An Analysis of the Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

In "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," T.S. Eliot offers a critical and pessimistic vision of the modern spiritual condition.

T.S. Eliot's poem, ironically titled a love song, is carefully constructed in a series of fragments. The resultant tonal and structural discontinuity, as well as abruptly shifting images and focus, dramatizes a scattered life and a fragmented human psyche. The poem details a moral and spiritual journey—a descent suffered by T.S. Eliot's dramatic persona, the narrator, and protagonist, Prufrock.

The descent eventually devolves into the spiritual death of Prufrock when, having glimpsed a moment of redemptive beauty, human voices wake him, and he "drown(s)." T.S. Eliot uses Prufrock and the radical poetic methods to explore a modern condition: a sense of social and moral corruption. Prufrock's lack of connection with others, his alienation, self-debasement, and the absence of passion prevent him from discovering life's meaning and his inner self. T.S. Eliot plunges Prufrock into the recognition of personal inadequacy, accompanied by an unrelenting desire for significance and recognition.

T.S. Eliot's use of Dante's Inferno for his intellectually erudite epigraph introduces his vision of hell without redemption, inviting comparisons with Prufrock's search for meaning. Prufrock's inadequacy, his absence of passion, ironically contrasts with Dante's.

Prufrock opens inviting readers to join him, "Let us go then, you and I." The tale of his emotional demise is heralded by unromantic imagery, "When the evening is spread out against the sky," which T.S. Eliot follows by hinting at Prufrock's detachment from the human heart:

"To lead you to an overwhelming question."

"Oh, do not ask, 'What is it?'

Let us go and make our visit." (line 10)

Mocking Prufrock, T.S. Eliot indicates Prufrock's inability to engage fully with life, his avoidance of choice, and fear of closeness, further explored later in the poem. Recurring questions, "Do I dare?" and "And should I then presume? And how should I begin?," reveal T.S. Eliot's critical view of Prufrock as timid, self-conscious, and self-protective. Prufrock's timidity prevents him from forming intimate connections; his fear of failure prevents him from trying.

The poem's title emphasising the personal nature of Prufrock's love song, creates an expectation of an exploration of Prufrock's innermost feelings, an expectation left unfulfilled. T.S. Eliot articulates Prufrock's feelings of inadequacy, both socially and sexually, and suggests a psychological distance within a palpably social context. Women are culturally secure and superficial, "In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo," whereas Prufrock is displaced, trapped traipsing along certain half-deserted streets, even though Prufrock himself is contemptuous of such a shallow culture. T.S. Eliot sees women as self-contained, but his Prufrock is full of doubts and insecurities, "Full of a hundred indecisions / And a hundred visions and revisions" (Line 32).

Cruelly critical, T.S. Eliot dramatises part of Prufrock's emotional paradox, his fear of women ("Is it perfume from a dress / That makes me so digress?" (Line 65)) and longing for intimate connection contrasting with a more sympathetic dismissal of their trivial social lives filled with taking of toast and tea. Prufrock's own triviality is exposed ("They will say: 'How his hair is growing thin'") when he fearfully and obsessively dwells on critical female scrutiny ("I have known the eyes already, known them all / The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase") and, painfully, self-loathingly, reduces himself to an insect "pinned and wriggling on the wall".

Women are conjured up as disembodied creatures ("skirts that trail along the floor, Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl"). Prufrock's spiritual demise appears partly caused by lack of intimacy with women, who are constructed as guardians of the inner life despite being rendered superficial and threatening. Ultimately, Prufrock sadly admits his insignificance and failure, constructed in his rejection by women: "I do not think they (the mermaids, or the women) will sing to me."

The rolling rhythm (lines 15-20) and extended image of personified yellow smoke suggest drained humanity and muffled consciousness, echoing Prufrock's entrapment. "I should have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas." (Line 73)

Here, T.S. Eliot uses complex compressed imagery sympathetically, suspending Prufrock's self-mockery, to dramatise Prufrock's self-perceived failure in life. Prufrock reduces himself to a primitive creature, revealing sentiments of displacement and alienation, and a profound self-debasement.

Prufrock's longing for significance and self-importance is apparent throughout the poem. He compares himself to the sometimes tragic, sometimes triumphant, but ultimately noble figures such as John the Baptist, Lazarus, and Shakespeare's Hamlet, yet remains, in his own mind, unimportant. Prufrock longs to say: "I am Lazarus, come from the dead," to offer humanity some lasting wisdom. Tragically, he is too much of an attendant lord to achieve such stature. Prufrock decisively states "No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;" ironically noting his own lack of nobility, a dignity which Hamlet possesses. Yet, amusingly, Prufrock does possess Hamlet's worst flaws: procrastination and indecision.

T.S. Eliot moves between absurd comedy and pathos, from the farcical vanity captured in "Shall I part my hair behind/ Do I dare to eat a peach?" (Line 123) to the more profound and introspective, "Do I dare/ Disturb the Universe?" (Line 45), echoing Shakespeare's questioning of nature and the order of the universe.

Throughout, T.S. Eliot dramatizes and mocks Prufrock's self-consciousness and his tragic lack of self-worth. Prufrock longs to leave the world with respect, dignity, and significance. Yet Prufrock's lack of courage renders this noble quest impossible. While T.S. Eliot's poetic form and structure are profoundly radical, embodying the discontinuities of the modern male psyche, his values are essentially conservative. His song of lamentation is powerfully passionate as it encompasses, through Prufrock, the hollowness and despairing reality of modern existence. Thus, the lament lures us to share T.S. Eliot's longing for an idealistic state of spiritual wholeness, where meaning, passion, and truth are as they were in the worlds of The Bible, Dante, Shakespeare, and Marvell. But, having lured us, T.S. Eliot's "Love Song" ends in the destruction of the tune.

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