The Love Song of J.
Alfred Prufrock
by T.S. Eliot1915
[Spiazzi, Tavella, Only Connect. Mudule F, Bologna,
Zanichelli, pp.F60-F61]
The poem is made up of four sections. The
first part (lines 1-70) establishes Prufrock's confinement and isolation in
time; the character is aware of his own situation and feels the emptiness of the
social events happening all around him. His succession of desires and fears, his
longing for beauty and company, are touched by irony and mingled with a mocking
sense that they will never be more than private pain. His hopes, aspirations and
fears are separated from his public life. On the one hand, he imagines the
possibility of life in heroic terms (line 28: "time to murder and to create'),
on the other hand, he recognises the futility of his daily life.
The second section is short (lines 70-74) but it contains the failure of
Prufrock's will to change his world.
The third section (lines 95-rro) emphasizes the contrast between Prufrock's
interior and exterior reality again. He cannot act because he fears that nothing
in the outer world will correspond to his perception of reality. The fourth and
final section opens with his acknowledgement of failure: 'No! I am not Prince
Hamlet..'; Hamlet, though torn by doubts, made a choice in the end; Prufrock,
troubled with social expectations, cannot do so. He cannot escape his life even
if it is dream and mechanical, he can only imagine a different existence: if he
sees no actual moment of vivid experience, he seems to hear something strange
and lovely, the mermaids'song (line 124), but at the end he is recalled to his
social world by human voices (line 131). A sense of drowning, that is the
realisation of his own death in life, takes possession of his being.
---------------------------------------------------
"Prufrock and Other Observations"
This poem was published in the volume Prufrock and other Observations in 1917. These early poems are 'observations', as the title suggests, of particular emotions, human feelings and reactions to a a specific kind of world. The characters are passive and aimless, and although they perceive the world around them, they are powerless to act. But if the characters are passive, the world around them is strangely active, penetrating into their consciousness.
The most distinctive influence on the poems in the 1917 collection are the thoughts of Henri Bergson. The world of these poetic compositions, like that presented by the French philosopher, is characterised by the split between inner and chronological time, and by the emphasis on memory. Time is a flux, an endless repetition of meaningless gestures; what remains is the record of events in one's memory, unified and evaluated by the mind which cannot see beyond it.
Meaning of
the epigraph
The epigraph from Dante's
Inferno
(xxvii, lines 61-66) refers to Count
Guido da Montefeltro,
a false counsellor condemned to live
eternally in a flame for his treacherous advice on earth to Pope
Boniface. Guido speaks
freely because he believes Dante
is like himself. one of the dead, who will
never return to the earth to report what he says.
This epigraph is not an essential part of the poem, but it conveys hints of its significance. Together with the title, it prepares the reader for the experience of the poem whose leading character embodies the theme of the alienation of modern man.
Style
The form of this poem is the dramatic monologue.
The metre employed is the iambic pentameter distorted into free verse and the tone used is mock-heroic, not only in the author's treatment of the character, but also even in Prufrock's evasion from himself.
The juxtaposition of poetic passages, for example the epigraph, with everyday phrases and descriptions is a device employed to highlight the banality of Prufrock's life and his search for something more lasting and meaningful.
The use of objective correlative replaces direct statements: objects become symbols of emotions and personal feelings; therefore a peculiar kind of imagery becomes the expression of a particular feeling.