T S Eliot’s Prufrock

TS Eliot's Prufrock

The ironic character of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," an early poem by T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) in the form of a dramatic monologue, is introduced in its title. Eliot is talking, through his speaker, about the absence of love, and the poem, so far from being a "song," is a meditation on the failure of romance. The opening image of evening (traditionally the time of love making) is disquieting, rather than consoling or seductive, and the evening "becomes a patient" (Spender 160): "When the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherized upon a table" (2-3). According to Berryman, with this line begins modern poetry (197). The urban location of the poem is confrontational instead of being alluring. Eliot, as a Modernist, sets his poem in a decayed cityscape, " a drab neighborhood of cheap hotels and restaurants, where Prufrock lives in solitary gloom" (Harlan 265).

The experience of Prufrock is set against that of unnamed "women" (13), collectively representing womankind. Their unattainable status is represented by their constant movement- they "come and go"- and their "polite chitchat about Michelangelo, who was a man of great creative energy, unlike Prufrock" (Harlan 265). We cannot imagine that they would listen to any love song by Prufrock, any more than they would find his name or his person attractive. "A man named J. Alfred Prufrock could hardly be expected to sing a love song; he sounds too well dressed" (Berryman 197)."J. Alfred Prufrock" indicates his formality, and his surname, in particular, indicates prudery. The powerful metaphor, a visual image of the "yellow fog" (15) in the fourth stanza, represents the jaundiced environment of the modern city, or Eliot's "infernal version of the forest of Arden" (Cervo 227). The image is ambiguous, however, because Eliot also makes it curiously attractive in the precision he uses in comparing the fog's motions to that of a cat who "[l]icked its tongue into the corners of the evening" (17). We also hear the fog, disquietingly, in that image, in the onomatopoeia of "licked."

Repetition of "time", in the following stanza, shows how the world of Prufrock's being is bound to temporality. "Prufrock speaks to his listeners as if they had come to visit him in some circle of unchanging hell where time has stopped and all action has become theoretical" (Miller 183). "Time" is repeated, several times, but it is not only its inescapable presence that Eliot is emphasizing, but also the triviality of the ways in which we use it; "the taking of a toast and tea" (34).

The melancholy of Prufrock's situation begins to emerge when he speaks of his experience of failures in love and life. The initial vitality of his invitation to go out into the evening is now replaced by images of the many evenings he has known, with their same disappointing conclusions. This meditation expands to include "mornings, afternoons" (50) - all of his life, in other words - which, in a famous image, he has "measured out with coffee spoons" (51). The emphasis on "I" in the poem, which we would expect in a dramatic monologue, is also typical of Romanticism, with its celebration of the ego.

Again, in this poem, Eliot is pointedly unromantic, as the "I" that is revealed is fit not for celebration but for ridicule, especially when Prufrock shows that he has been repeatedly diminished, even reduced to a laboratory specimen, by others' evaluation of him. It is little wonder that his self-confidence, the essential quality of a successful lover, has been shattered. It is women, of course, who have delivered this judgement on Prufrock. He finds them powerfully attractive, with "[a]rms that are braceleted and white and bare" (63), but we notice that this image - like the eyes, earlier, that "fix you in a formulated phrase" (56) - does not indicate a whole person, but rather a fragment of a human being, almost lifeless, like "[a]rms that lie along the table" (67).

We may be critical of Prufrock, but the objects of his desire are scarcely more desirable. The criticism broadens to encompass a society, even civilization, and Prufrock becomes a type of human being - modern urban man, perhaps - not merely himself. The poem is haunted by the refrain referring to the women. Prufrock is taking himself and us on a quest in pursuit of them, "Let us go then, you and I" (1). It is a Romantic image, but Prufrock's quest is frustrated by the modern setting and by his unheroic qualities. Prufrock's shortcomings as a potential lover and the singer of a