Explication Essay

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock is a consummate artistic depiction of the Modernist
“zeitgeist” of T.S Eliot’s time, the characteristics (and often pathologies) of which Eliot
masterfully explores. It is no surprise then that the poem is permeated with a sense of
disillusionment and pessimism; satire and self-deprecation; hyper-activity and discontinuity; and
an almost schizotypal introversion which only serves to heighten Prufrock’s acute alienation.
Eliot’s portrayal of the “modern condition” however, is only one side of this poem, and certainly
not the side intended to be celebrated.

From the poem’s opening lines “Let us go then you and I…evening spread out against the sky”,
we can already detect a definitive Romantic undertone. This is achieved through the literally
romantic subject matter of “you and I” and “evening”, as well as the naturalistic subject matter
of “sky”. This utilization of Romantic themes (i.e. romantic love, the natural world) paired with
the use of a pleasant and unsurprising rhyme scheme (then/spread, I/sky) falsely assures the
reader that the poem is written in a Romantic paradigm. And it is this false assurance which
perfectly sets the reader up for the Modernist contrast to come.

After the opening lines, Eliot shatters our idyllic expectations by annexing the third line “like a
patient etherized upon a table” with the previous and very charming “…evening spread out
against the sky”. Aside from the morbid, clinical and “stainless steel” atmosphere aroused by the
subject matter of the third line, its rhyme characteristics also create a jarring effect. The clunky
partial rhyme of “etherized” with “sky” is noteworthy, but it is just a prelude to the utterly
unmusical, brick-wall ending of “table”. Such an abrupt ending creates for the reader the feeling
of having “walked off the edge of a cliff” - and indeed we have: right into the pit of restless
despair that is Prufrock, the polished embodiment of the “modern condition”.

Many of the words used in the first stanza after the opening lines evoke themes which are tightly
associated with modernity. Words such as “half-deserted streets”, “muttering”, “restless”, “one-
night cheap hotels”, “sawdust restaurants”, “tedious” and “insidious” all remind the reader of the
stereotypical urban condition. A condition epitomized by the individual who is worn-out by a
“tedious” and monotonous workload; lonely and alienated amidst the bustling yet spiritually void
“half-empty streets”; “restlessly” anxious of what others are “muttering” about him; and haunted
by the “insidious” worm of existential despair which he attempts to mask through hedonistic
indulgence (i.e. splurging on presumably bad quality oysters at a cheap “sawdust” restaurant and
having “one night” stands in “cheap hotels”) Though this is not quite the kind of person Prufrock
is - he is clearly a cultured gentleman who enjoys a more leisurely lifestyle - it is the milieu
Prufrock finds himself within, and therefore probably the milieu whose “condition” forms the
basis of Prufrock’s more “refined” affliction.

Aside from stylistic and thematic, the poem maintains little continuity: it lacks a clear linear
narrative. One moment the poem is presenting Prufrock’s reveries from the first-person, the next
moment it is in the third-person, speaking about subject-matter as unrelated as “yellow-fog”,
“Michelangelo”, “Prince Hamlet” and “mermaids”. The poem thus reads not like a speaker
telling a story to the reader, but like a fragmented series of monologues or “moments-in-
consciousness”. Eliot’s employment of this style not only reflects the Modernist suspicion of
teleology and “grand designs”, but instils the poem with an anxious, amphetamine-like
“restlessness”

While the structural features of the poem convey Prufrock’s “restlessness”, it is the content and
style of his speech which conveys another component of the “modern condition” - excessive
self-consciousness. Prufrock is acutely aware of the “bald spot” in his hair, of his thin “arms and
legs”, of his foolishness, and of his mortality. Worst of all, he is aware of his alienation from
others, of how he is frozen and enfeebled by the (presumed) ladies who “fix” him in their gaze,
and “pin” him against the wall. This kind of excessive self-consciousness is also at the root of
Prufrock’s compulsive self-doubt, plainly apparent in lines such as “How should I presume?”,
“do I dare?” and the highly satirical and un-Romantically prudent “do I dare eat a peach?”.

Prufrock clearly suffers from a kind of paralyzed impotence, largely induced by his near
schizotypal, hyper-reflexivity - a condition which we see in other Modernist works such as
Kafka’s The Trial, Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground and Brothers Karamazov, as well as
in the philosophical works of philosophers such as Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Nietzsche and
Kierkegaard. This is why I view Prufrock’s condition as merely emblematic of a more general
trend: the loss of spontaneity, self-assuredness, vitality, embodied grace and social intuitiveness
are all symptomatic of Modernism’s individualistic cynicism; hyper-cognitive introversion and
egocentrism; historically-conscious skepticism and prudence; and general loss of Romantic
“innocence”.

Aside from Modernism’s social-psychological pathologies, the poem also alludes to its cultural
ones; the “Michelangelo” motif is perhaps the best example of this. By contrasting the women’s
"coming and going” against the eternal grandeur of a figure such as Michelangelo, Eliot creates
the impression of a frivolous, socialite audience hyper-actively swanning about in the face of
divine beauty. This interpretation is also likely in that it implicitly invokes certain female-
stereotypes which were at the time (1915) still dominant: namely, that women couldn’t have a
“serious” appreciation for art, etc. Also noteworthy is how Eliot creates an ironic contrast
between the almost deified subject matter of “Michelangelo” and the (presumably intentional)
banal rhyme scheme of “come and go/Michelangelo”. This rhyme scheme synergizes with the
aforementioned “frivolous” characterization, delivering a potent indictment on not only the facile
pseudo-intellectualism of modern bourgeoise society, but also on how the Romantic notion of
“art as sacred” has been swallowed up by a kind of hyperactive commodity-mentality able to
infiltrate even the highest levels of culture.

If Prufrock was merely a depiction of the “modern condition”, it would not be quite so enjoyable.
What makes Prufrock so brilliant is how it finds respite from the tyranny of the Modernist
paradigm through interspersed moments of sincere sentimentalism, vivid reverie, and profound
melancholy - all characteristics that we find in Romanticism. The utter forlornness of lines such
as “I should have been a pair of ragged claws, scuttling across the floors of silent seas” and “I do
not think that they will sing to me”; as well as the captivating imagery and refined sentimentality
of lines like “the afternoon…smoothed by long fingers”; “the smoke that rises from the pipes of
lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows”; and “We have lingered in the chambers of
the sea, by sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown” all reveal a certain Romantic
sensibility in Eliot. This is not to say that Eliot was a Romantic, but that he was deeply aware of
the vital necessity of the Romantic “spirit”. Perhaps this poem was his attempt to integrate the
Romantic spirit into the drab “wasteland” of Modernism.