The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufock by T.S.

Eliot

Prufrock

‘Prufrock – Littan’ furniture wholesalers in St. Louis (Washington)

The name ‘Prufrock’ awakens verbal associations of prudence, primness, prudishness,

prurience, and dandyism.

1-12: How does Prufrock make clear that he does not want to visit the room where the
women are even though he says, “Let us go and make our visit”?
13-14: What is apparently repelling about the women?
15-34: With what does he identify himself in these lines and how does he rationalize his
indecisiveness?
35-36: What effect is gained by repeating these two lines?
37-48: How does Prufrock come to believe that even the slightest action will be
embarrassing and self-defeating?
49-54: How does Prufrock characterize the society in which he has been living a kind of
half-life? Why does the very thought of it make him more incapable of action?
55-69: Show how these lines suggest more positively his shyness and terror and yet
indicate that the thought of the visit is not so dreadful that he can come to an easy
decision about it?
70-74: Why does “Prufrock” recall the “lonely men in shirt-sleeves” at this point in the
poem? What do they mean to him?
75-86: What quality in the evening does he envy?
87-98: What is he afraid will happen if he tells “all”? What is meant by all?
99-110: How is this stanza related to the preceding one?
111-119: Is Prufrock’s analysis of himself accurate? What is the importance of this
section in the poem as a whole?
120-131: What is Prufrock going to do and with what does he identify himself in these
closing lines of the poem?

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Epigraph: These words are spoken by Count da Montefeltro (1223-98) in Dante’s
Inferno xxvii, 61-66. In the eighth chasm of Hell Dante sees the fate of the evil
counsellors who had misused their superior wisdom to deceive others. Guido, too, is
punished here for his treacherous advice on earth to Pope Boniface. Each sinner is
imprisoned in the flame of his consciousness and tormented by its burning. When the
damned speak from this flame the voice sounds from the tip, which trembles. Dante
requests Guido to reveal his identity ‘so may thy name on earth maintain its front.’ Guido
does so only because he believes that Dante, too, is one of the damned, who will never to
the earth.

 Simile of the evening as an etherized patient suggests the suspended state of

Prufrock’s consciousness. It opposes an image of inertia to the intended activity
of the first line: “Let’s go . . . I.” Eliot also points forward to the image of
drowning at the end of the poem.

 13-14: The couplet epitomizes the social setting and ethos of the poem.
Prufrock’s inability to articulate his feelings is in contrast to the linguistic self-
assurance of the women who can effortlessly converse of Michelangelo and find
the ‘formulated phrase’ with which to categorize Prufrock.

 14-22: Prufrock contemplates action through movements of the cat and the fog,
but the contemplation ends in inertia and somnolence.

 23-48: These echo the words of the preacher in Ecclesiastes iii, 1-8:

“To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: A
time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is
planted; A time to kill, and a time to heal;. . . a time to keep silence, and a time to
speak.”

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The language draws upon the portentousness of Ecclesiastes while accentuating the gulf
between the momentous nature of the acts listed there and the banalities of Prufrock’s
world.

 52: Duke Orsino in Twelfth Night I, i. “That strain again! It had a dying fall.”
Orsino is love-sick; the music suits his mood and he wants it to be replayed. Here
by contrast, it might show the death-in-life existence of Prufrock and the women.

 81: An echo of the Biblical lines: ‘they mourned, and wept, and fasted,’ 2 Samuel
1,12: and ‘I fasted and wept,’ xii, 22. The lines suggest Prufrock’s preparation for
the role of prophet which he fails to perform and later disclaims.

 82-83: (Mark VI, 17-29 and Matthew xiv, 3-11). He lacks the courage to tell the
truth like John and so disclaims the role. The image of decapitation is indicative
of Prufrock’s terrified self-consciousness and of his split personality. It also
suggests his fear of castration.

 94-95: Brother of Mary and Martha, whom Christ brought back to life because of
their imploration (John xi, 1-44). The parable of the other Lazarus is narrated in
Luke XVI, 19-31.

 95: ‘To tell all’ would be to do as Christ promised of the Holy Ghost: ‘he shall
teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance whatsoever I have
said unto you’ (John XIV, 26).

 105: Another image of the split self.

 Characterize Prufrock. What sort of a man is he? What age? What social status?
Married? What temperament? How has life treated him? Is he dissatisfied? With
what? Why? Whom is he most like?

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 The head of John the Baptist was “brought in upon a platter” at the request of
Salome as a reward for her dancing before Herod.

 Prufrock’s monologue begins and ends with reveries of escape followed by

intimations of ether and drowning. To Prufrock, emotional release necessarily
entails the prospect of psychic disintegration.

 The syntax of what is said serves to hint at what is unsaid, to frame the
meaningful silences which may be gaps between blocks of lines.

 “Prufrock” is organized around the visit which the protagonist proposes to make
(line 13)

 But the effects of the poem come from two other main thought sequences: one is
the protagonist’s desire to ask, and his failure to ask, some “overwhelming
question,” the other is the sequence of the sea images, which “moves toward the
image of drowning” in the last line.

 The purpose of the sea-imagery is taken by many readers to be to suggest a

simple, unexamined, physical existence which Prufrock would seem to have
preferred to his complicated, self-conscious, over-civilized existence.

 There may be a close connection between the “overwhelming question” and the
drowning mentioned in the last line of the poem: “Till human voices wake us, and
we drown.”

 “Overwhelming” is both overpowering and drowning.

 Prufrock is overpowered and drowned by his inability to ask and answer the
question. A line of epigraph applies here, referring to “that depth/From which
none ever did return alive.” Prufrock has been driven to the physical depths partly

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 by the “overwhelming question” which finally does overwhelm, submerge and
drown him.

 “Prufrock” is a psychological portrait of the anxieties of egocentric confinement,

and Eliot presents the rising intensity of Prufrock’s uneasiness through Laforguian
ironies of diction: an unexpected latinate usage suggests sudden discomfort and
psychological constraint; the indecorous but energetic present participles render
Prufrock’s increasingly uncomfortable, though ambivalent, response to the idea of
becoming something less than the fastidious idealist of his self-image.

 In 1962 Eliot said that “P” was partly a dramatic creation of a man of about 40. . .
and partly an expression of a feeling of my own.” He added: “I always feel that
dramatic characters who seem living creations have something of the author in
them.”

 How typical of modern man is Prufrock? In what ways can you generalize from
his problem to the problem of man in the modern world?

 Prufrock’s love song is the song of a being divided between passion and timidity;
it is never sung in the real world. The poem develops a theme of frustration of
emotional conflict, dramatized by the “you” and “I.”

 Throughout the poem, the speaker is “submissive – if we cannot say reluctant”

(Williamson, p.59). His attitude becomes one of resignation, a recognition of
futility, and finally the rather docile acceptance of his probable future - - as the
various rhetorical questions indicate: “Do I dare Disturb the universe?” “And how
should I presume?” “And would it have been worth it, after all . . . ?”

 Lines15-22: We find more of the twilight atmosphere of the poem. The settling
down of the smoke and fog tends to emphasize the isolation of the drawing room
from the outside world.

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  In addition, the image of the housecat falling asleep involves the relaxed, aimless
quality of Prufrock’s world.

 Streets of insidious intent and the room of women – quality of Prufrock’s world.

 Action of the fog (rubs, licks, lingers, lets, slips, curls, and sleeps) i.e., it is
capable of natural freedom within the filth of the city, which is for Prufrock a
place of nervous confinement.

Explanation:

Like Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” this poem is a dramatic monologue – the rendition of the
thoughts of a character.

Epigraph (in Latin): The flame of Guido is asked to identify himself: ‘so may thy name
on earth maintain its front.”

1-12: You and I: You is that part of Prufrock’s personality which is social, outgoing and
active. I of the poem is that part which is shy, retiring, introspective and fearful.
(b). So the urge belongs to ‘you’ and the emotional block which refuses to identify the
question belongs to ‘I.’
Evening is characterized as a sick person on the bed.
Metaphor of etherization suggests the desire for inactivity to the point of enforced release
from pain
Mind in conflict but presumably concerned with love
Streets suggest the character of the question at their end as well as the nature of the urge
which takes this route.
13-14: ironic contrasts
15-25: Fog compared to a cat

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Image of the fog as cat suggests his mental state: desire which ends in inertia. If the cat
image suggests sex, it also suggests the greater desire for inactivity.
25-30: Time now associates the scene with his mental indecision, but it also offers him an
escape.
34: Moment for the overwhelming ‘question’ is tea-time.
35-36: Ironic contrasts
50: I have measured out my life with coffee spoons: trivial
51: I know the voices dying with a dying fall: Twelfth Night (I, I)
56-61: Dogged by doubt.
Use of metaphors.
Prufrock is oppressed by the “eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase”-- eyes that
continually question the value of his emotional life.
62-64: Prufrock’s love song moves toward an erotic vision of a group of women at a tea
party. Their arms “braceleted, white and bare,” provoke the insurgence of his buried life,
and their pillowed heads push the conflict of his divided selves to the point of crisis.
69: climax but an answer, too.
73-74: sea- image
‘ragged claws’ -- disinterested personality.
79-80: Ironic contrasts
81-83: Allusion to John the Baptist.
85-86: timidity has conquered his amorous self – ‘you.’
91-92: Marevell’s “To His Coy Mistress.”
Prufrock knows his time for squeezing the universe into a ball is past.
94-95: Allusion to Lazarus (John 11:44). Brother of Mary and Martha, whom Jesus
raised from the dead.
reveals his buried life. (Lazarus parallel similarly expresses its momentous nature for him
– only to expose himself to a rebuff)
105: Disheveled syntax of speech.
public revelation of his sensitivity
111-119: The poem turns to a note of decision.

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This is how Prufock characterizes himself. Allusion to Hamlet. Ruled by an acquired self
that suffocates him and leaves him feeling like a servant in his own world.
113: To swell a progress: Ceremonial procession at a royal court.
120 – 125: Unromantic character.
Trying to conceal his lack of virility by aping the appearance of the swaggering young
males around him for whom mermaid will sing.
Mermaids, like the lady, will not sing to him (as to Ulysses).
121 – 122: Prufrock points to its futility.
125: pathos
126: ‘them’ refers to mermaids
126-128: The emotional terrain of childhood /water image.
129 – 131: Reality returns, and the divided self is submerged again, not resolved.

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