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?