’s inward through a peculiar use of the stream of consciousness technique in the interior monologue form that mixes symbolic images and real views. The transition between the different thoughts are psychological rather than logical; for this reason free verse fits better.

The starting verse “Let us go then, you and I” of the first stanza is the beginning of the meaning’s search, the “quest” of modernist exponents. It’s a sort of invitation that the poet makes to his readers. The “quest” is through “half deserted streets”, “muttering retreats”, “cheap hotels” (real and urban places) but also in “tedious argument” and “overwhelming question” (unreal locations, places of the mind and unconscious). The poem has indeed different settings: a series of concrete physical locations (a cityscape and several interior) and many vague images conveying Prufrock’s emotional distance from the world.

It follows a refrain who repeats the rituality of contemporaneity and its vulgarity: women discuss above one of the greater artist “coming and going”. Noticeable is the reference to Michelangelo, the artist of vitality and beauty in opposition to immobility of Prufrock.   

The following stanzas are also marked by the use of repetition (“there will be time”, “Do I dare?”) which strengths the idea of inability of the protagonist who endlessly delays what he should do immediately. Prufrock thinks “there will be time” but the time is quickened, and he’s getting old (“with a bald spot in the middle of my hair”).

A list of Alfred’s experiences of life is arranged in the following stanzas (“Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons”, “And I have known the eyes already, known them all), underlying his firm and wide knowledge of women of his time.

Prufrock has measured his life with coffee spoons, as if had tried  to organize his time and life through again the repetitive action of the tea.  

But he also wasted his time in taking part to mundane life and to the stupid rituality of the upper class described in these stanzas.