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The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock Summary and Analysis

Lines 1-36 Summary: J. Alfred Prufrock, a presumably middle-aged, intellectual, indecisive man, invites the reader along with him through the modern city. He describes the street scene and notes a social gathering of women discussing Renaissance artist Michelangelo. He describes yellow smoke and fog outside the house of the gathering, and keeps insisting that there will be time to do many things in the social world.

Lines 37-86 Summary: Prufrock agonizes over his social actions, worrying over how others will see him. He thinks about women’s arms and perfume, but does not know how to act. He walks through the streets and watches lonely men leaning out their windows. The day passes at a social engagement but he cannot muster the strength to act, and he admits that he is afraid.

Lines 87-131 Summary: Prufrock wonders if, after various social gestures, it would have been worthwhile to act decisively if it resulted in a woman’s rejection of him. He thinks he is not a Prince Hamlet figure, but a secondary character in life. Worried over growing old, he adopts the fashions of youth. By the beach, he sees images of mermaids singing and swimming.

Major Themes

1) Prufrockian paralysis

Paralysis, the incapacity to act, has been the Achilles heel of many famous, mostly male, literary characters. Shakespeare’s Hamlet is the paragon of paralysis; unable to sort through his waffling, anxious mind, Hamlet makes a decisive action only at the end of Hamlet. Eliot parodically updates Hamlet’s paralysis to the modern world in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Parodically, because Prufrock’s paralysis is not over murder and the state of a corrupt kingdom, but whether he should “dare to eat a peach” (122) in front of high-society women.

Indeed, Prufrock’s paralysis revolves around his social and sexual anxieties, the two usually tied together. Eliot intended Prufrock’s name to resound of a “prude” in a “frock,” and the hero’s emasculation shows up in a number of physical areas: “his arms and legs are thin” (44) and, notably, “his hair is growing thin” (41). The rest of the poem is a catalogue of Prufrock’s inability to act.

The original title of the poem was “Prufrock Among the Women,” and Prufrock, as a balding, weak, neurotic, effete intellectual, is both baffled and intimidated by women. Perhaps the central image of his anxiety is his being “pinned and wriggling on the wall” (58) under the unflinching gaze of women (exacerbated since the women’s eyes, much like their “Arms that are braceleted and white and bare” [63], seem eerily disconnected from their bodies). At least here the women seem to be paying attention to him, however hostile they may be. By the end of the poem, Prufrock feels ostracized from the society of women, the “mermaids singing, each to each. / I do not think that they will sing to me” (124-125). Interestingly, Prufrock’s obsession with his bald spot rears its ugly head here; the beautiful, vain mermaids comb the “white hair of the waves blown back” (127). As hair is a symbol of virility, Eliot suggests that Prufrock’s paralysis is deeply rooted in psychosexual anxiety.

Yet Prufrock admits he is not even “Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be; / Am an attendant lord … Almost, at times, the Fool” (111-112, 119). He is a modern tragic hero, which is to say he is a mock-hero whose concerns are pathetic yet still real. The final six lines of the poem comprise a sestet that somewhat echoes the Petrarchan sonnet, yet Prufrock, unlike Petrarch, does not have an ideal, unrequited love like Laura; he has a very real anxiety about all women.

2) Temporal repetition and anxiety

Prufrock’s paralysis roots itself in the poem’s structure. Eliot deploys several refrains, such as “In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo” (13-14, 35-36) and “And would it have been worth it, after all” (87, 99), to underscore Prufrock’s tendency to get stuck on a problem.

Delusion only masks Prufrock’s greater anxiety about the future and aging. Already characterized as having lost the luster of youth (and pathetically trying to approximate the bohemian style of rolling his trousers), the only thing Prufrock marches toward decisively is death. The two allusions to Andrew Marvell’s poem “To His Coy Mistress” ironically comment on Prufrock’s attitude toward life. In the poem, the speaker urges his lady to have sex with him while they are still young and alive. Prufrock’s allusions, however — “And indeed there will be time” (23) and “Would it have been worth while, … To have squeezed the universe into a ball” (90, 92) — reinforce his fixation on paralysis rather than sex. He deludes himself into thinking he has plenty of time left, and thus does not need to act; death looms, though, however much he wants to deny it. Sex, of course, reproduces new life while death ends it; Prufrock is somewhere in the middle, gradually advancing on the latter.

3) Fragmentation

One of the key terms in Modernist literature, fragmentation is the accumulation of numerous and varied — often to chaotic effect — signs (words, images, sounds). But it is so successful because the Modernists also believed that meaning could be made out of these fragments. Prufrock concerns himself with fragmentation. The city Prufrock lives in is itself fragmented, a scattered collection of “Streets that follow like a tedious argument” (8) above which “lonely men in shirt-sleeves” (72) lean out of their isolated windows. The population is fragmented, lost and alone; even the sterile skyline resembles a “patient etherized upon a table” (3).

Augmenting our appreciation of the fragmented Prufrock is insight into his mind and voice. His mind is perhaps more easily represented; all over the place, interrupted by self-interrogation and self-consciousness, looping back on itself, Prufrock’s train of thought is deeply fragmented. What is Prufrock’s voice, poetically speaking? It is difficult to answer because it is a combination of so many historic poetic voices. The poem comes in the form of a dramatic monologue, a form that is usually fit for a resonant speaking voice (and one that extinguishes the personality of the poet, too). But “Prufrock” has a chorus of fragmented voices — the epigraph to Dante, the frequent allusions to the Bible, Shakespeare, and many poetic predecessors — which deny the existence of a solo voice. This, then, is Prufrock’s voice: a fragmentation of voices past and present that somehow harmonize.

4) Debasement and Hell

The opening image of the evening “spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherized upon a table” (2-3) hints that what is lower down will be much worse. Prufrock sweeps the reader on a generally downward ride — from the skyline to street life, down stairs during a party, even to the sea floor. Prufrock consistently feels worse about himself in these situations — the reference to “Scuttling across the floors of silent seas” (74) is the ultimate in self-pitying — but they have more resonance when we consider the Dante epigraph. Prufrock is descending into his own Hell, and he brings the reader along with him for safety. Prufrock switches from his first-person singular narration to first-person plural in the last stanza: “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” (129-131). For his final plunge, Prufrock wants to make sure that we accompany him into his self-pitying Hell.

source: www.gradesaver.com