T.S. Eliots The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock :: essays research papers fc

TS Eliots PrufrockThe ironic character of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," an early poem by T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) in the nervous strain of a dramatic monologue, is introduced in its title. Eliot is talking, through his speaker, about the absence of love, and the poem, so far from being a "song," is a meditation on the failure of ro publicce. The break image of evening (traditionally the season of love making) is disquieting, rather than consoling or seductive, and the evening "becomes a patient" (Spender 160) "When the evening is spread out against the sky / handle a patient etherized upon a table" (2-3). According to Berryman, with this line begins modern poetry (197). The urban location of the poem is confrontational instead of being alluring. Eliot, as a Modernist, sets his poem in a decayed cityscape, " a drab neighborhood of cheap hotels and restaurants, where Prufrock lives in solitary gloom" (Harlan 265). The experience of Pr ufrock is set against that of obscure "women" (13), collectively representing womankind. Their unattainable status is represented by their constant movement- they "come and go"- and their "polite chitchat about Michelangelo, who was a man of great originative energy, unlike Prufrock" (Harlan 265). We cannot imagine that they would listen to any love song by Prufrock, any more than they would find his name or his person attractive. "A man named J. Alfred Prufrock could hardly be expected to sing a love song he sounds too well dressed" (Berryman 197)."J. Alfred Prufrock" indicates his formality, and his surname, in particular, indicates prudery. The powerful metaphor, a optical image of the "yellow fog" (15) in the fourth stanza, represents the jaundiced environment of the modern city, or Eliots "infernal version of the forest of Arden" (Cervo 227). The image is ambiguous, however, because Eliot also makes it particularly attr active in the precision he uses in comparing the fogs motions to that of a cat who "licked its tongue into the corners of the evening" (17). We also hear the fog, disquietingly, in that image, in the onomatopoeia of "licked." repeat of "time", in the following stanza, shows how the world of Prufrocks being is bound to temporality. "Prufrock speaks to his listeners as if they had come to visit him in some circle of unchanging hell where time has stopped and all action has become theoretical" (Miller 183). "Time" is repeated, several times, but it is not only its inescapable presence that Eliot is emphasizing, but also the slenderness of the ways in which we use it "the taking of a toast and tea" (34).