Imagery in T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Shilpi Kanchan

Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965)•He was an American living in London.

•He attended Harvard (1906-10, 1911-14), Oxford from 1915-16

• Erza Pound introduced him “trained himself and modernized himself on his own”.

•Had a mental collapse brought by overwork, marital problems, and general depression.

The Waste Land (1922)The Hollow Men (1925)Ash Wednesday (1930)Four Quartets (1945)

Wrote 7 plays. Murder in the Cathedral (1935) is the most popular one.

He was awarded the NobelPrize in Literature in 1948.

• Eliot became interested in religion in the later 1920s and eventually converted to Anglicanism.

• His poetry from this point onward shows a greater religious bent. 

• Four Quartets combines a Christian sensibility with a deep uncertainty resulting from the war’s devastation of Europe. Eliot died in 1965 in London.

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

* The masterpiece of his poetic skills, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” remains one of Eliot’s most intriguing and challenging poems.

* It was published in the Chicago magazine Poetry in June,1915.

* It is set in a city which is hyper-critical, disturbed and self-conscious…filled with melancholy.*

The Interior Monologue is used by Eliot in this poem.

This poem is written in free verse, since it doesn't have any set length or set rhyme scheme. It's kind of just like whatever Eliot felt like writing. At the same time, it has these half-rhymes and internal rhymes even though there's no real structure.

It is a psychological profile of a white, middle-aged, middle-class, late Victorian man suffering from mental depression as a result of his boring, unimaginative, routine, repressed bourgeois existence.

Prufrock is an effigy representing the cultural decadence and moral degeneration that Eliot equates with the society of his time.

Epigraph• The epigraph is from Italian poet Dante’s Inferno,

a story of a journey through Hell. These lines have been spoken by a lost soul, Guido da Montefeltro.

• He tells his story to Dante because he believes that his story would never reach anyone on earth; therefore he need not to be ashamed for admitting anything he had done.

• It’s a “Love Song” that begins with mention of a trip through Hell.

• The quoted passage from Dante's Inferno suggests that Prufrock is one of the damned and he speaks only because he is sure no one will listen.

• T.S. Eliot

When the evening is spread out against the sky, Like a patient etherized upon a table.

• William Wordsworth

It is a beauteous evening,calm and free, The holy

time is quiet as a NunBreathless with adoration;

When the evening is spread out against the sky, Like a patient etherized upon a table.

This comparison clearly reveals the psyche of Prufrock. He is inactive and helpless like a patient. Evening also

symbolizes Twilight which indicates uncertainty and inability to see clearly.

Imagery of an Ugly City Life

Cheap Hotel Half-deserted Streets Sawdust Restaurant

 In the room the women come and goTalking of Michelangelo.

This allusion highlights the theme of sexual anxiety. Michelangelo, a world-renowned painter, sculptor and poet, serves as a model of the ideal “Renaissance man”, the male exemplary for excellence. An image also associated with Michelangelo is his sculpture of David, considered to be the embodiment of male physical perfection.

• There is a fragmentation in these lines.

• Prufrock faces severe sexual anxiety after realising the standard for the perfect male and his own inadequacy. Unable to compare with Michelangelo's status as a Renaissance man or David's standard of physical perfection, Prufrock turns self-conscious and develops the feeling of inferiority in himself.

• Women can speak to one-another, on the other hand, Prufrock does not dare to ask a question.

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,

The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes

•The metaphor of a Cat is apparent. Phrases such as “rubs its back,” “rubs its muzzle,” “sudden leap,” “curled once about the house,” and others to clearly point to the metaphor.

•Cats are not very sociable creatures. Eliot essentially compares Prufrock to the cat in this stanza. Prufrock hesitates while socializing with others (particularly women), and spends the entire poem trying to bring himself to talk to just one girl.

• Prufrock refers to “yellow fog” and “yellow smoke,” which means: Clouded. He cannot act and is paralyzed, blocked by his own thoughts.

•The colour yellow, associated with cowardice, just supports this idea.

•Finally, when looking at the story of the cat as a whole in this stanza, nothing is accomplished. The cat essentially moves around in the night, but by the end it just “fell asleep.” In the same way as Prufrock, the cat did not act in any significant way.

Imagery of The SELF

With a bald spot in the middle of my hair-

[They will say: "How his hair is growing

thin!"]...

My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by

a simple pin-

[They will say: "But how his arms and legs

are thin!".

Despite correctness of dress, Prufrock sees himself as pathetic, self-conscious, and insecure; he feels he is one of the living dead because of inaction and indecision.

The eyes are fixed in a formulated phrase,When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall

He feels that everyone is paying attention on him and with this thought, he is feeling even more insecure. He doesn’t like how eyes seem to “fix” or freeze him, and a “formulated phrase” means a phrase that judges, summarize. He’s afraid of judgments of any kind by other people. Prufrock is imagining that the eyes are treating him like a scientist treats an object of study.

I have seen the Eternal footman hold my coat, and snicker, And in short I was afraid

Prufrock expresses the belief that death itself mocks him in his old age. Through this passage, Eliot again displays Prufrock's self-consciousness and fear as he nears the end of his life. The protagonist's constant introspection and anxiety about his own death develops the theme of the mortality and fragility of human life.

I have measured out my life with coffee spoonsTo spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways

He has a pessimistic view of life and feels his life is as useless as the used-up cigarette. It gives a sense of this mundane existence, this unremarkable life. His life is filled with meaningless gestures and predictable encounters; his world is agonizingly uninspiring.

•Prufrock is disgusted with the aimlessness of his contemporary life. He urges to get freedom from the society which is actually devoid. He wants to be a crab which scuttles across the seas.

Most apparent in these lines is Prufrock’s desire for insignificance. The use of the crab, especially, creates images of futility, of moving slowly and with great difficulty- images also associated with the process of aging and approaching death. 

I should have been a pair of ragged claws

Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;Am an attendant lord.

Prufrock is similar to Hamlet as both of them are indecisive in nature and have the habit of procrastination, but Prufrock rejects the role because he is aware of his inadequacy to perform the heroic task of setting his world in order. He is happy in performing the role of a subordinate. He takes refuge in distancing himself from the prince and takes refuge in self-mockery.

Do I dare to eat a peach?He imagines himself growing old, unchanged, worrying about his health and the “risks” of eating a peach. He believes he will be fragile and would not be able to eat a peach as his teeth will be weak by then. This is an Imagery of an old man. He has the fear of aging and death.

Mermaids singing each to each

He faintly hears the mermaids of romance singing in his imagination, even though they are not singing to him. In a final imagined vision, he sees these nymphs of the sea, free and beautiful, calling him. Reality, however, intrudes in the form of “human voices,” perhaps those of the art-chattering women, and he is “drowned” in his empty life. Then he says that “human voices” wake him—perhaps he is awakening from a daydream at one of these get togethers? “And we drown”—he ends his love song with drowning, death... Eliot has left an open ending. It is an inconclusive poem.

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