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SDuz - The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (analysis)
by - (2013-03-29)
Up to 5A - T.S.Eliot. Modernist Poetry and The Waste Land
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is a T. S. Eliot’s poem. From the title, an intelligent reader can make some hypothesis about the possible themes of the poem: it will be about a love story. Besides, the reader can notice the particular form of the text: Eliot uses the interior dramatic monologue, in which the character’s thoughts come into surface. The dramatic monologue is a monologue in which the poet commits his thoughts and his ideas to a speaking voice (in this case the speaking voice is Prufrock) called “dramatis personae” or "maschera". It allows to to take the distances from the reader and the character. The dramatic monologue permits to arrive in the most personal and secret part of the character. The love song is organized into an epigraph and nineteen stanzas. In particular the second and the fifth stanza are the same because they represent the refrain of the love song. Concerning the epigraph, the reader can notice that it is a part of Dante Alighieri’s Divina Commedia. In particular this part refers to the meeting between Guido da Montefeltro and Dante. It comes into surface a comparison between Prufrock and Guido da Montefeltro: all the characters tell to an imaginary address their inner thoughts. In the first part of the love song, Eliot provides to introduce the character: it is Alfred Prufrock, an insecure middle-aged man that has some difficulties in his life. This aspect is underlined by the atmosphere of suffering created by a specific lexical. Besides, the phrase used by Eliot in the first part (“let us go and make our visit”), underlines the aim of the narrator: to attract the reader into the story. In the second stanza there is the refrain that is present even in the fifth stanza: it refers to the crisis of Eliot’s society. In fact women are talking about important themes such as Michelangelo’s art but they haven’t a culture. In the third stanza Eliot continues to describe the society through negative aspects such as smoke and fog. In the fourth stanza the narrator focuses his attention to the time. In particular Prufrock’s fragility and indecision emerges and is showed to the reader. The theme of passing of time is dealt better, as this phrase demonstrates: “how his hair is growing thin; but how his arms and legs are thin”. The following stanzas are used by Eliot to provide to give some justification for the non acting, the indecision and inability of Prufrock. As a consequence, the intelligent reader understands that the entire song deals with anti-heroism. In the tenth stanza the theme of passing of time is represented. Eliot creates a list of actions that Prufrock hadn’t make in the past. Prufrock is afraid about this and he starts to reflect about the sense of life. The narrator focuses his attention to the word “life” and its meaning. Prufrock has lost the meaning of life and he should recuperate all that. In the last part of the love song, Eliot creates a comparison between Prufrock and the Prince Hamlet. The prince is ready to die, so he is an hero; instead Prufrock is an ordinary man of the 20th century that makes nothing. So Eliot wants to convey with the reader that his society has lost a lot of values and that the antique society was better. It emerges the negative opinion of Eliot about his time and his society. In the concluding lines of the poem, we can understand that Prufrock haven’t an ideal love. Besides, the last stanza is a description of the mermaids. So he creates a comparison between Homer's Ulysses and this song, but in the song there isn’t success. The conclusion of the song is that the lover isn’t a hero and that the poem deals about the figure of death, in contraposition to the reader’s expectations.