Learning Paths » 5B Interacting
The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock is a modernist poem written by T.S. Eliot in the 1915. It belongs to the poems collection Prufrock and Others Observations. The composition is a dramatic monologue presenting a moment in which the narrator, who is the story’s protagonist too, expresses his own feelings and thoughts revealing information about him.
Starting from the title, the reader can recognize immediately two important elements: the main character and the topic.The central character of the poem is a bald, insecure middle-aged man. He is the narrator and the speaker at the same time.
He expresses his feelings of inadequacy and his fears connected to his love purposes; indeed he is unable to make a decision and to take risks, especially with women. As for the topic, the poem deals with Mr Prufrock's love for a lady, but it is the pretext to analyze the ineptitude of a man who is paralyzed by his fears.
Mr. Eliot opens the poem with a quotation taken from Dante's epic poem (27th chant of the “Inferno”)where Guido Da Montefeltro reveals his fault because he knows his secret will never leave Hell. Both Prufrock and Count Guido hide a secret: Count Guido fears infamy while Prufrock is afraid of the uncertainty of the situation he is living which makes him unable to risk.
In the first stanza the narrator invites the reader to walk with him through empty and squalid streets during the evening that is compared to an etherized patient. The imagery indicates the evening is listless and lifeless. Also feelings are not important in this society: the narrator refers to one-night cheap hotels, where people can have only a physical love.
The stanza is followed by two lines that form a reframe, typical of the ballads and of the songs. Some women are discussing the Renaissence artist Michelangelo in a room, but they want only to show their culture and in this way they represent the loss of the pure culture in a brutalized world ("go" rhymes with "Michelangelo" underlining its loss of importance).
In the second stanza the description of the evening goes on. It is a foggy evening and the haze moves like a cat. The language used refers to senses and creates a motionless and immaterial atmosphere. The scene, which seems to be represented by a close place, reflects Mr Prufrock personality, that is his indecision and his shyness. The first and the second verses of the stanza begin with the same words and in the three following verses there is an alliteration at the very beginning of them.
Time is the central theme of the third stanza. Mr Prufrock talks with himself and says there is time to do a lot of things, both to think and to act but, as a matter of fact, he uses his time only to reflect, to think.
After the reframe, the writer analyzes more deeply the theme of the paralysis and of the fear. Mr Prufrock is blocked, he asked himself if he have to act or not. Furthermore he doubts of himself and is afraid of people's opinion about him.
His rasignation emerges also in the following stanzas, that are linked by similar questions: "How should I presume?". The stanzas are characterized by many questions, which underline his indecision. Mr Prufrock thinks all people are the same.
Moreover he is unable to reveal all his sufference in a society that is based on conventional formulas. For these reasons he knows his decisions will not lead him to anything and so he loses the will to act and in particular to declare his love.
In the following stanza there is again a question. There is again the evening and Mr Prufrock probably is talking with the woman he loves: he is walking in a narrow street and he sees the smoke of men's pipes. They are alone like him and they are looking out of a window: they do not do anything important and they are living their life in a passive way, not acting like Mr Prufrock.
In the following stanza the narrator presents the evening as an asleep cat (as he does in the second stanza), smoothed by someone (probably by the fingers of the woman he loves). The evening is lying on the floor: it may symbolize the time Mr Prufrock is wasting in his life. In confirmation of this, in the following verses he presents his life, made only of stupid and useless things: tea, cakes and ice creams. But all of it makes a question in Prufrock's mind: after all this waste of time and trifling life, should he have the strenght to change his inner crysis (in the text "crysis" rimes with "ices")?
The narrator goes on wondering about his life. The reader finds again the elements that characterizes the upper society: tea, marmelade, porcelain that represent also the emptiness of their lives. Mr Prufrock wonders if it is possible, after all these, to confess his lover his problems. He compares himself with Lazarus, who came back from deads' world: the metaphor recalls the epigraph taken from Dante's Inferno because what Lazarus says (that is what Prufrock would like to confess) is also what Guido will do with Dante.
The paralysis is deeper analyzed: the character goes on analyzing himself and to do this he uses images from Shakespeare's Hamlet (it emerges that Mr Prufrock is a man of culture). Hamlet is the symbol of the adolescient who can not decide anything, but Prufrock does not compare himself to the young and royal Hamlet, who can decide something at the end, but he compares himself to an attendant lord: he does not do anything by himself and he wants someone tells him what to do. This figure is Polonius in Shakespeare's Hamlet: as Prufrock says, he is only the person who advices the prince, full of sentences and obtuse. He appears ridicoulous because of his inability to act and he becomes only one of the people that follows someone without reasoning.
Going on reading there is another reference to literature. Prufrock has heard the mermaids singing and this recalls Homer's Odissey; but, unlike Ulysses, Prufrock says that he is not sure they were singing for him as they have done for Ulysses, because he is not an hero. In the following verses the reader discovers Prufrock has followed the mermaids in their rooms in the sea: this underlines that Prufrock is not an hero like Ulysses (he did not followed them) but an anti-hero, subjected to fears and to weaknesses.
He says he has seen them in the sea and he compares the waves to hair. But they are only a dream and suddenly human voices bring Prufrock again in reality, that is compared to a sea where man drowns and can not face problems (in the text the colour of the seaweed, "brown", rhymes with "drown").