ClassicNote on The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

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Lines 1-36 Summary:

J. Alfred Prufrock, a presumably middle-aged, intellectual, indecisive man, invites the reader along with him through the modern city. He describes the street scene and notes a social gathering of women discussing Renaissance artist Michelangelo. He describes yellow smoke and fog outside the house of the gathering, and keeps insisting that there will be time to do many things in the social world.

Analysis:

The title of the poem is Eliot's first hint that this is not a traditional love poem at all. "J. Alfred Prufrock" is a farcical name, and Eliot wanted the subliminal connotation of a "prude" in a "frock." (The original title was "Prufrock Among the Women.") This emasculation contributes to a number of themes Eliot will explore revolving around paralysis and heroism, but the name also has personal meaning for Eliot. He wrote the poem in 1909 while a graduate student at Harvard (though he revised it over the next few years, eventually publishing it in 1915 and in book form in 1917), and at the time he signed his name as "T. Stearns Eliot."

While it would appear, then, that T. Stearns Eliot was using J. Alfred Prufrock as an alter ego to explore his own emotions, this is not the case. Superficial differences aside - Eliot was a young man in 1909, while Prufrock is balding and probably middle-aged - Eliot disdained poetry that focused on the poet himself. He wrote in his essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent" that the "progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality." He crystallized his ideas about how to achieve this extinction of personality in another essay, "Hamlet and His Problems": "The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an 'objective correlative'; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events, which shall be the formula of that particular emotion." Simply put, the objective correlative - a tangible, concrete thing - assumes the emotional significance in a work of art; Eliot largely does away with abstract emotional ruminations. The examples and ramifications of the objective correlative in "Prufrock" will be discussed later.

Eliot first achieves the extinction of his personality by setting "Prufrock" in the poetic form of a dramatic monologue. In this form, the speaker addresses another person and the reader plays the part of the silent listener; often the dramatic monologue is freighted with irony, as the speaker is partially unaware of what he reveals.

The dramatic monologue fell out of fashion in 20th-century Modernism after its 19th-century Victorian invention. Eliot was a great believer in the historical value of art; in "Tradition and the Individual Talent," he argued that "the poet must develop or procure the consciousness of the past," especially the literary past. The epigraph is a quotation from Dante's Inferno (27.61-66), and translates: "If I thought that my reply would be to one who would ever return to the world, this flame would stay without further movement; but since none has ever returned alive from this depth, if what I hear is true, I answer you without fear of infamy." The speaker, Guido da Montefeltro, imprisoned in a flame in Hell, relates his shameful, evil life to Dante only because he thinks Dante will never go back to earth and repeat it.

Before we analyze the Dante quote, it is important to note that Eliot's brand of Modernist poetry sought to revive the literary past, as he argued for in "Tradition and the Individual Talent." His poetry, including "Prufrock," is peppered with allusions to the Greeks, Shakespeare, the Metaphysicals, and more. Eliot does not neglect the modern, however; it is often front and center, usually with unfavorable comparisons to the past.

The unpleasant modern world is where "Prufrock" begins. Prufrock, much like da Montefeltro in The Inferno, is confined to Hell; Prufrock's, however, is on earth, in a lonely, alienating city. The images of the city are sterile and deathly; the night sky looks "Like a patient etherized upon a table" (3), while down below barren "half-deserted streets" (4) reveal "one-night cheap hotels / And sawdust restaurants" (6-7). The use of enjambment, the running over of lines, further conveys the labyrinthine spatiality of the city. Although Eliot does not explore the sterility of the modern world as deeply here as he does in "The Wasteland" (1922), the images are undeniably bleak and empty. Often overlooked in the opening salvo is that Prufrock's imagery progresses from the general to the specific and, tellingly, from the elevated to the low. We go from a general look at the skyline to the streets to a hotel room to sawdust-covered floors in restaurants. This debasement continues throughout the poem, both literally in the verticality of the images and figuratively in their emotional associations for Prufrock.

Indeed, emotional associations are key, since Eliot deploys the objective correlative technique throughout the poem rather than dwell abstractly on Prufrock's feelings. The above images all speak to some part of Prufrock's personality. The etherized patient, for instance, reflects his paralysis (his inability to act) while the images of the city depict a certain lost loneliness. The objective correlative switches to the "yellow fog that rubs its back upon the windowpanes" (14) in the second stanza. Although Eliot said the fog was suggestive of the factory smoke from his hometown St. Louis, the associations with a cat are obvious. Though Eliot was arguably the greatest lover of cats ever to write poetry (he wrote a number of poems on them, and the musical "Cats" is based on Eliot's work), here the feline correlation seems undesirable.

The fog/cat seems to be looking in on the roomful of fashionable women "talking of Michelangelo" (13). Unable to enter, it lingers pathetically on the outside of the house, and we can imagine Prufrock avoiding, yet desiring, physical contact in much the same way (albeit with far less agility). Eliot again uses an image of physical debasement to explore Prufrock's self-pitying state; the cat goes down from the high windowpanes to the "corners of the evening" (17) to the "pools that stand in drains" (18), lets soot from the high chimneys fall on its back (since it is lower down than the chimneys), then leaps from the terrace to the ground. While Eliot appreciated the dignity of cats, this particular soot-blackened cat does not seem so dignified. Rather, the cat appears weak, non-confrontational, and afraid to enter the house. Moreover, Prufrock's prude-in-a-frock effeminacy emerges through the cat, as felines generally have feminine associations.

Regardless of what one takes from these images, the bewildering collage points to another technique Eliot and the Modernists pioneered: fragmentation. The Modernists felt their writing should mirror their fractured and chaotic world. Fragmentation seems to imply a disordered lack of meaning, but the Modernists resisted this instinct and suggested that meaning could be excavated from the ruins. Just as we can make sense of the seemingly chaotic combination of a 14th-century Dante allusion and a 20th-century dramatic monologue, we can draw meaning from the rapid-fire metropolitan montage Prufrock paints.

Images and allusions are not the only fragmented features of "Prufrock." The rhythm of the lines is deliberately irregular. At times in unrhymed free verse, Eliot occasionally rhymes for long stretches (lines 4-12) and then not at all; his rhyme scheme itself seems like the confusing "Streets that follow like a tedious argument" (8). He also twice uses the refrain of "In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo" (13-14, 35-36), and often begins lines with the word "And" (7, 23, 29 32, 33). As the word found in three of these lines implies - "time" (23, 29, 32) - the repetitions have something to do with Prufrock's relationship with time.

Prufrock indecisively cycles around even the smallest of concerns: "And time yet for a hundred indecisions, / And for a hundred visions and revisions, / Before the taking of a toast and tea" (32-34). He seems rooted in the present tense and this, according to Eliot and most Modernists, is an unhealthy approach to time. The opening image of the evening "spread out" (2) against the sky is an allusion to a metaphor frequently used in turn-of-the-century French philosopher Henri Bergson's work Time and Free Will (1889). Bergson was a great influence on Eliot; the latter attended the philosopher's lectures in Paris in 1910 and was influenced by his theories on consciousness. In Time and Free Will, Bergson argues that time is a single, continuous, and flowing "durée," or duration, rather than a succession of discrete steps with distinct tenses.

The only way to achieve this mental sense of duration, Bergson maintains, is through direct intuition rather than indirect analysis. While much New Age philosophy and theory has hijacked this idea - that one should feel rather than think is an appealing concept - the damaging effects to Prufrock are evident. He is clearly a thinker, not a feeler, and his indecisive thoughts contribute directly to his paralysis, perhaps the most important theme in the poem. As the image of the cat unable to penetrate the house suggests, Prufrock cannot make a decision and act on it. Instead of a flowing duration that integrates all of time, he is imprisoned in the present.

Prufrock's anxiety is rooted in the social world. Not only is he afraid to confront the woman talking of Michelangelo (whose most famous sculpture, David, is the epitome of masculine beauty, a daunting prospect for the flaccid Prufrock), he seems intimidated by the social posturing he must engage in:

There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
(26-29)

The "works and days of hands" is a reference to 8th-century B.C. Greek poet Hesiod's poem about the farming year, "Works and Days." Prufrock seems to resent the divergence between the blistered hands of hard-working farmers and the smooth ones of social players, just as he dislikes the masks people wear in the social arena ("To prepare a faceŠ"). His social anxiety assumes more importance in the middle part of the poem.

Lines 37-86 Summary:

Prufrock agonizes over his social actions, worrying over how others will see him. He thinks about women's arms and perfume, but does not know how to act. He walks through the streets and watches lonely men leaning out their windows. The day passes at a social engagement but he cannot muster the strength to act, and he admits that he is afraid.

Analysis:

Prufrock's social paralysis is diagnosed in these six stanzas. The smallest action - descending stairs - is occasion for magnified self-scrutiny and the fear that he will "Disturb the universe" (46). He continues asking himself questions about how to comport himself, but admits he will reverse these decisions soon. His inaction is constantly tied to the social world: "Should I, after tea and cakes and ices, / Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?" (79-80) The somewhat silly rhyme here underscores the absurdity of Prufrock's concerns.

Yet Eliot fleshes out Prufrock's character and makes his worries, however trivial, human. Prufrock twice refers to his balding head, describes his plain, middle-aged clothing, and draws us into his point-of-view of the social world. His eye is specific in its observation: "Arms that are braceleted and white and bare / (But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!)" (63-64) Although the first line is an allusion to the line "A bracelet of bright hair about the bone" from John Donne's poem "The Relic," a line Eliot admires for its sharp contrast in his essay "The Metaphysical Poets" (1921), the specificity of Prufrock's eye shows more the influence of the 19th-century French Symbolists, such as Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Stephene Mallarme, and particularly Jules Laforgue. (In fact, Eliot's repeating line about Michelangelo is a somewhat parodic nod to a similar line by Laforgue about the masters of the Sienne school.) The Symbolists butted heads with the Realist movement, believing life could be represented only by symbols, however confusing or chaotic. Eliot's objective correlative serves a similar purpose, expressing Prufrock's emotional life through concrete, oft-elusive symbols.

As detailed as Prufrock's eye is, he feels the effects of the penetrating social gaze far more deeply:

And I have known the eyes already, known them all -
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall
(55-58)


"Sprawling on a pin" refers to the practice of pinning insect specimens for study, suggesting Prufrock feels similarly scrutinized, but the key here is Prufrock's discussion of eyes. As with his catalogue of the "Arms that are braceleted and white and bare," Prufrock isolates the body part from the rest of the body. Detached, the eyes multiply in power; they dominate both the room and the bodies of those who look at Prufrock.

Anxiety is foremost a concern with the future, and Prufrock continues to show his inability to advance in time. Of the six stanzas here, four begin with "And" (37, 55, 62, 75) while five lines at the end of different stanzas do (61, 68-69, 85-86), suggesting a repetitive, inescapable present tense. His mental logic conforms to a similar pattern; the "sprawling on a pin" lines make tiny steps forward ("And when..."/"When I am..."/"Then how..." [57-59]) rather than large leaps. Prufrock's refrain "And indeed there will be time" (23, 37) is an allusion to Metaphysical poet Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress" ("Had we but world enough, and time" [1]), in which the speaker urges his lady to speed up their courtship. As with most of Eliot's allusions in "Prufrock," the Marvell reference is ironic. Rather than hurrying his lady, Prufrock makes excuses for himself; he assures himself there will be time to act, although his repetitive, paralytic nature has so far belied that. The line also contains a possible pun; "indeed" can be read as "in deed," another reference to Prufrock's inability to act (to do a deed). A further irony unfolds in Prufrock's use of the word "presume." While the Latinate root of "presume" means "to anticipate," something Prufrock spends much time doing, its main English meaning is "to undertake without leave or clear justification," a boldness Prufrock surely lacks.

Not only is Prufrock paralyzed in the present, but he seems to have a disordered sense of time. He describes the "evenings, mornings, afternoons" (50), and the odd order gives us pause. While it primarily describes a cycle from night to the next day, reinforcing the idea of repetition, its abrupt switch from "evenings" to "mornings" echoes Eliot's images of vertical descent present in the first three stanzas. He resumes the vertical descent motif in this section of the poem as well; Prufrock descends the stairs, and as he watches smoke rising from pipes and lonely men "leaning out windows" (72) just below, he feels he "should have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas" (73-74). This final alliterative image of debasement (the third animal association for Prufrock after the cat and insect connections) paints a pathetic portrait of Prufrock, but the suggestion of a crab is perhaps an allusion to Shakespeare's "Hamlet," in which Hamlet mocks Polonius (Eliot later explicitly references "Hamlet," making this more plausible): "for yourself, sir, should be old as I am, if, like a crab, you could go backward" (2.2.205-206).

Perhaps, then, Prufrock's propensity to move backwards and downwards is suggestive of his nearness to death, of his backpedaling down into Hell. The Dante epigraph casts a deathly pallor over the entire poem, and Prufrock himself sees "the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker" (85). While he says in the next line "in short, I was afraid" (86) in reference to his fear of social action, he may also be referring to this deathly figure awaiting him.

Lines 87-131 Summary:

Prufrock wonders if, after various social gestures, it would have been worthwhile to act decisively if it resulted in a woman's rejection of him. He thinks he is not a Prince Hamlet figure, but a secondary character in life. Worried over growing old, he adopts the fashions of youth. By the beach, he sees images of mermaids singing and swimming.

Analysis:

The movement in the final section of the poem swings from fairly concrete, realistic scenes from the social world - "After the cups, the marmalade, the teaŠAfter the novels, and the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor" (88, 102) - to fantastic images of mermaids "riding seaward on the waves / Combing the white hair of the waves blown back" (126-127). Eliot's objective correlative grows more vague; what exactly does Prufrock feel here? Perhaps Prufrock himself is unsure: "It is impossible to say just what I mean! / But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen" (104-105). His own inarticulacy results in the magic lantern's wild kaleidoscopic imagery of teacups and mermaids; aside from desperation and loneliness, confusion is one of the objective correlative's main emotional associations.

But Prufrock shows a wise self-regard when he admits he is

not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;  (111-116)


Hamlet, Shakespeare's famous tragic hero from the play of the same name, is literature's other great indecisive man. Hamlet waffles between wanting to kill his stepfather and holding off for a variety of reasons. The allusion, then, is somewhat ironic, since Prufrock is not even as decisive as Hamlet is. Instead, he is more like the doddering Polonius of Hamlet (the "for you yourself, sir" quote from Hamlet 2.2.205-206, if the "ragged claws" [73] line alludes to it, is spoken by Hamlet to Polonius), or the conventional Shakespearean "Fool" (119). Prufrock is the second-in-command at best, and he comes off as a mock-hero; even the absence of an "I" preceding "Am an attendant lord" bespeaks his lack of ego. The numerous caesurae (pauses) from commas and semicolons in the stanza underscore Prufrock's stagnation and paralysis.

The only thing in Prufrock's life not paralyzed is time; it marches on, and Prufrock laments "I grow old . . . I grow old . . . / I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled" (121). The rolled trouser, a popular bohemian style at the time, is a pathetic attempt to ward off death. While he continues to be anxious about the future, Prufrock now seems to regard the future, paradoxically, from a future standpoint. His refrain of "And would it have been worth it, after all" (87, 99) places his actions in the perfect conditional tense. It is as though he is reviewing actions he has yet to take. Either time has accelerated his aging process, or this look to the past is a way for Prufrock to delude himself into thinking he has made some decisive progress in life.

Previously, Prufrock wondered if he should "dare / Disturb the universe" (45-46) and squeeze "the universe into a ball" (92). The latter is a reference to Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress": "Let us roll all our strength and all / Our sweetness up into one ball, / And tear our pleasures with rough strife / Thorough the iron gates of life" (41-44). Marvell urges his lady to engage in sex with him, as death draws ever closer and their time is running out.

Prufrock, on the other hand, knows he is going to die soon but he still cannot even "dare to eat a peach" (122). While Eliot's main intent is to trivialize Prufrock's anxieties - a simple piece of fruit confounds him - the peach has a few other possible meanings. First, it is the Chinese symbol for marriage and immortality, two things Prufrock desires. Moreover, the peach, through shape and texture, has long been a symbol for female genitalia. Prufrock's anxiety about eating a peach, then, has much to do with his feelings of sexual inadequacy, his worry that his balding head and thin physique earn him the scorn of women.

Accordingly, Prufrock immediately switches his attention to the mermaids "singing, each to each" (124) - the society of women who ignore him. The elusive images perhaps have more cohesion than on first glance:

 

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
(126-128)


Prufrock has just wondered "Shall I part my hair behind?" (122), and previously he has agonized over his bald spot, turned his keen eye to the women's arms "downed with light brown hair!" (64), and agonized over eating a fuzzy peach. Mermaids are conventionally depicted combing their hair with a mirror, so as symbols of vanity and lush beauty - "wreathed with seaweed red and brown" (130), they possess even more artificial hair - they threaten Prufrock (whose thinning hair is perhaps now a salt-and-pepper mixture of "white and black" and no longer "red and brown").

When Prufrock finishes the poem by pronouncing "We have lingered in the chambers of the sea "Till human voices wake us, and we drown" (129, 131), he completes the vertical descent Eliot has been deploying throughout the poem. He has plunged into his own Dantesque underworld and, through the "We" pronoun, forces us to accompany him - hoping, like da Montefeltro from the epigraph, that we will not be able to return to the mermaids on top and shame him by repeating his story.

The concluding two three-line stanzas act as a sestet (six lines). Although the rhyme scheme differs (here it is abbcdd), Petrarchan sonnets complement the opening octet (first eight lines) with a sestet. This is Eliot's final mock-allusion to yet another Renaissance artist (after Dante and Michelangelo). Petrarch unrequitedly mooned after his love, Laura, but Prufrock, whose name sounds much like Petrarch's, does not even have an unattainable ideal love. He has unattainable, frustrated, paralyzed desire for all women who reject him; they are all inaccessible, and any reminder of the social world ("human voices") drowns him - and, he hopes, his reader-as-Dante - deeper in his watery Hell.