اطلاعیه

**Angel** · 10-18-2009, 05:02 PM

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

اطلاعیه

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

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

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