The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock is poem written by T.S. Eliot published in June 1915. It presents a stream of consciousness in the form of a dramatic monologue in wich the protagonist speaking, Prufrock dialogues to his inner voice.
Right from the title, the text appears to tell about a love song. Even if it is not such, Eliot pays attention to the rythm and the sound.
As the poem deals with stream of Prufrock's feelings and ideas, Eliot uses "free verses". The text is no longer composed of stanzas like Victorian poetry, but it adopts the juxtapposition of scenes, each one connected by a costant refrain. Through this technique Eliot not only focuses the attention to Prufrock's psychology, but also he creates a drammatic effect.

There is an epigraph taken from Dante's Inferno. The inscription refers to the meeting between Dante and Guido da Montefeltro, condemned to the eighth circle of Hell. Like Guido, Prufrock believes his story remains hidden; for this reason he unfolds without fear. He's like the actor's soliloquy in which he expresses himself freely addressing his reflections to anyone but himself.

The poem begins with an apostrophe: "Let us go then, you and I". Through this exlamation Prufrock undertakers his journey, his search for a meaning (QUEST). However Alfrd has to overcome obtacles which are risen from his paralysis. The incapacity to act has been the Achilles heel of many famous, mostly male, literary characters. Shakespeare's Hamlet is the paragon of paralysis; unable to sort through his anxious mind, Hamlet makes a decisive action only at the end of "Hamlet". Eliot ironically updates Hamlet's paralysis to the modern world in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. Ironically, because Prufrock's paralysis is not caused by murder and the state of a corrupt kingdom, but whether he should "dare to eat a peach" (122) in front of high-society women.

Indeed, Prufrock's paralysis revolves around his social and sexual worries. Prufrock's emasculation shows up in a number of physical areas: "his arms and legs are thin" (44) and, notably, "his hair is growing thin" (41). The rest of the poem is a catalogue of Prufrock's inability to act; he does not, "after tea and cakes and ices, / Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis" (79-80).

Perhaps the central image of his anxiety is his being "pinned and wriggling on the wall" (58) under the gaze of women (exacerbated since the women's eyes, much like their "Arms that are braceleted and white and bare" [63], seem eerily disconnected from their bodies). Maybe Prufrock can't confess his feelings to a loved woman because of his fear about his action's consequences. By the end of the poem, Prufrock feels removed from the society of women, the "mermaids singing, each to each. / I do not think that they will sing to me" (124-125). Interestingly, Prufrock's obsession with his bald spot increases its ugly head here; the beautiful, vain mermaids comb the "white hair of the waves blown back" (127). As hair is a symbol of virility, Eliot suggests that Prufrock's paralysis is deeply fixed in psychosexual anxiety.

Prufrock's paralysis (see Prufrockian paralysis, above) roots itself in the poem's structure. Eliot deploys several refrains, such as "In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo" (13-14, 35-36) and "And would it have been worth it, after all" (87, 99), to underscore Prufrock's tendency to get stuck on a problem. Just when we believe Prufrock has walked through the "hundred visions and revisions" (33) and come to a conclusion, he echoes a line from the beginning of the stanza. For instance, the double "'at all'" from the woman's "'That is not it at all, / That is not what I meant, at all'" (109-110) provides the answer for Prufrock's original question of "And would it have been worth it, after all" (no, evidently).

The refrains and echoes indicate Prufrock's entrapment in the present tense, but Eliot notes his protagonist's other temporal afflictions. The swinging rhythm of the poem - at times rhymed for long stretches, often not - hints at a confusing, chaotic sense of time within Prufrock's head. The confusion establishes itself in the "And would it have been worth it, after all" line. By using the perfect conditional tense, Prufrock deludes himself into thinking he has made a decision and is now reviewing it.

This delusion only masks Prufrock's greater anxiety about the future and aging. Already characterized as having lost the luster of youth, the only thing Prufrock marches toward decisively is death. The poem's epigraph from Dante's Inferno casts a deathly pallor over the proceedings, and Prufrock seems already in his own nightmarish afterlife. Prufrock's allusions, however - "And indeed there will be time" (23) and "Would it have been worth while, / To have squeezed the universe into a ball" (90, 92) - reinforce his fixation on paralysis. He deludes himself into thinking he has plenty of time left, and thus does not need to act; death looms, though, however much he wants to deny it.