Eliot' The Love Song of J. Alfred Prurfock

"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is one of the most anthologized poems of T.S. Eliot. Technically, as well as thematically, the poem marks a complete break away from the Victorian poetry and relics of Romanticism that can be witnessed in the early poems of W.B. Yeats. In the poem, the protagonist J. Alfred Prufrock, endures sudden variation and moods depicted ironically. These are the moods of cynicism, repulsion and disillusionment. The irony is manifest at its best through the antithetic impulses of initation and withdrawal. The images of urbanity invite a reader's attention. According to Peter Acroyd the images used on the poems ("The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and "The Portrait of a Lady") are the images inspired by Eliot's stay in Boston. Tracing the origin of the image and characters used in Prufrock, Acroyd says that "it was the life of Boston" and the "people who came close to shifting him altogether" that the poet "incorported into the two great poems of his early maturity" (Acroyd, 39). The most important aspect of the poem is the unique fusion of the character and the urban setting. Eliot himself confesses that 'we cannot isolate' the character 'with the environment' (Aeroyd, 39). It is interesting to note that the atomsphere and the character have been so completely fused together.
Women in the poems also have two distinct origins. On one hand, it serves to define and delineate the psyche of the protagonist and on the other hand, it helps us visualizing the whole atmosphere of the poem. The poem advances upon the resonating node and anti nodes of these two main sources of the emotion of the poem.

The paradoxical strain between the inner and the outer of the protagonist becomes clear in the opening lines of the poem.

Let us go then, you and I
When the evening is spread and against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon the table
(Ll 1 to 3)
In the succeeding line Eliot brings into prominence the urban backdrop against which the action of the dramatic monologue is set. The images like "restless nights in one night cheap hotels" (L. 6) and "streets that follow like a hidious argument" (L. 8) confirm the urban background supporting the lack of certitude and spiritual hollowness of the protagonist. Women appear in the monologue immediately after the first stanza of the poem.
The line quoted above present a generalized picture of contemporary society and the women in these lines are aptly metaphorical to the intellectual vacuum pervading the society. Austin Warren rightly puts in when he say:
The background of the drawing room, the women talking of
Michelangelo, represent the art chatter ocultivated
who talk of the art of the past, who a
They and Prufrock represent air effect, and decadent
and decayed world in which women and men talk, instead
of acting and loving.(p291)
The views of Austin Warren make clear the meaning inherent in the metaphor. The urban images employed to illustrate the picture of a cat emerging as the evening.


The yellow toy that rubs its back upon the window panes.
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window panes.
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains.
(Ll 15-18.)
Eliot brings forth the idea of inverted divinity and correlates it with destiny. The image of cat imparts new metaphorical shades to the women in the life of the protagonist who represents an eternal conflict subsisting between a sensitive intellect and a group of hostile forces operating upon the destiny of the protagonist. The protagonist mocks at himself and say:

Do I dare
Disturb the universe ?
In a minute there is time,
For decision and revisions which a minute will reverse

F.R. Lewis rightly observes that through Prufrock Eliot expresses "a modern sensibility, the wave of feeling, the mode of experience of on fully alive in his own age" (Bearings, 75). The reverberation of the decisions and revision oblige him a hallucinatory perceptions and ratify the pervasion of evil forces and omnipotence of inverted divinity realized through hallucinatory perceptions and expressed in surrealistic images;

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea.
By sea girls wreathed with sea weed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
(Ll. 129–131)
"The Love Song of J. Aflred Prufrock" sets into being a privileged treatment of women that represents and illustrates a larger aspect of human destiny comprising all forms of superior forces, social, as well as cultural. "The Love Song of J. Aflred Prufrock" sets into being a privileged treatment of women that represents and illustrates a larger aspect of human destiny comprising all forms of superior forces, social, as well as cultural.
Works Cited
Eliot, T.S. Collected Poems 1909–1962. Calcutta : Rupa and Company, 1994.
Lewis, F.R. New Bearings in English Poetry. London : Chatto and Windus, 1959.