The dry character of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” an early verse form by T.S. Eliot ( 1888-1965 ) in the signifier of a dramatic soliloquy, is introduced in its rubric. Eliot is speaking, through his talker, about the absence of love, and the verse form, so far from being a “ vocal,” is a speculation on the failure of love affair.
The opening image of flushing ( traditionally the clip of love devising ) is perturbing, instead than comforting or seductive, and the eventide becomes a patient”: “When the eventide is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherized upon a tabular array”. Harmonizing to Berryman, with this line begins modern poesy. The urban location of the verse form is confrontational alternatively of being tempting. Eliot, as a Modernist, sets his verse form in a rotten cityscape,” a drab vicinity of inexpensive hotels and eating houses, where Prufrock lives in lone somberness”.
The experience of Prufrock is set against that of nameless “adult females”, jointly stand foring womankind. Their unachievable position is represented by their changeless movement- they “come and travel” – and their “polite chitchat about Michelangelo, who was an adult male of great originative energy, unlike Prufrock”. We can non conceive of that they would listen to any love vocal by Prufrock, any more than they would happen his name or his individual attractive. “An adult male named J. Alfred Prufrock could barely be expected to sing a love vocal; he sounds excessively good appareled”. ”J. Alfred Prufrock” indicates his formality, and his family name, in peculiar, indicates primness.
The powerful metaphor, a ocular image of the “yellow obscure” in the 4th stanza, represents the icteric environment of the modern metropolis, or Eliot’s “infernal version of the wood of Arden”. The image is equivocal, nevertheless, because Eliot besides makes it oddly attractive in the preciseness he uses in comparing the fog’s gestures to that of a cat who “ fifty icked its lingua into the corners of the eventide”. We besides hear the fog, disquietingly, in that image, in the onomatopoeia of “licked.”
Repetition of “clip”, in the undermentioned stanza, shows how the universe of Prufrock’s being is bound to temporalty. “Prufrock speaks to his hearers as if they had come to see him in some circle of unchanging snake pit where clip has stopped and all action has become theoretical” . “Time” is repeated, several times, but it is non merely its ineluctable presence that Eliot is stressing, but besides the pettiness of the ways in which we use it ; “the pickings of a toast and tea”.
The melancholy of Prufrock ’ s state of affairs begins to emerge when he speaks of his experience of failures in love and life. The initial verve of his invitation to travel out into the eventide is now replaced by images of the many eventides he has known, with their same dissatisfactory decisions. This speculation expands to include “forenoons, afternoons” – all of his life, in other words – which, in a celebrated image, he has “measured out with java spoons ”.
The accent on “I” in the verse form, which we would anticipate in a dramatic soliloquy, is besides typical of Romanticism, with its jubilation of the self-importance. Again, in this verse form, Eliot is pointedly unromantic, as the “I” that is revealed is fit non for jubilation but for ridicule, particularly when Prufrock shows that he has been repeatedly diminished, even reduced to a research lab specimen, by others ’ rating of him. It is small admiration that his assurance, the indispensable quality of a successful lover, has been shattered.
It is adult females, of class, who have delivered this opinion on Prufrock. He finds them strongly attractive, with “arms that are braceleted and white and bare”, but we notice that this image – like the eyes, earlier, that “repair you in a formulated phrase” – does non bespeak a whole individual, but instead a fragment of a human being, about lifeless, like “arms that lie along the tabular array”. We may be critical of Prufrock, but the objects of his desire are barely more desirable. The unfavorable judgment broadens to embrace a society, even civilisation, and Prufrock becomes a type of human being – modern urban adult male, possibly – non simply himself.
The verse form is haunted by the chorus referring to the adult females. Prufrock is taking himself and us on a pursuit in chase of them, “Let us travel so, you and I”. It is a Romantic image, but Prufrock’s quest is frustrated by the modern scene and by his unheroic qualities. Prufrock’s defects as a possible lover and the vocalist of a love vocal by which to court his beloved are apparent in his physical characteristics, his apparels and his behaviour. “From an history of his apparels, we realize that Prufrock is non, as he at foremost seemed, a Rebel to his surroundings”. Unlike the typical Romantic, he is middle-aged “with a bald topographic point in the center of my hair”, and his apparels indicate a personality that is inhibited instead than passionate ; his necktie is “rich”, but “modest”. He is discerning, excessively, about what others – the adult female in peculiar – will do of him. “They will state: ‘But how his weaponries and legs are thin’”. After this description, there is the profound sarcasm of his inquiry: “Do I dare / Disturb the Universe”. The existence he is mentioning to is “his little societal circle of middle-class acquaintances”. We would non conceive of that he was capable of upseting anything.
He rehearses assorted colloquial schemes in the hope that, at last, he will happen the agencies to deviate the adult females from their “talking of Michelangelo”. These include images from the earlier portion of the verse form, such as “alone work forces in shirt-sleeves, tilting out of Windows”. However, even as he does so, Prufrock is cognizant of the insufficiency of his process and would go a crab, “ scuttling across the floors of soundless seas ” . This is another image in the verse form that is both upseting and queerly appealing. It is an image of flight.
In the concluding stanzas of the verse form, “Eliot brings to bear a Prufrock ’ s dilemma four figures out of the religious history of adult male; Michelangelo, John de Baptist, Lazarus and Hamlet,” as images of the disparity between what Prufrock is and what he would be – a Lazarus, or a Hamlet, for illustration, figures with penetrations into the ultimate inquiry of immortality and the epic calamity of being. At the bosom of this is Prufrock’s self-acknowledge: “No! I am non Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be”. Rather, “Prufrock sees himself as more like Polonius, the old sap from the same drama”. In Shakespeare, the Fool, although covering in bunk and absurdness, customarily sees the truth of a affair. The verse form has been a journey into Prufrock’s psychological science.
The shutting image of the verse form includes the chief subject of Prufrock’s relationship – or non-relationship – with adult females which, in itself, represents the modernist disillusion with Romanticism. Prufrock would get away to a fantasy fulfilment with the mermaids. However, even they are let downing: “I do non believe that they will sing to me”. Furthermore, commonplace and destructive world must be resumed as the dream subsides: “Till human voices wake us, and we drown”.
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is typical in its presentation of “modern disenchantment”, a figure who has been thwarted by life, both in footings of his ain psychological science and the environment of the 20th century barren universe, which Eliot was to handle in item in the celebrated verse form of that name.
References
- Berryman, John. “Prufrock’s Dilemma” The Freedom of the Poet. Farrar: Strauss, 1976: 270-78. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Dedria Bryfonski and Laurie Harris. Vol. 13. Detroit: Gale, 1982. 197-98.
- Cervo, Nathan A. “Eliot’s ‘ The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’”. Explicator. Vol. 57, Issue 4, Summer 1999: 227.
- Eliot, T.S. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Literature and the Writing Process. Elisabeth Mc Mahan, Susan X Day, and Robert Funk. 5th erectile dysfunction. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice, 1999. 577-80.
- Harlan, Judith, and Kathleen McCoy. English Literature from 1785. New York: Harper, 1992: 265-66.
- Miller, Vincent. “Eliot’s Submission to Time.” Sewance Review ( Summer 1976 ) : 448-64. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Dedria Bryfonski and Laurie Harris. Vol. 9. Detroit: Gale, 1978. 183-86.
- Spender, Stephan. “T.S. Eliot in His Poetry.” The Destructive Element. Cape, 1935. 132-52. Rpt. in Poetry Criticism. Ed. Robyn V. Young, Vol. 5. Detroit: Gale 1992. 159-62.
