The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

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The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (Composed February 1910 - July 1911) is the main poem in the book Prufrock and Other Observations published by T. S. Eliot in 1917, which marked the start of his career as a writer. It is still one of the dozen most famous 20th century poems in English.

The poem itself tells the inner feelings of a man in love who realises that his aspirations and his outlook on life are much deeper than those of the rest of the people (including the woman he wishes to ask to marry him). He feels the need to stir those around him, to make them conscious of the seriousness of life and of their frivolity, but at the same time he fears being rejected and mocked. Another thematic element is the subject of aging: the speaker contemplates his wearied heart (vis-à-vis the mornings and afternoons he has known), the repetitions inherent in life causing his physical deterioration (a bald spot, weak teeth making him fear food), and the consuming idea of an impending death.

The poem begins with a quotation from Dante's Inferno (XXVII, 61-66), which reads:

S`io credesse che mia risposta fosse

A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,

Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.

Ma perciocche giammai di questo fondo

Non torno vivo alcun, s'i'odo il vero,

Senza tema d'infamia ti rispondo.

Which translates as:

If I believed that my answer would be

To someone who would ever return to earth,

This flame would move no more,

But because no one from this gulf

Has ever returned alive, if what I hear is true,

I can reply with no fear of infamy.

These passages may be viewed as a criticism of English society of the beginning of the 20th century. The passage described helps draw a parallel between the journey in which Dante explores on through Hell. Eliot contrasts Alighieri's notion of journeying through the rings of Hell with 'asking' the daunting question never broached by Prufrock.

The poem may be viewed as an embodiment of bathos (a Modernistic style-figure): the lover (Prufrock) wants to be serious, but he is just an ordinary (and even comic) individual. This use of bathos can be seen with such lines as

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons

One of Eliot's key literary devices which renders this poem so successful is ironic deflation, evidenced in the first stanza. It reads:

Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherized upon a table;

The beginning of the simile in the second line inclines upwards, leading the reader into an image of beauty, which falls sharply in the third line into an image of squalor. This up and down 'sighing' tone, repeated throughout the poem, is essential to the sometimes comedic but always melancholic speaker's voice. It also is an example of challenging previous conventions of the past. The simile used was far from the normal 'nature' imagism used. Either way, the word 'etherized' would not have been popularly used as well, as 'anesthetized' is more commonly known.

There are several images/expressions in the poem which have become famous, including:

In the room the women come and go

Talking of Michelangelo

(which appears twice in the poem)

Do I dare

Disturb the universe?

and

I grow old... I grow old...

I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

as well as

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;

A well-known example of this poem being quoted in later popular culture exists in Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now. Dennis Hopper's character, a photojournalist, refers to himself, saying "I should have been a pair of ragged claws, scuttling across the floors of silent seas." This line follows a reference to another famous poem, Rudyard Kipling's If.