The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (T.S. Eliot)l

[Angel]

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock


"S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse
A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma perciocche giammai di questo fondo
Non torno vivo alcun, s’i’odo il vero,
Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo. "***


LET us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats 5
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question … 10
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes, 15
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap, 20
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes; 25
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; 30
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

In the room the women come and go 35
Talking of Michelangelo.

And indeed there will be time
To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair— 40
[They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”]
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin—
[They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”]
Do I dare 45
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

For I have known them all already, known them all:—
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons, 50
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?

And I have known the eyes already, known them all— 55
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways? 60
And how should I presume?

And I have known the arms already, known them all—
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
[But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!]
It is perfume from a dress 65
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
And should I then presume?
And how should I begin?
. . . . .
Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets 70
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows?…

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
. . . . .
And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully! 75
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep … tired … or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis? 80
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head [grown slightly bald] brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet—and here’s no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker, 85
And in short, I was afraid.

And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while, 90
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”— 95
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say: “That is not what I meant at all.
That is not it, at all.”

And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while, 100
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—
And this, and so much more?—
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen: 105
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
“That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all.”110
. . . . .
No! I am 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, 115
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.

I grow old … I grow old … 120
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me. 125

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.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown 130
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

Thomas Stern Eliot
1910-11


*** "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." (Dante, Inferno 27.61-66) Guido da Montefeltro, shut up in his flame (the punishment given to false counselors), tells the shame of his evil life to Dante because he believes Dante will never return to earth to report it.

[Angel]

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

In his letter (1916) to Harriet Monroe, who published ‘Prufrock’ for the firsttime in her journal (Poetry), Eliot declares that ‘Prufrock’ is better than his other poems of 1909-1911. The poem, written when Eliot was only twenty-three, has all the characteristics of Eliot’s early vision. It adapts Laforgue’s self-irony to rather serious uses. Though influenced by Browning, it is not a perfect dramatic monologue, because there is no listener; it is a monologue or rather, a soliloquy, a dialogue of the mind with itself; it is a tragicomedy that is Jamesian in its verbal mannerisms. The ‘you’ of the poem is not a lady, a listener, or a companion. He is talking to himself in a mirror. ‘I’ and ‘You’ are two aspects of the same person, the public personality and the ego. The ego is interpreted through the physical body that is thin and weak. The physical body is judged by others as insignificant, and the ego is injured by the disgrace of the personality. The two destroy Prufrock and at the end both of them drown.

The epigraph, quoted from Dante’s Inferno, expands the context of Prufrock’s frustration. The speaker of the epigraph is Guido de Montefeltro, who is in hell, while wrapped in a flame that represents his duplicity and practicing guiles while living. Prufrock’s resemblance to Guido is ironic. He, like Guido, is in hell, but, unlike Guido, he has been too passive to practice evil. He resembles Guido in having abused intellect, indulging in daydreams and useless fantasy.

Prufrock is an aging failure, caught in a self-debate between the desire to live fully and the compulsion to conform to the social milieu. Eliot dramatizes the double conflict between character and environment, and between the warring elements within a single soul. Thus, Eliot creates a sense of emptiness and barrenness that leads to frustration caused by a chaotic culture. One feels the need for a vital purpose as well as order and wholeness of living suggested by the images drawn from nature, history, and art. But there is no definite and unified pattern of values set over against the aridity of Prufrock’s environment and the disorder of his own spirit.

‘Prufrock’ is not actually a ‘love song’ in the true sense of the term; it is a song of being divided between passion and timidity; it is a song of frustration and emotional conflict. It starts with a desire for action and moves to inaction. He lives in a world of daydream, in a world of a polite society in which a tea party is a significant event, while action is trivial. He is a sensitive man caught in a stupid world, in a rotting world, in which beauty exists but he is inhibited to seek it or, rather, he is too hesitant to achieve it.

Prufrock is an interesting tragic figure who is caught in a sense of defeated idealism and tortured by unsatisfied desire. He feels that he is unimportant to others. Therefore, he does not dare to seek love because he is afraid of disappointment. He feels that he may not find love or, if he does, it may not satisfy his needs. His tragic flaw is timidity that has made him incapable of any sort of action.

Prufrock is unheroic, too hesitant to solve his own problem, which seems slight to us but significant to him. He reminds us of one of the significant problems of modem times: no problem is trivial to the person who has it. His tragedy is that he desires something that is trivial to us, but it is so significant to him that he thinks he cannot achieve it. In this unreal world, he has allowed his ideal conception of women overshadow his real life. He has neither accepted nor rejected love; rather, he has created a false notion of it that has prevented him from taking any kind of action.

Prufrock realizes that he is a fool in his daydream, but he has no power to abandon the illusion or be content without physical love. He is not a young man to be sentimental; he is old enough to discover the emptiness of his illusion, but he has found nothing to replace it. His tragedy is that he still desires what he cannot achieve; he still loves to propose to a lady and be accepted, while he knows that he cannot succeed because of his age, his shyness, and even his name.

The poem begins with Prufrock’s dialogue of the mind with itself. He begins with a command to the self to accompany the physical him to a drawing room, where he is going to propose to a lady, any lady. He hopes that the visit may help him to escape from his physical and psychological seclusion that is oppressing him. But the image of the etherized patient appears. As soon as he comes to think of some action, his subjective impression of the evening pulls him down to bathos (sudden anticlimax): both the evening and Prufrock symbolize an anesthetized patient. He is too hesitant and hopeless to escape from his sense of isolation and inferiority. Eliot uses a number of images that suggest Prufrock’s longing to embrace life as well as his failure because of the discrepancy between wishes and facts, between his fruitless search and his achievement.

The lonely streets, stifling retreats, cheap hotel, and sawdust restaurants, reflecting Prufrock’s mood and position, lead to Prufrock’s overwhelming question. He is going to declare himself to a lady who is talking tediously and ignorantly of Michelangelo with whom, Prufrock thinks, he cannot compete. His imagining the lady’s superiority to himself and drawing wrong conclusion make him distract himself first by speculating on the yellow fog and then by putting off the question. As usual, he thinks of action and moves to inaction. He thinks that he has plenty of time to ‘prepare a face’ and meet a lady.

Prufrock postpones the question, but he keeps on thinking about it. The recurring thought of women leads him to speculating on their reaction to him, to the baldness in the middle of his hair, to his thin arms and legs. It is now that doubt appears and he asks himself whether he has the courage to ‘Disturb the universe’. The hyperbole, comparing proposal to disturbing the universe, illustrates Prufrock’s terrified self-consciousness, which leads to showing distaste for women and for their voices, eyes and arms. Once more he thinks of some formula of proposal that is humiliating to himself: ‘‘Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets ... .” He thinks of being questioned, pinned, and dissected by the lady. The thought terrifies him so much that he wishes he had been ‘a pair of ragged claws’.

Prufrock realizes the difficulty of action because of his own personal inadequacy and sexual impotency. At the beginning of the poem, he compares the fog to a cat that curls round the house and falls asleep. Now he talk of the drowsy evening that ‘sleeps so peacefully’ and malingers like his own etherized self. Such images suggest the difficulty of action. He feels that he does not have the strength to force the moment to its crisis.

The climax of Prufrock’s reverie is shaped when he compares himself to John the Baptist, though he denies having the dignity of a prophet. He confesses his own cowardice, falls to anticlimax, and realizes that it is too late for him to act. In fact, it has always been too late. The rest of the poem moves toward the image of drowning. He affirms the improbability of a favorable answer to his suit. Even if he were Lazarus, coming from the dead to ‘tell you all’, that ‘all’ would be the lady’s negative answer. Thus, he disclaims his pretensions. The only positive decision is to go down upon the seashore, part his hair to conceal his baldness, and risk the solaces of a peach, the only forbidden fruit he is likely to eat. Even the vision of the mermaids has been a delusion because they will not sing for him. It is at the end of the poem that he wakes up, though it is too late.

Dr. Amrollah Abjadian
English Literature, vol.2, Pg.486
SAMT Publication 1384/2005