'The Love Song of J.

Alfred Prufrock': fragmentation, interruption and fog

Article written Roz Kaveney

by:
Themes: Capturing and creating the modern, Literature 1900–1950
Published: 25 May 2016
Roz Kaveney considers 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' as a poem that both grapples
with the modern world and looks back to the work of writers such as Dante, Robert
Browning, Henry James and Stéphane Mallarmé.
Modernism in the arts was less a moment than a movement – a movement away from modes of
expression that had come to seem worn out as much as a movement towards something
specifically new. It is easier to see this in retrospect than it was at the time. The great artists of
the modernist movement almost never produced its canonical masterpieces on a first attempt.
Instead, they were preceded by something that was almost new, almost fresh, yet still felt for the
most part as if were part of late romanticism, Impressionism or Art Nouveau. Of course there are
precise moments – the moment in Schoenberg's Second String Quartet when the music abandons
tonality altogether and a soprano sings of 'the air of other planets'; or Picasso's Demoiselle's
D'Avignon where the prettiness of the acrobats and lovers of his blue and pink periods is
abandoned for something at once harsh, archaic and foreign. And of course, there is Eliot's The
Waste Land...

Looking forwards and backwards

Before The Waste Land, however, there was ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, a poem
which looks forwards and backwards – backwards all the way to Dante, whom Eliot quotes
extensively in the epigraph, and to the poetry of Mallarmé and Robert Browning – both of whom
are best remembered for this kind of character-revealing monologue. It also looks backwards to
then comparatively recent prose fiction, to the novellas of Henry James and HG Wells, and
forwards to Eliot's future career and to what he feared becoming if he were not a poet. Eliot's
parents hoped that he would return to the USA, perhaps to a respectable career as a university
teacher; they were not at all keen on the idea of his becoming a poet and threatened to limit his
access to family money.

Eliot's mother was a poet, writing deeply banal religious poetry – but this was a supplement to
her life as wife and parent, not a career. Her poems were celebrations of strictness and mission,
featuring saints, martyrs and preachers. Charlotte Eliot would have read Eliot’s early poems, and
would have found 'Prufrock' vaguely insulting to the aesthetic pretensions of her class (‘In the
room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo’). Further, at around the same time that
'Prufrock' was published in the journal Poetry, he entered into his doomed marriage with
Vivienne, a woman of whom his parents disapproved even before meeting her.

A fragmentary cityscape

Technically, ‘Prufrock’ is a free-flowing rhapsodic poem whose metre varies but whose essential
pulse is iambic pentameters. It is a dramatic monologue – a poem in the form of a narrative by
an imagined person, in which the speaker inadvertently reveals aspects of their character while
describing a particular situation. It is as ironic and subtextual as Browning poems like ‘My Last
Duchess’, in that Prufrock reveals to his hearer perhaps rather more even than his confession. It
also resembles the poetry of Mallarmé, particularly ‘Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun’, in its
dreaminess and its inability to stay entirely on the point from moment to moment, establishing
its overall portrayal by intense fragments – it is not just an Impressionist poem, but a pointillist
one, like Seurat in painting or the preludes of Debussy in music. Like Mallarmé’s half-awake
faun, Prufrock inhabits a fractured cityscape that reflects not only his own lack of certainty and
purpose, but by extension that of the entire modern world. It is not only he that seems half-asleep
– none of the people he observes seem fully conscious.

Its opening lines and image – 'Let us go then you and I, / When the evening lies stretched out
against the sky / Like a patient etherised upon a table;' – indicate with clear deliberation that
from now on poetics will not necessarily be restricted to the beautiful. Interestingly, a much later
attempt to create a new language – William Gibson's manifesto/novel for
cyberpunk, Neuromancer – imitates Eliot in this: 'The sky above the port was the color of
television tuned, to a dead channel'.

Rhyme and interruption

Eliot uses intermittent rhymes, sometimes couplets, sometimes strings of three rhyming lines.
These sometimes hold a section of the poem in an expressive sweep that will then be broken by a
strong statement, sometimes for a deliberate bathos that undercuts any sense of Prufrock as a
tragic figure: 'I grow old...I grow old... / I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.' Yet
some of the most memorable lines – deliberate interruptions of the flow of Prufrock's thought –
are completely outside the main flow of rhyme, while having internal rhymes of their own: 'I
should have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.'

Time and ageing

‘Prufrock’ is a poem about time and ageing: 'Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons. / I
have measured out my life in coffee spoons.' Prufrock is worried that the women he pursues at
bourgeois parties will notice that he is losing his hair or speculate on his health. from an early
stage in his life Eliot talked of himself as old – later on, in his 40s, he thought of himself as ‘an
aged eagle’ and as the old man Gerontion, but even here, in his 27th year, he is worrying that life
will pass him by if he does not act. If, as I maintain, Prufrock is a speculative portrait of whom
he might be if he takes the wrong path, then this was only the first time that he would speculate
on a personal alternate timeline. Later, in Four Quartets he was to write:

What might have been is an abstraction

Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.

The fog
The great cloud beast of the poem (the fog, the smoke and the afternoons of boredom are
described as if some vast lazy predator) perhaps derives from, and is certainly cognate with,
Henry James's novella of 1903, 'The Beast in the Jungle', the protagonist of which avoids
commitment to a good woman and engagement with life because of a sense of lurking
catastrophe, only to find that the catastrophe he sensed was precisely his boredom and his sense
of utter futility. Eliot feared just such a fate – and in 'Prufrock' he depicts it, a man wandering
from social engagement to social engagement, never quite prepared to talk of his spiritual death
or to risk sexual rejection by women who might say: 'That is not it at all / That is not what I
meant, at all.'

This fear produces a diffidence, a coyness in Prufrock: 'squeezed the universe into a ball' is an
echo of Marvell's love poem 'To His Coy Mistress': 'Let us roll all our strength and all / Our
sweetness up into one ball.' Eliot was of course a great admirer of the poetry of the 17th century,
and the comparison of the gauche, cowardly Prufrock to a gallant like Andrew Marvell is
entirely to the modern figure's disadvantage.

A damned soul

As so often in his later poems, Eliot starts with an epigraph, here an extended quotation from
Dante's Inferno in which Guido de Montefeltro, damned both for treachery and failed
repentance, confesses all to Dante, thinking him already dead and in Hell. Prufrock, we may take
it, is a damned soul too, talking as if to someone who shares his damnation, the damnation of a
bourgeois boredom that can only be escaped by some radical act of truth-telling: '“I am Lazarus,
come from the dead, / Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”' Or perhaps by risking the
embarrassments of the sexual life, either being rejected by women of his own class or knowing
the naked white arms of sex workers, and then being dragged back to respectability and its
consequences.

Guido is a great sinner, Prufrock a petty one, who frequents low streets as a voyeur perhaps, or
as a purchaser of sexual services. Prufrock is aware of his own unimportance – 'I am not Prince
Hamlet, nor was meant to be' – and fears that he is the Fool. Perhaps he would be better off not
even being human – 'a pair of ragged claws'; Wells's time traveller sees some such beast at the
end of time, abandoning the land on a dying earth – again possibly not a conscious reference, but
certainly an expression of the same mood. Much later – in Four Quartets – Eliot was to come
back to the question of the path not taken, the choice of how to live one's life. Here he looks at
the comfortable bourgeois life of his parents, with its conventional culture ('In the room the
women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo') and its secret sins and double standards, and
mocks and rejects it.

Eliot was taking risks with his life. He did not have the arrogance to think of himself as the
major poet we now know him to be, and the hostility of his parents meant he had to find a way
of making a living, and his relationship with Vivienne was to prove disastrous for both.

But better to take risks than to be Prufrock.

A close reading of 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock'

Article written Seamus Perry

by:
Themes: Capturing and creating the modern, Literature 1900–1950
Published: 25 May 2016
The speaker of 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' is trapped in his own mind, so full of
hesitation and doubt that he is unable to act. Seamus Perry explores the poem's portrayal
of paralysing anxiety.
Who is Prufrock?

T S Eliot wrote this poem while he was in his early twenties: he later recalled beginning the
poem while a student of philosophy at Harvard University in 1909–10, and he finished it while
travelling for a year in Europe, in Munich and Paris. But you could not say that it was a young
man’s poem exactly: later in life Eliot, when asked, said: ‘It was partly a dramatic creation of a
man of about 40 I should say, and partly an expression of feeling of my own through this dim
imaginary figure.’[1] The poem is extraordinarily original, but it does have some anticipations. Of
all the poets of the Victorian period, Eliot later remarked, the only one ‘whom our contemporary
can study with much profit is Browning’: that is Robert Browning (1812–1889), who was
famous for writing poems as monologues in the voices of assumed personae. Eliot’s poem is not
very much like a Browning poem, but it does grow from the example of his dramatic practice: it
is through inventing a prematurely middle-aged persona, as he came to see it in retrospect at
least, that Eliot found a way of articulating something about himself.

He once referred to that thing, in private, as a ‘complex’. Presumably with some degree of levity,
given the nature of the authority upon which he was commenting, Eliot wrote ‘The Prufrock
Complex’ next to these words from the report of a palm-reader: ‘when faced with a personal
problem, any prolonged contemplation of probabilities merely produces hesitancy and
indecision’. Prufrock is one of the great inventions of the modern literary imagination: he has
become an archetype for the ‘complex’ of over-scrupulous timidity. He is a man paralysed by an
overwhelming anxiety about the possibility of getting things wrong: his judgement has such
nicety and fastidiousness that it never arrives at decision, let alone action. So there is, as it
transpires, a certain irony in the manner in which the poem opens:

          Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table …

The language of the opening line is decisiveness itself, and involves a determination to get
going, along with a firm address to another person; but the sense of purpose is quickly dissipated
as the speaker becomes absorbed in a lyrical evocation of the light effects of dusk, which in turn
then gets waylaid by the sheer oddity of the simile that seems to come, unsolicited, to his mind
to describe them. The play between the belated romanticism of an evening ‘spread out against
the sky’ and the incongruous modernity of ‘a patient etherised upon a table’ purposefully sets
different sorts of world in juxtaposition: the poetical and the medical, the lyrical and the hospital;
and this juxtapositional method will be the main way the poem gets to work. The title of the
poem announces that method as it braces the romance of ‘The Love Song’ against the precise
social formality of ‘J. Alfred Prufrock’. Eliot said later in life that he chose the name because it
sounded ‘very very prosaic’, though it probably sounds more eccentric than prosaic to most
readers, even a bit of a joke name; but Browning offered examples of characters with bizarre or
even cartoonish names (Bishop Blougram, Mr Sludge, Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau) who
revealed within their poems a seriousness of predicament that we might not have expected to
find. Eliot begins his poem with what is by any standards a linguistic misjudgement and might
seem just a comic stroke – to include of all things a pronominal initial in the name, as one might
on an official form, in the title of a love poem; but he then goes on in his portrait of
indecisiveness to make the fallibilities of such uncertain judgement seem terrible as well as
comical. ‘No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be’, Prufrock announces towards the
end of his poem, distancing himself from the character in literature who has most often (rightly
or wrongly) been seen as making dithering about a decision the source of great tragedy.
Prufrock’s experience of the ‘overwhelming question’ falls short of that kind of grandeur.

Going nowhere

‘Let us go’, Prufrock repeats, and again, ‘Let us go’; but the movements of the poetry have
already established by the end of the first verse that we are occupying a consciousness that is
destined to go nowhere very much. And in fact the epigraph to the poem, which comes from
Dante’s Divine Comedy, has already introduced the idea of going nowhere as a key theme in the
poem’s orchestration. (It is from Canto 27 of the Inferno.) In the passage, Dante, who is touring
Hell, has begun to converse with one of the inhabitants, Guido da Montefeltro, who is initially
reluctant to respond; but on the reasonable assumption that Dante must be in Hell for all eternity
too, he begins to speak:

If I thought my answer were to one who ever could return to the world, this flame should shake
no more; but since none ever did return alive from this depth, if what I hear be true, without fear
of infamy I answer thee.

For Eliot to begin his poem with a voice from the depths of Hell is to create another of the
poem’s formative juxtapositions, and invites the reader to make out a connection: the world of
the poem is nothing to do with medieval Catholicism, but rather genteel New England society –
a place of tea cups and coffee spoons, collar pins and neckties, musical soirées and perfumed
evening dresses – but conceivably another version of Hell for all that. The inescapability of
social conventions and the stifling prescriptions of polite decorum constitute a new kind of
infernal entrapment.

For Hell is a place you don’t leave: Dante was unusual in coming back to tell the tale. The
opening urgency of Prufrock’s ‘Let us go’ dwindles in the short second verse to the desultory-
sounding to-and-fro of the unidentified women, who ‘come and go / Talking of Michelangelo’.
That couplet also comes and goes, returning about 20 lines later, but with no improved sense as
to who the women are, let alone what they mean to the speaker. Like the cat-like fog that rubs
itself lazily upon the cityscape, the poem curls about and about, its beautifully drifting, self-
interrupting sentences repeatedly putting off the moment of coming to a full stop. Often, instead,
they come to a question mark: ‘Do I dare / Disturb the universe?’ It would be wrong to say that
these questions are ‘rhetorical’; they are genuinely expressions of perplexity: ‘So how should I
presume?’

The form of the verse co-operates in this universe of non-ending by avoiding the different sorts
of progressiveness that would come from using stanzas, or blank verse, or heroic couplets.
Eliot’s poem has no regular rhyme or rhythmical patterning: it is in free verse, vers libre, though
the effect here is anything but a launch into untrammelled freedom, as some of the proponents
of vers libre at the beginning of the 20th century liked to claim. ‘Vers libre’, wrote Eliot in 1917,
the year that ‘Prufrock’ was published in the volume Prufrock and Other Observations, ‘is a
battle-cry of freedom, and there is no freedom in art.’ Vers libre involves abandoning the
‘comforting echo of rhyme’, he said; but his poem does not do without rhyme at all, just without
regular rhyme, as in a rhyme scheme. Eliot wrote beautifully about the possibilities of this, as
though in oblique commentary on his own poem: ‘There are often passages in an unrhymed
poem where rhyme is wanted for some special effect, for a sudden tightening-up, for a
cumulative insistence, or for an abrupt change of mood.’ You could find examples of all of those
in the poem, and other effects besides, created by rhyme’s interruption into an unrhymed or
unpredictably rhymed space: ‘Should I, after tea and cakes and ices, / Have the strength to force
the moment to its crisis?’

Eliot is drawn, too, to leaving Prufrock caught up in rhymes that are no rhymes but merely
repetitions, enacting the way he is victimised by the insistently reiterative movements of his own
anxious mind – as, say, when he can’t dislodge the accusation of being too ‘thin’:

(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!’)

Prufrock and the women

‘They’ are probably women: Prufrock’s anxieties revolve partly around the imponderabilities of
time, but chiefly around a fear of women, and a fretfulness about the humiliations of social
encounter that rises here and there to a kind of suppressed hysteria: ‘When I am pinned and
wriggling on the wall …’. In a Browning monologue there is usually an implied interlocutor
(whom, of course, we do not hear) with whom the speaker is interacting in one way or another;
but just to whom Prufrock is addressing himself is not so clear. The ‘you’ addressed in the first
line seems to evaporate quite soon, as though he (is it a ‘he’?) never were in real life; and the
‘you’ of ‘you and me’ that comes later – ‘here beside you and me’ and ‘some talk of you and
me’ – does not feel like the same addressee, or indeed an addressee who is really present at all.
Prufrock is talking to a ‘you’ inside his own mind, and she is a part of some back-story to the
poem’s frustrated erotic life which is kept almost entirely under wraps. The poem has moments
of rich sexual response and, as though not knowing what to do with them, they no sooner arise
than they are diverted into the sidelines of a bracket or an aside: ‘Arms that are braceleted and
white and bare / (But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!)’ The closest we come to
disclosure is the studiedly neutral double reference to ‘one’: ‘one, settling a pillow by her head’,
and again, ‘one settling a pillow, or throwing off a shawl’. In his portrait of this ‘one’, she
appears unimpressed by his efforts to ‘say just what I mean’; but he is using her imagined
indifference as a reason for abandoning an effort in the first place.

The poem comes to a close with Prufrock lapsing gratefully back into a lovely fantasy of ‘sea-
girls’ singing their mermaid songs in the deeps: Prufrock eavesdrops upon them, momentarily at
ease, it would seem, now that the fulfilment of his desire is completely out of the question. But
the last line conveys that there is no escape from the poised chat over the tea cups: ‘Till human
voices wake us, and we drown.’ The poem does not mock Prufrock’s dreamy romanticism,
which it voices very beautifully; and while it could hardly be called a resolute ending, it is the
right one. The poem ‘does not “go off at the end”’, protested Ezra Pound, Eliot’s friend and early
champion, to an editor who had wanted something more: ‘It is a portrait of failure, or of a
character who fails, and it would be false art to make it end on a note of triumph.’[2]