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.
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