Some poems become part of a nation’s psyche, some become part of your inner world, some mark the beginning of a new spiritual turn, some get forgotten, abandoned half-read, abandoned half-formed… Every poem has a destiny; the poem called “The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock” by T S Eliot has a destiny worth talking about. It’s mesmerising and terrifying.
The first thing to notice about this poem is how it takes you in – how it is really addressed to you, the reader, not anyone else; how the author hypnotises you into following his protagonist into the unknown.
“He” picks you up on the side kerbs of your imagination and takes you into a psychic landscape of “certain half-deserted streets”, of “one-night cheap hotels”, of “sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells”: the atmosphere seems a little sordid. Perhaps, this landscape is a border between life and death, banality and Hell, reality and myth, because “he”, Prufrock, has arrived from the other world, from the world of the dead: as becomes clear from so many allusions starting from the epigraph quoting Dante’s Inferno and continuing through “though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter”, “And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker, and in short, I was afraid.” These allusions actually turn into a blunt statement: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead, / Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all…” The end of the poem is also mystical, when Prufrock suddenly changes “I” to “We” and vanishes like Mephistopheles: “We have lingered in the chambers of the sea / By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown / Till human voices wake us, and we drown.”
There are, in fact, quite a few other indications that Prufrock may actually be an incarnation of Mephistopheles coming from hell (or bringing hell with him): notice how he appears suddenly out of nowhere like an apparition and addresses you directly? “The yellow smoke” is reminiscent of sulphur in Hell. The way “the yellow fog… rubs its back upon the window-panes… rubs its muzzle on the window-panes, / Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening, / Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains, / Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys, / Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap, / And seeing that it was a soft October night, / Curled once about the house, and fell asleep” conjures up the image of a cat. Cats in middle ages were associated with witches and the devil, with some suggestions a witch would turn itself into a cat to enter the homes of their targets. Prufrock’s boasting of having “heard the mermaids singing, each to each” and having “seen them riding seaward on the waves / Combing the white hair of the waves blown back / When the wind blows the water white and black” also associates him with the mystical “evil” forces, since mermaids were known to lure and drown men (yet, they would not sing to Prufrock – perhaps, because he is not a man?). Finally, the diversion regarding “I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be…” is another hint that Prufrock is only in the service of, and not himself the Devil, just like Mephistopheles was. This fits in with further Prufrock’s self-characterisation of being “Almost, at times, the Fool”. In line with that self-characterisation, he breaks into the ridicule of old age when a man would end up wearing “the bottoms of my trousers rolled” and losing one’s mind by asking oneself such, frankly, idiotic questions as: “Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare eat a peach?”
Prufrock has not come with a confession, but with a revelation which is “like a tedious argument of insidious intent”, a revelation that could “After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets, / After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor – / And this, and so much more” destroy the world: “Do I dare / Disturb the universe?” only to arrive to a conclusion that it would all be for nothing, that perceived greatness and pathos may fall victim to triteness and banality of “settling a pillow by her head” and of complete and embarrassing misunderstanding: “That is not it at all, / That is not what I meant at all.”
At the same time, Prufrock, amid his revelations, keeps an eye on “the women” who are “[i]n the room” (known to him but not revealed to the reader); who, he observes, “come and go / Talking of Michelangelo”; he also reacts to the smell: “Is it perfume from a dress that makes me so digress?” He appears aroused by “Arms that are braceleted and white and bare / (But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!)”. The women are in the room, but he clearly has something to say about men: “Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets / And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes / Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows?…” This is how he imagines he may begin his ultimate revelation. But he cuts himself short with what clearly seems to be a rebuke: [Had I said that], “I should have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas”. The synecdoche refers to a crab, a mollusk of sort – a way more primitive creature than a human being. Why would Prufrock be ashamed of what he started to say?
What was he going to reveal? Who is the woman he is agonising about revealing something dreadful to? He never clarifies whether it is “a woman” or “the woman”, but he lets us understand the circumstances of the meeting are rather intimate or at least informal: he anticipates her settling a pillow by her head (which suggests she may have been lying down) or throwing off a shawl and turning towards the window (i.e. away from Prufrock). However, the meeting with the woman (or a woman) does not actually take place, ever, as the entire time Prufrock’s ‘soliloquy’ is directed at the reader.
Another prominent character in the poem is the evening “spread oud against the sky, / Like a patient etherised upon a table”. This simile used in the beginning of the poem, which also indicates the state on the border of consciousness and unconsciousness, life and death, transforms into a full metaphor further in the poem: “And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully! / Smoothed by long fingers, / Asleep… tired… or it malingers / Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me”. Even though the tone of Prufrock is dismissive of death (his suggestion that the evening “malingers” turns one’s thoughts away from death), yet, the night is clearly approaching and once night sets in, the evening will die.
There is a vague, if not frightening, symmetry between the refrain of being “in the room” where “the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo” in the beginning of the poem and lingering “in the chambers of the sea / By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown” at the end of the poem. Could it be the same place? Could it be the place where Prufrock has dragged in the reader? He does say at the end: “We have lingered”, not “I” or “You and I”, but “we”, as if there is no longer a distinction… This may lead to “an overwhelming question”…
“Oh, do not ask, ‘What is it?’ / Let us go and make our visit.”
