The Yellow Fog of "Prufrock"

Author(s): John Hakac

Source: The Bulletin of the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association, Vol. 26, No. 2
(Jun., 1972), pp. 52-54
Published by: Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1346502
Accessed: 24-04-2016 04:00 UTC

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted
digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about
JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and
extend access to The Bulletin of the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association

This content downloaded from 209.23.242.20 on Sun, 24 Apr 2016 04:00:15 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 THE YELLOW FOG OF "PRUFROCK"

JOHN HAKAC

The yellow fog stanza of eight lines in 'The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock" (11. 15-22) has been for many an ambiguous if not unmanageable
part of the poem since it appeared over fifty years ago. In attempting to relate
the passage to the implicit theme of Prufock's weakened faith in civilization
and his consequent inaction through timidity, dramatized by Eliot's emphasis
on Prufrock's enfeeblement of love, one often feels thwarted by the technique
of ellipsis and the thick psychological web of the poem. Noticeable too is the
limited help found in critical discussions. A surprising number of the criti-
cisms which offer analyses of the poem do not explicate at all the conspicuous
yellow fog passage.' Others imply by their characteristically brief and indeci-
sive treatment of the passage that one had better not dally too long on a dead-
end venture. According to Grover Smith, for example, Prufrock's observation
of the yellow fog is merely a way the man has of diverting himself for a few
moments from the prospect of a visit.2 For George Williamson, the passage
has more, but negative, importance. He sees the cat-fog image as suggestive
of a desire which ends in inertia.3 Williamson's assumption that the outcome
of the stanza's richly amorous emotional activity is inertia seems questionable.
For inertia is a condition marked by an inherent inactivity, and the flowing
motion of the passage, which rises to an energetic caper, calls for recuperation
as the normal response. Thus, for some the stanza may end not with inertia,
but with a credible fatigue and rest.
If one studies "Prufrock" with an eye for detecting negative and positive
values, it becomes apparent from a psychological viewpoint that the yellow
fog passage, far from being a cul-de-sac or an oversized fragment,4 is the
only section of the poem which is organically complete and which ends on a
note of positive satisfaction. It appears to contain an apprehensible and useful
essence with tenable connections to the entire poem. Prufrock gazes attentively
at the evening fog. He seems to have entered into a good mood for the
observation, detached from himself and almost objective about what he sees,
objective in the sense that none of the timidity and anxiety incipient in his
opening sally (11. 1-12) is present here. Subconsciously he associates the
cat-fog's provocative behavior with what he most desires: love. The stanza
can be read as a very normal, although subconscious and highly symbolic,

lThe studies of Leonard Unger, T. S. Eliot, Moments and Patterns (Minneapolis,

1956) and Eric Thompson, T. S. Elot, The Metaphysical Perspective (Carbondale, Ill.,
1963) are two examples.
2T. S. Eliot's Poetry and Plays (Chicago 1956), p. 18.
3Reader's Guide to T. S. Eliot, 2nd ed. (New York, 1966), p. 60.
4Representative of most critical judgment is Elizabeth Drew's implication, in T. S.
Eliot: The Design of His Poetry (New York, 1949), pp. 32-33, that it is one of the
subordinate details, a fragment, used for developing the "ugliness and squalor of the
common urban scene" with its "creeping, choking atmosphere of spiritual miasma."
52

This content downloaded from 209.23.242.20 on Sun, 24 Apr 2016 04:00:15 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 THE YELLOW FOG OF "PRUfIROCK" 53

description of the act of love.5 It is an animal, physical love. Earthy, as we

shall note later, is perhaps an even better word. Sexual desire of some force is
obviously not dead in the man.
Three distinct phases of love are traceable in this unique, self-contained
passage which stresses one aggressive and one passive partner. The fog,
likened by Prufrock to a yellow tom-cat,6 woos, experiences a climax, and
rests. The demonstrative rhetoric, remarkable for the break it represents in
the subdued tone of "Prufrock," gives the passage its affirmative value. No
other lines in the poem have the effective physical maneuvers and sexual
connotations of these. In the wooing phase (11. 15-20), the yellow cat-fog
"rubs its back," "rubs its muzzle," "licked its tongue," and "slipped by the
terrace." The consummation (1. 20) is achieved with the quick "made a
sudden leap," followed by the cozy rest phase (11. 21-22):

And seeing that it was a soft October night,

Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

As a veiled expression of graceful love-making, the cat-fog drama is care-

fully located in the poem. Before and after it come the two memorable
references to real women and Michelangelo. The first reference to women
(11. 13-14), while conveying a mild suggestion of their aloofness from
Prufrock, apparently triggers in his mind a process of psychological association
which leads immediately into the yellow-fog, physical-love scene subconscious-
ly identified. The second reference (11. 35-36), preceded by a 12-line verse
paragraph with repeated hints of a sweeping procrastination,7 establishes
specifically for the first time in the poem what was latent in the earlier mention
of women: they are distant and elusive for Prufrock.8 The reader is coming
to realize more and more clearly that Prufrock is indeed a troubled man
who makes an awkward entrance in the bleak dozen lines which begin the
poem. It is now possible to keep in mind as one continues moving forward
through the monologue that love is quite likely the root of his difficulty.
The placement of a symbolic view of happy love very early in the poem is
functional in another way also. From this point on, this vision of healthy love
operates as the poem's informing idea. It is the revealing clue, visibly
suspended, of what is missing in Prufrock, serving the reader as an ironic
reminder of good love as he struggles sympathetically to understand the long
and obscure revelation of Prufrock's tortured incapacity for such good love
which follows to the end.

5Other sections of tie poem lave amorous contexts (see 11. 62-69 and 87-90 for good
illustrations), but a case can be made that every one except the yellow fog section lacks
ardor and has evidence of various kinds of inhibition and failure.
6Note the double use of yellow as a warm color in 11. 15-16.
7Note how deftly Prufrock puts off the "yellow smoke" in 11. 23-25.
80ne may therefore question as perhaps too simplistic the assertion, so common as to
be popular, that identical statements of women talking about Michelanglo are a sign of
trivia in Prufrock's life.

This content downloaded from 209.23.242.20 on Sun, 24 Apr 2016 04:00:15 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
54 .RMMLA BULLETIN JUNE 1972

The final scene in the poem is a romantic reverie of ideal love with
mermaids. It is one of the few ways left, inevitably bound to frustration
though it is, for Prufrock to utilize the emotion of desire which he has not
outlived and which he finds, through disillusion and despair, impossible to
fulfill in social life. His loveless predicament has now been defined as both
complex and hopeless. A real, earthy love ("Let fall upon its back the soot
that falls from chimneys," 1. 19) and a gratifying ideal love ("Till human
voices wake us and we drown," 1. 131) are beyond him.
Eliot seems to have provided these subtle, widely spaced contrasting motifs
of real love and ideal love as impossibilities in order to intensify Prufrock's
agony of no-love. They demonstrate full circle the fact that Prufrock's severe
debilitation of love through timidity and a self-acknowledged fear is really
tragic. He cannot free himself, even under the goading threat of precious
time, to take one of man's sublime gambles of striving to impose upon the
vast chaos of existence the order of a personal love in a small, coherent
world of his own creation; Prufrock will never try to squeeze "the universe
into a ball" (1. 92). Against the symbolic drama of adult love which he
subconsciously sees performed with effortless harmony in nature, and against
his reverie of an ideal love with mermaids, pictured as pleasant but short-lived
escapism, Prufrock stands by comparison painfully tense and abnormal in
daily life. Couched in the Dantean epigraph of the poem is a shadowy outline
of Prufrock himself: He is, like Guido de Montefeltro in Canto XXVII of
the Inferno, a figure of living death.
Without departing from psychology and sex, which are always recognized
as basic material in Eliot's early poetry, but finding in them a structural and
thematic depth not sounded before, I have endeavored to show that the
fairly large yellow fog section means more and consequently does a great deal
more in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" than has yet been proposed.
It clarifies and intensifies the theme of Prufrock's failure.

Mr. Hakac (Ph.D., University of Texas) is an Assistant Professor at Arizonu

State University and serves also on the editorial board of Western Review.
His publications include articles on Twain and Fitzgerald in Western
American Literature.

This content downloaded from 209.23.242.20 on Sun, 24 Apr 2016 04:00:15 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms