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‘Prufrock’ in a Nutshell
You love to read literary criticism, don’t you? Of course, you do. It’s why you come to Ricochet. So let me offer you a small diversion this morning by analyzing one of the staples of the British literary canon, T. S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. I think I can do this by focusing our attention on only three lines from the poem.
If you remember, Love Song is a portrait of an upper-middle-class Englishman, perhaps a banker (like T. S. Eliot himself was for a time), a little twit, anxious and afraid of life, who comes to an understanding of what he is during the course of the poem. Here, then, is the first sentence I’d like to consider.
“In the room the women come and go/ Talking of Michelangelo.”
These simple two lines appear abruptly, seeming to have nothing to do with their previous and succeeding lines. So Eliot forces us to use our imagination if we’re going to make any sense whatsoever of them.
So let’s jump in. First, the lines seem to suggest that the ladies, probably upper-middle-class (Prufrock’s class), are in an art gallery — perhaps a reception of some kind is going on — where their conversation is about Michelangelo.
But Eliot, it seems to me, has bigger game in mind than setting a scene. You see, by juxtaposing these two particular images in the same sentence — the chattering British women with the powerful artist who painted the story of mankind’s salvation on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel — Eliot gently satirizes the small, pretentious lives of the women. (Eliot uses the same kind of ironic juxtaposition in the title of the poem, where he sets off the romantic phrase “Love Song” with the prissy and decidedly unromantic name of “J. Alfred Prufrock.”)
For my second quote, I have chosen Prufrock’s own assessment of himself:
”I have measured out my life in coffee spoons.”
Now that is a dreadful summation of one’s life. There are various ways a person can measure out his life: in the bloody gauze patches a nurse uses to staunch soldiers’ wounds, in the tears a mother sheds as she tends to her brain-damaged child, in the calluses that form on a working man’s hands over the years. But Prufrock measures out his petty life in the spoons of the teas and luncheons he attends. Prufrock is coming to know himself, and it’s not a pretty picture.
Finally, in the last major image of the poem, Prufrock’s ultimate judgment on his life:
”I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each./ I do not think that they will sing to me.”
Mermaids, figures out of the world of myth and imagination, stand in contrast with the small and ordinary drawing rooms and tea rooms of Prufrock’s world. He knows he will never hear the song of the mermaids. After all, Prufrock’s a man who agonizes, as he says himself, over whether he should part his hair in the back, a man who timidly asks, “Do I dare to eat a peach?” Prufrock hasn’t lived a life worthy of the mermaid’s song, so he knows they will never sing to him.
So there, in a three-quote nutshell, is T. S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. I’ve assumed quite a bit and used a little imagination in my analysis — perhaps more than you prefer. But that’s the way we lit-crit roll. We’re the warm fuzzies of the university. We think an algorithm is a tap dance done by the onetime Vice President.
Postscript: My wife Marie actually grimaced in pain as she read this post. She didn’t care for it at all. She still remembers the angst she felt when she was asked, in an English class long ago, to write a paper on the imagery and symbols in D. H. Lawrence’s Odour of Chrysanthemums. So for those of you who suffered like my wife as you worked your way through my post, here’s a little reward, a photo of Bob taking his afternoon nap. It’s a little revealing, but we’re all sophisticated adults here, aren’t we?
Well, among other things, Prufrock is not middle-classed. He’s from the slums, the red-light/industrial side of the oldest part of an old European city.
“If you’ll check the member feed, you’ll find @KentForrester’s excellent analysis of T.S. Eliot’s masterpiece of the poetic form “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” I’m an American literature teacher myself, so I was quite excited to see literary criticism on Ricochet, so I quickly read the post. KentForrester makes some excellent points about the source material. However, there are some points within the poem where I have rather profound disagreements regarding the OP’s interpretation of the poem. Rather than clutter up his comments section with an abbreviated counter-criticism, I offer the readers of Ricochet one of my own. I hope you enjoy both pieces.”
@thescarecrow
@sawatdeeka
@markcamp
WHHATT?
Kent, will you stand for this? He’s basically calling you out. Come on, get back in there, watch his left hook, and keep up with the body punches. I give him 2 more rounds, max.
Also a Fascist. Which just about exhausts what I know about him.
Mr. Godbey, thank you for your comments. I don’t have enough time right now to go back and forth regarding the interpretation of Prufrock.
I will, however, offer up a few comments regarding your contention that Prufrock is “from the slums.” Surely not. Everything about the man points to his status as an upper middle-class gentleman — from his name (J. Alfred Prufrock), to the teas and coffees he attends, to the diction he uses (“I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker”), to the clothing he wears (“My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,/My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin”), to his timidity (“Should I eat a peach?”), to his self-consciousness (“The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase”). If that is a man “from the slums,” they made awfully foppish, timid, well-spoken, and well attired slum dwellers in those days.
YES!!!
If he gets up, hit him again!
Mark, I do think you’re looking for a literary brawl.
Kent, I am offended by the very hint of a suggestion. If Godbey does, heaven forfend, engage in brawling, against the wishes of all good Ricocheteers, we hope you hit him back even harder!
Aren’t there census records, birth certificate, etc. that can be checked to settle this argument?
Retic, perhaps I am misreading your irony, but Prufrock is a fictional character.
I always find the latin epigram at the beginning of the poem — it’s from Dante’s Inferno — to be devastating:
“If I thought that my reply were given to anyone who might return to the world, this flame would stand forever still; but since never from this deep place has anyone returned alive, if what I hear is true, without fear of infamy I answer thee.”
It suggests Prufrock is in a hell of his own making.
:-)
I’ll blame my father. When we’d watch television together he’d wait until a moment of high tension in the story and then ask, “Why doesn’t the cameraman help her?” Now I’m the one who asks those questions. (As you can imagine, people in my house seem to be content with my decision not to watch television any more.)
Some years ago when I was taking an evening Russian class I played a clip from The Return for a class presentation. Then people got to arguing over the background of the father figure, with one of the class members, a lawyer, arguing that he knew the type from experience. (It’s fiction, people! And Konstantin Lavronenko is an actor!) People get into it on the internet, too. The director of the film wisely refuses to answer questions about him, or to explain any of the other questions that are left hanging. He’ll explain the making of the film and the casting of the characters, but as to the story, he lets it speak for itself and doesn’t go any further than what he put on the screen.
My poetry class meets by Zoom tonight. The main work is Plato’s Ion where Socrates questions the very nature of poetry – is it a learned skill like for example, medicine or shipbuilding, or is it inspired, even divinely inspired, and in a different category than other knowledge. I love going into the class not knowing where I will end up but knowing I will participate. One question I plan to ask is whether Data from Star Trek could write good poetry.
I think it would be hard to study literature on your own, but if you can find a class with a good leader, you will find it very rewarding.
Gary, you are a student and a scholar. The conclusion your class will no doubt reach will be that poetry, like almost everything else that humans do, requires both skill and inspiration. For the Romantic poets, poetry was largely, they believed, the result of inspiration. For the Neo-classical poets like Pope, poetry was largely technical skill in meter, rhyme, diction and wit.
I expect part of the discussion will be what is meant by “divinely inspired.” For Socrates or Plato, it would be the Greek gods. The teacher and some students will get all metaphorical about it. For me, I know that the Holy Spirit helps me write poetry. My pen has come up with lines that I couldn’t explain by thinking on my own. This seems especially true when I come up with an idea for a new poem.
A revolt against intellect? I should have been sense and movement organs without a mind? Just clutching aimlessly.
BTW–I agree with OP that this is a great psychological study, but it is also a sociological one. That is, it is not just about poor Alfred.
Maybe the greyness of the evening is an “objective correlative” of the anesthesia of modern life. Like the mindless claws, the patient cannot think or feel. And there is something dissociated about seeing the evening and the sky as two separate entities. I’ve read that some schizophrenics have that sort of perception, too.
Different from? In what ways?
And he does not want to be known, fixed and formulated. Fear of Freud? (Not phobia, since it is a rational fear even today.)
Yes, he can. My daughter and I loved the poem he read about his cat. :-)
This is literally in my top three favorite poems. I have always loved it. I have always rejected T. S. Eliot in Brit lit anthologies because he was, actually, an American, even if he expatriated. His wastelands have always spoken to me. ;)
You are a lit-crit indeed.
Surely, he was joking.
How delightful to find arguments about a canonical poem on a website.
Wow, I certainly didn’t think I would find anyone on Ricochet who had read Prufrock, much less put it in her top three poems. Good for you, Lois Lane.
What I’ve discovered is that Ricochet has a number of people who have read Prufrock — and even have opinions about an interpretation of the poem.
You’ve even read The Wasteland? That’s quite an achievement.
How come I haven’t received an attaboy for my pun in the sentence, “We think that an algorithm is a tap dance by the onetime Vice President?” I worked hard to come up with that sentence and was terribly proud of it.
You are not the first to work the word algorithm into a sentence about Al Gore. I won’t say yours isn’t the best job of it, though. The first page of search results for “Al Gore algorithm” doesn’t turn up anything quite as good.
I feel your pain. The internet has revealed to me that far too many of my own clever wordplays didn’t originate with me, after all. Well, some of them perhaps did, but I wasn’t the first.
Clearly Prufrock identifies as a crustacean, which informs his mermaid fixation.