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Old Friday, February 17, 2006
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Default Love Song Of Alfred J. Prufrock

“One does not have to die in order to go to hell, any more than one has to die to get to heaven. Both are states of mind and conditions, which people experience as a direct outworking of their thoughts, beliefs, words, and acts. If one’s mental processes are out of harmony with the law of man’s being, they result in trouble and sorrow; mental as well as bodily anguish overtakes one, and this is hell.”
~ Charles Fillmore.


The poem has as its central theme the emptiness of modern society, a pervasive spiritual malaise in the wake of the horrors of World War I. The poem’s hero, J. Alfred Prufrock, is a sexually frustrated middle-aged man who grapples with the dichotomy between his sensual desires and cynical rationale. It deals with spiritually exhausted person who exists in the impersonal modern city. Prufrock is a character that cannot reconcile his thoughts and understanding with his feelings and will. The poem displays several levels of irony, the most important of which grows out of the vain, weak man’s insights into his sterile life and his lack of will to change that life. Prufrock understands that he and his associates lack authenticity. One part of him would like to startle them out of their meaningless lives, but to accomplish this he would have to risk disturbing his “universe”, being rejected.

For Eliot, form is the largest difficulty facing the modern poet, who must find “a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history”. This sense that the modern world defies traditional structure and that the poet must somehow find a way of creating order amid chaos is a driving force in Eliot’s work, and each poem seen as offering a distinct solution to the problem of form. In this poem, Eliot shows the mental disorder of Prufrock instigated through the disparity between the social structure of his society and his inner needs. He finds his inability to come up to the level of his society which functions on physical strength, sexual virility and wealth.

Mental Disorder



Prufrock presented as a mentally enervated, middle-aged, frustrated man thinking about his present life and the current state of the world, and carving his thoughts into the form of a love song. He comes across more as an atmosphere, a consciousness, than as a character or a personality. He is paralyzed by indecision and extreme self-consciousness which makes him hesitant to “dare/ Disturb the universe”, consoling himself with the thought that “there will be time, there will be time”.
In the poem, the Sartrean idea that people judge each other based on what they see, and that no one has any control over other people’s perception of them, is very prevalent. However, this leads the character to different revelations. Prufrock feels that he has no complete self-definition. In The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, the anxiety that the idea of “the look” causes him is “a mortal dread of the ‘look’ of others, which he feels can annihilate him”(Brown). Prufrock lacks a sense of self, and he hypothesizes what he could be. However, Brown writes that through a close reading of the poem, the reader learns that “ the poem is not some final truth about his situation in the old terms, but simply that there is no final truth about selfhood, no hidden core, no (disguised) coherence. The poem effects a new type of poetic character, based on unresolved multiplicity, and a new kind of tentative discourse to help construct fragmentary man”. Prufrock so internally fragmented by his lack of identity that there is no hope for him to be whole. Prufrock feels that when others judge him, he loses himself, and does not know where to begin. He says,

And I have known the eyes already, known them all -- The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase, And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin, When I am pinned and wriggling on a wall, Then how should I begin. . . . . .How should I presume?

Once judged, he becomes trapped by how other people view him and he no longer knows who he is. This is evident though the fact that he never writes of what he is, choosing instead to use phrases such as “I should have been”, “I am not”, “I have known”, and “I shall”. His writing is of his past and his future, and what “there will be time” to accomplish. His lack of identity does not allow him to define himself in the present at all, and he must lay all hope in his view of the future. When he realizes that his future is only a fantasy and that people like women and the mermaids will never see him the way he wants them to, he is awakened to reality, and feels that he “will drown”.
Prufrock seemed to epitomize the frustration and impotence of the modern individual. He seemed to represent thwarted desires and modern disillusionment. Such phrases as “I have measured out my life in coffee spoons” capture the sense of the unheroic nature of life in the twentieth century. Prufrock’s weaknesses can be mocked at, but he is a pathetic figure, not grand enough to be tragic.

And indeed there will be time
To wonder, ‘Do I dare?’ and, ‘Do I dare?’
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair—
(They will say: ‘How his hair is growing thin!’)

These lines depict a man with an overwhelming fear and insecurity about his situation. He is concerned with a bald spot and what people will say about it. He desires something very much, yet he is afraid to act. Eliot is not content with simply portraying a man who is insecure, instead, he uses the character’s own recollections and melancholy to deepen his meaning, “For I have known them all already, known them all— / Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons”. The speaker is tormented by his neurotic insecurity.
The epigraph, a dramatic speech taken from Dante’s Inferno, provides a key to Prufrock’s nature. Like Dante’s character, Prufrock is in a “hell”, in this case the hell of his own feelings. For the first forty-eight lines of the poem, he contemplates the aimless pattern of his divided and solitary self. He is a lover, yet he is unable to bring himself to declare his love. He is both the “you and I”, pacing the city’s grimy streets on his lonely walk. He observes the foggy evening settling down on him. Growing increasingly hesitant, he postpones of the moment of his decision. Should a middle-aged man even think of making a proposal of love? Prufrock wrestles with his desire and his doubt. And, he imagines how foolish he would feel if he were to make his proposal only to discover that the woman had never thought of him as a possible lover; he imagines her brisk, cruel response: “That is not what I meant, at all”. Finally, Prufrock decides that he lacks the will to make his declaration. “I am not Prince Hamlet”, he says; he will not, like Shakespeare’s character, attempt to shake off his doubts and “force the moment to its crisis”. He feels more like the aging, foolish Polonious, another character in Hamlet. He is able only to dream of romance. He will “walk upon the beach”, though he probably will not venture near the water. He has a romantic vision of mermaids singing an enchanting song, but assumes that they will not sing to him. Prufrock is paralyzed, unable to act upon his impulses and desires. He will continue to live in a world of romantic daydreams – “the chambers of the sea” - until he is awakened by the “human voices” of real life in which he “drowns”.

The mental hell in which Prufrock is burning is his loss of ability to perform and satisfy the desires and demands of his society and his inner desires. The problem of the society is that it is functioning not in a real world but in an artificial world. While Prufrock fails to fit in the standards set by it due to his faltering age and health. He has been living on his minimal self, fulfilling only his physical desires. Therefore, he finds himself in mental distress and agony from which he is unable to escape.


Hell is oneself;
Hell is alone, the other figures in it
Merely projections. There is nothing to escape from
And nothing to escape to. One is always alone.

~The Cocktail Party,T.S.Eliot.
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~*~ Life is short, art long, opportunity fleeting, experience treacherous, judgment difficult ~*~ Hippocrates
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