“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
By: T. S. Eliot.
The Original title of this poem is “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and Other Observations” published in 1915. The present poem as such is just a part of several other poems in the same volume whose title I have mentioned above. T. S. Eliot, a poet, philosopher, thinker, dramatist and critic, was a very salient name throughout the 20th century and is still today.
It is very important to notice that T. S. Eliot is not a British citizen but an American one whose family in Boston was very religious conservative. His great grandfather established what is known today as Harvard University. His strict Catholic upbringing was manifested everywhere in his critical views and social comments till the end of his life. A good example of this is his book The Idea of A Christian Society. You remember how W. B. Yeats, in “ Sailing to Byzantium” feels fed up with his modern society and how he decides to travel to an ideal imaginary place, Byzantium. T. S. Eliot literally left the USA for Britain which he saw as the ideal place to live in. In 1927, he became a naturalized British subject. Britain for Eliot represented that ideal community which kept its strong ties to traditions and the past.
Eliot’s poetry and criticism since then represented continuous attempts for reforming the society which he saw as degenerating into a Godless immoral life. His poetic achievement culminated in his long epic poem, The Waste Land, in which he anatomized modern society, its freak values and the loss of its morality. T. S. Eliot seemed to have sensed the postmodern values of today’s life and art. He stood against these values presuming that they lead to nowhere except loss and fragmentation.. His poetry is often characterized as a difficult-easy poetry.
The language of his poems is very simple that readers find no serious difficulty in understanding it directly as a language. Yet his style ( the way of conveying ideas to readers) is very difficult and esoteric. The difficulty of his style arises from the fact that he uses allusions ( references to past names, historical events, classical philosophy etc): unless readers know these references, they will never be able to understand Eliot’s poems. In this case, the reader will find himself/herself in front of a text written in English but with no real poetic meaning or taste. The purpose of using such an allusive style is to make readers as well as young poets aware of the richness of their past. Without our past, we shall live without a memory. Without our history , we shall live estranged from other nations. Every nation should feel proud if it has a rich past or history.
In his poetry, Eliot often uses a persona ( a character). When we have such a persona, the poem is turned into a drama with a character playing a role. The poem as such becomes a dramatic monologue ( an imaginary speaker expressing the poet’s thoughts to us as an imaginary audience). Most of his long poems celebrate a diversity of subjects. Several subjects and zigzagging issues are tackled in a single poem. These subjects are often unified by a ruling theme; social and moral fragmentation and artistic degeneration.
The present poem is an example of Eliot using a diversity of subjects in a single text. From the title of the poem, we understand that there is a character named Prufrock who has a love song which he never sings in the poem. From the name we can sense a comedy coming next; the name is very strange and funny. As I often tell you; comedy lies at the heart of a tragedy and what we laugh at may simultaneously be very sad and tragic for the person in a given comic situation. The speaker of the poem invites himself “ Let us go you and I” as if he was a schizoid or a split personality. The invitation is to go out for a sightseeing walk! The time is evening which looks like a sick person stretched on a table. The walk should go through semi-empty streets with cheap hotels and dusty restaurants made dirty with food remnants and dumps everywhere. But “what is it”? is this a real modern city or is it just a ghostly one with no life in it? This is the major question the speaker raises about his then situation. This is subject number 1; the dirtiness, loneliness, barrenness and lifelessness of modern cities.
Subject number 2 is related to art and human history. All of you know who Michelangelo is, the great Italian sculptor. When an expertise ( a person with specific knowledge in Art) speaks about Michelangelo, s/he should have a well-organized discussion with artistic views and respect. Michelangelo is not an ordinary person; he represents the exuberance of human mind and history; he is a famous name in the history of art for all nations respecting art. However, an unknown woman in the hotel “ come and go/ Talking of Michelangelo” without any respect or seriousness. T. S. Eliot sees this situation as a sign of degeneration in the society’s knowledge and evaluation of world art.
In the third subject, the poet turns towards industry and pollution which is now a serious problem and a world concern often referred to as Global Warming. The “ yellow fog” or factories smoke is, like in Charles Dickens’ Hard Times, everywhere, sooty and suffocating. In the poem, the smoke looks like a giant freakish animal rubbing “ its back upon the window-panes”. Moreover, that animal comes so close to private houses and “ licked its tongue into the corners”. The smoke of factories and chimneys never go away but it covers the whole city and sleeps over it like a heavy animal, “ Curled once about the house and fell asleep”.
In the fourth subject, Eliot comments on social hypocrisy which all of us suffer from. He says that a man has to have a particular face to meet people outside , “ There will be time, There will be time/ To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;” . Because modern values are those of outward appearances, and materialism, the speaker needs to change his face ( values) in order to be accepted by people. Here again the poet mentions the schizophrenic conversation of the opening lines of the poem. He says “ Time for you and time for me”, as if the speaker was two different persons. This sentence goes with the psychological case of the speaker who is already two persons with no specific identity. He is simply metamorphosed by the current values of society which looks at his appearance and never seeks to know about his humanity, education, lineage, past etc. Every man becomes an unknown citizen. This clear loss of identity beside moral and social fragmentation are two major themes in T. S. Eliot’s poetry.
The fifth subject is modern man’s hesitation and lack of self-confidence. The speaker says that there will also be time for “ indecisions, visions and revisions” within a very short time which he refers to as the time needed for “ a toast and tea”. Here the speaker is commenting on how modern man is deprived of the ability to make any simple decisions. When a modern individual decides, s/he must also revise that decision and in this case s/he may arrive at an indecision because of the so many revisions of the one single decision made a while ago! This sense of hesitation in modern society is a serious sickness. Modern man is deprived of the will to decide and also of the ability to carry out his decisions however small they are. Man, thus, is not free to decide, unlike Dr. Faustus in the great Elizabethan Age, for instance
The speaker thinks of making a very small and trivial decision like to“ turn back and descend the stair”. But even this trivial decision becomes very complicated when the speaker thinks of others and their looks. The speaker is bald and people may make fun of him and say “ How his hair is growing thin!” . He looks at his clothes and finds out that he is %100 tidy with a firm collar, a rich necktie and a pin. Even if his tidy appearance may compensate for his bald head, yet people may still find defects in him and may say “ his arms and legs are thin!”. People’s eyes here are not used for a positive purpose like for reading, for example. The eyes are used to evaluate other people according to their appearances. People interfere even in personal business.The speaker’s psyche deteriorates because of the society around him. He is so fed up with his reality that he describes his whole life as spent “ with coffee spoons”, a reference to his everlasting suffering.
Only when he hears “ the music from a farther room” does he feel rest and peace. Music here, and all art in general, has therapeutic effects on human psyche. The speaker says that those eyes are very hideous and hurtful as they cause you to feel like an insect “ on a pin/ And when I am pinned and wriggling on the wall/ Then how shall I begin.” When people look down upon you or underestimate you, you cannot move forward in your life. You will keep thinking of them, their eyes and what they will say about you. you may finally try to imitate them and become a copy of them. In this case you lose your original identity and become nobody and unknown. Yet, an artist or a poet lives for his/her own art and not for others and that is why the speaker feels good when he hears the music coming from a far room in the hotel.
Eliot then moves to a his sixth subject which is related to modern women in the early twenties of the last century. The 20s were an age of full openness and moral dissolution in the West. That period, following the First World War, is often called the Age of the Lost Generation. Eliot picks up the image of modern women and describes them not in terms of their femininity but in terms of their physical attraction and body seduction. For Eliot, modern women are different from the Victorian ones who were conservative and decisive in their moral values. In the poem, modern women are looked at as if they were icons of sex and moral dissolution.
Eliot speaks of such women as spending most of their time mixing with men outdoors. In the poem, the modern woman appears with short-cut hair style and with naked white arms decorated with bracelets. The poet again feels bitter inside as he sees such immoral scenes and asks again “how should I begin”: how can he guide these women for traditions and moral and social values. The society has changed a lot and it is no longer a good place for serious reformers and poets. This is very similar to what Yeats feels in “ Sailing to Byzantium”.
In this big drama of life , one cannot become a hero and change the world: one may hardly play a moderate role and leave the theatre of life. This is Eliot’s seventh subject in the poem. The poet here, alludes to Hamlet who, in the famous Shakespearean play, is assigned the mission of settling justice by killing the king of Denmark who is at the same time his own uncle. The very idea of killing a king is enough to make a throbbing heart stop immediately. It is a dangerous and challenging thought for Hamlet in the 16th century because killing a king was a regicide forbidden, cursed and loathed by God Himself. Kings were considered the hands of God on earth. As such , Hamlet must have been a great man to think of doing this mission. He was a hero.
Eliot says we are not heroes at all to change reality as Hamlet did. We, the poet says, are just minor characters in the drama of life. As a poet , Eliot says, he may still play the role of a consultant to a hero like Hamlet but not the role of Hamlet himself. This modern society does not listen to or honor poets and artists, nor heroes either. Eliot confirms this idea of distancing poets from modern society’s life in the image that “ mermaids”, a symbol of Nature, imagination and art, are “singing, each to each”, not to poets: “ I do not think they will sing to me”.
At the end of this scanty comment on the poem, we may arrive at the reason why the speaker never sings his song. Nobody is ready to hear it since the speaker’s song is about art, poetry, real spiritual love, morality and mutual human understanding and tolerance. These are some of the values that modern society misses.
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