T.S. Eliot's Love Song of  J. Alfred Prufrock is the poem of
indecision.

The protagonist, Alfred
became old, crossing the middle age, without takes decisions about
his life, about his declaration of love to a neighbor, about the way
to choose. He is the triumph of indolence, paralysis: he is the king
of the realm of motionless existences.

Instead to win or
overcome difficulties of living, he decides to think perpetually but
he's not Hamlet, the prince of Denmark: his thoughts don't lead
him to action.

Moreover, Alfred seems to
be the archetype of anti-hero, a person who can't do anything at
all because he is simply unfit.

He loses his
self-assurance, letting the wind of futility and banality washes away
all his hopes: he becomes slave of traditions, rituals, actions who
repeats  over and over again, empty of awareness.

To feel better he props up
he is up to the situation.  However, his belief is not backed up by
praxis.

He's only wondering if
he should dare to face the seas of unknown, but the readers can
understand he does not mean to give himself an answer.

The reader notices that
Prufrock is walking with another mate, an alter-ego who he confesses
about his problems. That is not to say the protagonist, who embodies
a knight of Modern Age, is able to speak to somebody.

His speech is not, as
apparently, a conversation, but a soliloquy in which Alfred shows
himself to be weak, out of time, coward. All virtues that a true
knight should not have: a proud man as a cavalier should be
self-confidence, strong, merciful, not, as Alfred, a grotesque parody
of a human being.

In the background, a
somber, gloomy city, devastated to the fog, grey and yellow due to
lamplights, smog.

The city is
inhabited by vanishing figures, who's dragging themselves through
narrow streets or pedestrian subways: it is so far from the elegance
and beauty of  poetry.  It seems to be a modernist graveyard, not a
place to live.