An Analysis of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot
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 etherized upon a table; Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets, The muttering retreats 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…. 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, 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, 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; 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; 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 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-- (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 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, 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-- 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? 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!) Is it perfume from a dress 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 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! 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? 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, 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, 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”-- 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, 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: 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.” 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, 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 … 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. 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 Till human voices wake us, and we drown. |
The epigraph is from Dante’s Inferno, Canto XXVII, in which a condemned spirit in hell confesses his sins. He says, “If I thought that I was speaking / to someone who would go back to the world, / this flame would shake no more. / But since nobody has ever / gone back alive from this place, if what I hear is true, / I answer you without fear of infamy.”
Etherised (etherized) means “anesthetized with ether, as before an operation”; in other words, “made insensitive to pain.” The etherized patient, for instance, reflects his paralysis (his inability to act) while the images of the city depict a certain lost loneliness. Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564) was a gifted Italian sculptor and painter 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. 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 face"). His social anxiety assumes more importance in the middle part of the poem. "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). 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). 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. 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 "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. 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. 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). 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. 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. 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 teaAfter 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. 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. 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 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. Prufrock 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. 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 seaTill 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. |