Brief notes on Prufrock by TS Eliot

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Themes
- The solitary, fragmentary and alienating nature of modern urban existence: its emotional sterility, ins inauthenticity and meaninglessness
- The desire for solace in dreams and memories
- Ritual without meaning
- The ironic contrast between a heroic, vital and visionary past and a banal, unromantic anti-heroic present
- Masculine sexual ambition and fear
- Emotional and verbal inexpressiveness: the failure of communication and language

Form
- A dramatic monologue
- Spoken by one character- the persona, Prufrock
- The persona offers asides and soliloquies
- Contains an implied listener or auditor. (Prufrock is a distinctly modern example of the dramatic monologue in its representation of the persona as a divided self. The ?I? and the ?you? of the poem can be read as two aspects of Prufrock?s psyche- his rational self/ his sexual instinctive self; the public and inauthentic self (the ?face? which he prepares to meet the faces that he meets)/ the private self or ?real? self. The ?you? of the poem can also be read as the unnamed woman, or the reader.
- ?Stage directions? are given to indicate actions, gestures and mannerisms
- Like the drama, involves particularised setting or settings and the passing of time.

As a poetic form, the dramatic monologue is primarily concerned with the construction of character rather than with the presentation of a story or actions.
The form also characteristically combines sympathy for and judgement of the persona. It encourages sympathetic understanding because it represents the thoughts and feelings (inner life) of the persona. At the same time, the form often positions us to be critical of the persona. The reader?s response, then, is ambivalent, and acknowledges people?s complexity.

Structure
- Elliptical i.e. it proceeds by way of suggestion, implication, gaps and silences rather than through rational and logical connections between stanzas. This has the effect of making the reader work; the structure positions us to be active interpreters rather than merely passive consumers of the text. It also enacts the workings of the human psyche or consciousness, which moves rapidly and often at random from one subject to another, mixing memory, fantasy, desire, sensations.
- Imaginistic i.e. the poem is structured on a series of images, such as water, time, hands, hair, which accumulate to construct meaning and to create particular emotional effects.

Poetic Techniques
- Rhyme
- Rhythm
- Imagery
- Figures of speech: personification, metaphor and simile
- The aural dimension of language: assonance, consonance, alliteration etc.

Ideological issues
- Gender. The poem might be read as an expression of masculine vulnerability and powerlessness in the face of the ?feminine?. The poem offers two versions of the feminine; one is undesirable, while the second is desired but unattainable. The first is represented by the women of Prufrock?s class, whose intellectual pretensions are mocked and who are implicitly imaged as pretentious, shallow and discreetly malicious. This upper-class version of femininity leaves Prufrock feeling alienated, vulnerable and emasculated. His lack of virility is embodied throughout the poem by the use of weary or listless rhythms. Hid self-doubt is enacted through his constant qualifications, revisions, repetitions and hesitancies. His abjection and self-loathing are suggested by self-mocking images and self-deprecating irony.
- A second version of the feminine, desired but unattainable, is represented as the source of Prufrock?s salvation- the vision of the mermaids with which the poem concludes. The mermaids are a traditional symbol of a dangerously alluring female sexuality ? women as body, siren and temptress. The sensual and sexual appeal of the mermaids is evoked through the use of long vowel sounds and through images of touch, movement and colour. Prufrock can only observe rather than experience this life of passion and sensual richness: it is literally and metaphorically out of reach. The description of the mermaids is suffused with a sense of longing, of masculine desire for the unattainable woman. Notice the hypnotic of yearning rhythms (the use of enjambment, the lingering present participles, the repetition of certain words and sounds)
- Class. Upper-class society is imaged as superficial, malicious, emotionally and spiritually sterile, while working-class society is imaged in terms of tawdry sensuality (?one night cheap hotels?) and an unassuageable loneliness (?the lonely men in shirt sleeves, leaning out of windows?).

- A middle-aged bachelor tentatively considers proposing to a young widow but draws back. Prufrock is in a hell of his own, but his fault has been frittering away his mental powers rather than actual destructiveness. He is in Hamlet?s situation, but is behaving more like Polonius; he sees himself as ?an attendant lord?.
- The whole sequence of poems reflects a preoccupation with the French symbolist poet Jules Laforgue?s fascination with the figure of Hamlet, the tormented intellectual observer hesitating to commit himself.
- Prufrock- The name is taken from that of a leading family from the town of St Louis where Eliot grew up, as Stephen Stepancher has pointed out.
- The words of the epigraph are taken from ?Inferno, Canto 27? where Guido da Montefeltrano, guilty of duplicity, confides in Dante from the eighth circle of hell: ?If I thought my answer were to one whoever could return to the world, this flame should shake no more; but since none ever did return alive from this depth, if what I hear be true, without fear of infamy I answer thee?
- Michelangelo (1475-1564); great Italian Renaissance painter and sculptor from Florence whose most famous work was the painting of the vaulting of the Sistine Chapel in Rome
- There will be time? for you? for me- These lines recall those of Andrew Marvell in ?To His Coy Mistress?, ?had we but world enough and time...? This whole section of Eliot?s poem, with its reiteration of the word ?time? also echoes Ecclesiastes iii, 1-8, which begins ?To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven??
- When I am pinned ? Carries overtones of pinned down specimens of butterflies and other insects- Also the French Symbolist poet Jules Laforgue?s poem.
- Arms that are braceleted? light brown hair- Echoes of John Donne?s ?The Relic?: ?A bracelet of bright hair upon the bone?
- Ragged claws? floors of silent seas- an evocation of self-hate, self-loathing: the self is being compared with primitive life.
- Brought in upon a platter- Matthew xiv, 10-11: ?and he sent and beheaded John in the prison. And his head was brought in upon a charger?.
- Squeezed the universe into a ball ? again the image comes from Marvell?s ?To His Coy Mistress?: ?Let us roll all our strength and all/ our sweetness into one ball?
- I am Lazarus ? See John, xi. This comparison was suggested to Eliot by Crime and Punishment, by Feodor Dostoevsky
- I have seen? chambers of the sea ? There seems to be an echo of John Masefield?s poem ?Cardigan Bay? from him ?Salt Water Ballads?
- The poem dramatises the state of mind of Prufrock, a tragicomic figure of uncertain age. He is very much the mould of the Laforguian self-mocking little man, by his own account physically unimpressive and sexually timid, cultured and sensitive. He imagines going through sordid streets to the room where women chatter, but coming away having failed to achieve anything: though this is his ?Love Song? he cannot make a declaration of love. Nor dare he do or say anything else of any significance (his ?overwhelming question? suggests not merely a proposal of marriage, but a larger question as to the meaning of life), he is so unheroic, so self-conscious, and so shy of communicating with any of the women, whom he seems to despise as well as fear. From them he turns to a fantasy of love with mermaids until real voices call him back to the stifling real world.
- The title neatly undermines the romantic associations of ?Love Song? by the ridiculous name, not forgetting its self-important initial ?J.?, while suggestions of prudishness may be combined with ?Proof-rock? as a punning variant of ?Touchstone?; for Prufrock is both primly proper and a test case for the reader?s reactions. Incidentally, the name is not entirely whimsical: young Eliot signed himself T. Stearns Eliot.
- The epigraph is significant in various ways. The implication of the reader as a fellow-inhabitant of Prufrock?s hopeless world; a suggestion that one part of Prufrock (timid and thinking) is deluding another (passionate and feeling), turning him to fraudulent fantasy rather than true engagement with life.
- The ?you? of the first line seems to be the reader at first, but ?you and I? could be two aspects of Prufrock ? his thinking addressing his public personality- though the final ?we? that drowns may not only be the whole Prufrock, but a universalising touch. Elsewhere ?you? is the equivalent of ?one?, or can even be addressed to one of the women, and so on.
- Opening similes ? likening the evening to a patient under anaesthetic and the streets to stages in a wearisome argument, and the metaphor comparing fog to a lazing cat, tell us more about Prufrock?s mental state (especially his morbidity and inertia) than the objects they are ostensibly describing. This use of images to characterise moods and feelings continues throughout; look at the coffee-spoons and cigarette-ends that sum up Prufrock?s dull days, or the way he (equally pathetically) pictures himself as an insect stuck on a pin, or a crab in the sea. The final sea imagery of escape seems suddenly liberating after all the images of feebleness and futility that culminate in trivia about eating and dressing, but reality quickly reasserts itself, drowning Prufrock, not in the fantasy sea, but in the social world in which he flounders.
- ?Works and days? ? the title of a poem by Greek writer Hesiod
- ?A dying fall? Duke Orsino?s description of a piece of music in Shakespeare?s ?Twelfth Night?
- ?My head?brought in upon a platter? as was the head of the prophet John the Baptist, cut off at the request of Salome as a reward for her dancing
- The eternal footman- apparently a personification of death, made socially suggestive, this recalls the ?Heavenly Footman? in the allegorical Pilgrim?s Progress of John Bunyan
- Squeezed?ball/To roll?: recalls ?To His Coy Mistress? in which the poet urges his mistress to immediate, passionate love.
- Lazarus- the dead man who Christ raised to life again. The poor man sent to heaven, whom Dives, a rich man in hell, asks to be sent back from the dead to make the living repent.
- Tell you all ? Christ promised the Holy Ghost would ?tell you all things?
- Sprinkled streets- sprinkled with sawdust
- Prince Hamlet- Shakespeare?s Hamlet; like Prufrock in his self-awareness and worry about being indecisive (the line-ending echoes Hamlet?s ?To be or not to be? sequence), but unlike him in heroic stature. Prufrock goes on (in imitation Elizabethan style) to liken himself instead, to Polonius, the talkative, moralising old courtier in Hamlet; or even the court jester (the fool)
- Full of high sentence- description of the learned and elevated talk of the Clerk in The Canterbury Tales of Geoffrey Chaucer
- Bottoms of my trousers rolled- turned up trouser ends were then becoming fashionable, as with ?part my hair behind?
- Mermaids singing- recalls ?Teach me to hear mermaids singing? in a ?Song? by John Donne; as well as contrasting with the sirens of Greek legend whose singing led sailors to drown.
- Polite social gatherings are often seen as a way of avoiding more important issues ??And would it have been worth it, after all/ After the cups, the marmalade, the tea
- Prufrock, unlike most of Eliot?s voices, has a name by which we identify him. He is very much aware of the discrepancy between the importance of his personal appearance- his morning coat, collar and necktie ?rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin?- and the feelings he has which are not in keeping with the correctness of his dress. He also feels vulnerable and knows, or thinks he knows, that the other guests at the social gatherings will notice his bald spot and thin arms and legs. These are chinks in his armour. It is as though they imply some inner failing that contradicts the appearance he presents to society.
- Prufrock may be hesitant and uncertain, but he is aware of the multiplicity of selves contained within his single person- ?There will be time, there will be time/ To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet/ There will be time to murder and create?- One way of understanding these lines is to think of how facial expressions or attitudes are adjusted to correspond appropriately to different people and situations.
- The poetry here imitates the Biblical verses ? A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up? ?But the change in rhythm, and the final rhyme of the particular passage in ?Prufrock? marks a deliberate contrast from the Bible. Instead it echoes the triviality of the popular song ?tea for you, and tea for me, tea for two and you for me?. The verse moves from something that sounds wise and significant, to the trivial. Both are ?true? and seem irreconcilable, even though Eliot has put them together.
- Prufrock knows he cannot disturb the gathering in the drawing room by asking his ?overwhelming question?. We infer that it is in the nature of ?what is the meaning of life??, and we recognise his difficulty. How can the politeness of ?toast and tea? in privileged surroundings be reconciled with the reality of ?half-deserted streets?, 0f ?restless nights in one-night cheap hotels? and ?sawdust restaurants?? Both settings can be regarded as aspects of Prufrock himself- ?I, the objective world, and my feelings about it, are an indissoluble whole? ? the ?streets that follow like a tedious argument? and the room ?where the women come and go/ Talking of Michelangelo? are quite different, but both belong to him and are externalisations of particular states of mind. Prufrock has a third reality: in his imagination he has heard mermaids singing and seen them ?riding seaward waves?. It is in these final images that we glimpse a real sense of his possibilities ? but he fails, unable to synthesise his awareness of different feelings and realities. We are left with the sense that in Eliot?s poetry, modern life is an evasion; trivialities ensure that society is distracted from important or frightening questions.
- Parts of bodies are described- Prufrock has ?known the arms? and ?known the eyes?
- Eyes are traditionally regarded as the windows to the soul, and souls are precisely what are lacking in the nervous self-conscious voices found in the poems
- A positive female image of the mermaid is offered in ?Prufrock?. The mermaids are depicted as sexually desirable, but unattainable, especially to men like Prufrock. The long open vowel sounds like ?seaward?, ?waves?, ?combing?, ?white hair? and ?blown back? all give a bewitching, sensual and sexual, along with a pining quality. The flowing and yearning rhythms foreground a seductive and inviting image that promises a rich, sexual life. The repetition of the word ?waves? and ?white? and the use of enjambment give the mermaid?s world an appealing quality. Prufrock can only seem to observe rather that experience the life of passion. However, as the image seems to be positive, it is undermined by the fact that it is represented through physical and sexual attributes, thus undermining women?s representation in the poetry.
- Allusion ? It is not plagiarism, as the poet acknowledges the original source of the words. Moreover, the pastiche relies upon the reader recognising the source of the original words and reflecting upon the meaning of this excerpt both in the original and within its new context, for its full impact. Textual allusions are particularly effective in poetry, where conciseness adds to the impact of a poem, where references often express more than many words.
- Eliot engages the persona in a surge of self-mockery enhanced by his use of allusion. Perhaps the most powerful allusion is a literary one to Shakespeare?s ?Hamlet?. Hamlet and Prufrock ad characters share an indecisiveness, which dominates the works they are presented in. However, whereas Hamlet?s indecisiveness stems from his overwhelming moral integrity, Prufrock?s hesitancy is the result of his fear of retribution and social ostracism.
- Hamlet is the ultimate tragic hero, but Prufrock acknowledges his cowardice, and the world?s indifference towards him. Eliot parallels Prufrock with Polonius, Orphelia?s father, a pontificating, long-winded and pompous character, or to the Clerk in Chaucer?s ?Canterbury Tales?, another lofty yet empty character. Whereas Hamlet?s deliberation ultimately results in action, Prufrock is allied with passively reflective characters. In theatrical terms, the Hamlet allusion also highlights Prufrock?s redundancy in life. He never partakes in anything meaningful and grand; he is not a lead role such as Hamlet, who is a prince, but rather like Polonius, who is a semi comical character, or merely ?an attendant Lord, one that will do? to start a scene or two?- a role which is merely functional, not developed and unheroic. This furthers our understanding of Prufrock?s composition; he recognises the futility and inanity of his society, however his shortcomings of fear and timidity frame him as a moral coward.
- In order to further highlight the pathetic nature of Prufrock, and add impact to his self-mockery, Eliot alludes to the Fool. A jester of the court was the lowliest regarded of all court servants. Theatrically, the Fool was often represented as a pathetic, wretched character reminiscent