T.S. Eliots The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock :: essays research papers fc

TS Eliots PrufrockThe ironic character of "The turn in Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," an early poem by T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) in the form of a dramatic monologue, is introduced in its title. Eliot is talking, through his speaker, around the absence of love, and the poem, so furthest from being a "song," is a meditation on the failure of romance. The spread cipher of evening (traditionally the time of love making) is disquieting, rather than consoling or seductive, and the evening "becomes a patient" (Spender 160) "When the evening is spread out against the slant / Like a patient etherized upon a table" (2-3). According to Berryman, with this saltationary begins ripe poetry (197). The urban location of the poem is confrontational preferably of being alluring. Eliot, as a Modernist, sets his poem in a rotted cityscape, " a drab neighborhood of cheap hotels and restaurants, where Prufrock lives in solitary glumness" (Harlan 265). The ex perience of Prufrock is set against that of unnamed "women" (13), collectively representing womankind. Their unattainable status is delineate by their constant movement- they "come and go"- and their "polite chitchat about Michelangelo, who was a man of great creative energy, unlike Prufrock" (Harlan 265). We cannot imagine that they would mind to any love song by Prufrock, any more than they would flummox his name or his person attractive. "A man named J. Alfred Prufrock could hardly be expected to sing a love song he sounds to a fault well dressed" (Berryman 197)."J. Alfred Prufrock" indicates his formality, and his surname, in particular, indicates prudery. The powerful metaphor, a visual image of the "yellow fog" (15) in the fourth stanza, represents the jaundiced environment of the modern city, or Eliots "infernal version of the forest of Arden" (Cervo 227). The image is ambiguous, however, because Eliot also makes it c uriously attractive in the precision he uses in comparing the fogs motions to that of a cat who "licked its tongue into the corners of the evening" (17). We also hear the fog, disquietingly, in that image, in the onomatopoeia of "licked." Repetition of "time", in the following stanza, shows how the world of Prufrocks being is bound to temporality. "Prufrock speaks to his listeners as if they had come to visit him in some circle of motionless hell where time has stopped and all action has become abstractive" (Miller 183). "Time" is repeated, several times, but it is not only its inescapable strawman that Eliot is emphasizing, but also the triviality of the ways in which we use it "the winning of a toast and tea" (34).