LIDIA VIANU

T.S. Eliot - An Author for All Seasons

POETRY

THE LOVE SONG OF J. ALFRED PRUFROCK is a character's dialogue with himself, a dramatic monologue. Prufrock recalls disparate past experiences, which burst into his present. From their apparently odd order and their effect on his present mood, we can infer the whole story of Prufrock's life. The poem has two basic landscapes. It takes place in the two worlds at once. One is the city-scape we all know; in there, past, present and future are monotonously alike and hopeless. The other is an ideal space, ‘the chambers of the sea’, where there is no past, no present, no future, only the fairy-tale peace of the ever after.

The real Prufrock walks down a half-deserted street at the time when the evening ‘is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherised upon a table’. A sense of illness, even of impending death, pervades the town, its streets, its houses, its sky and gutters, animals and inhabitants alike. In cheap hotels, unknown people spend ‘restless’ nights. In ‘sawdust restaurants’, only the oyster-shells are left, dead traces of what once was sea-life. The streets follow one another ‘like a tedious argument / Of insidious intent’, menacing to lead the passers-by to an ‘overwhelming’ question, which everybody takes pains to avoid. A question that may deal either with life, or with death, who knows. Prufrock himself does not want to hear it, so he takes refuge in the companionship of an unseen creature, whom he entreats:

‘Let us go then, you and I ...’

but

‘Oh, do not ask, 'What is it?'

Let us go and make our visit’.

There is a helplessness in Prufrock's fear of the overwhelming question, which goes very well together with the sense of illness, of agonizing life that oppresses the whole poem. The objects are stirred to life, personified only to suggest unhealthiness. The fog is yellow, and it lazily ‘rubs its back upon the window-panes’, pushing hard, as if trying to invade the rooms with its pallor. The smoke is yellow, too, and it also pushes against the window-panes, rubbing its ‘muzzle’ on them. Then it slowly ‘slides’ over the whole street, floats upon the dirty water of the ‘pools that stand in drains’, allows itself to be blackened by the soot that ‘falls from chimneys’, and thus, pale and pitch-like, slips by the terrace, leaps suddenly, as if trying to take the house by surprise, then curls and falls asleep about the walls: a threatening, poisonous air that people must breathe.

Prufrock himself seems stifled by a secret, gnawing illness. He haggardly speaks of his effort to ‘prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet’. Weakness causes his hands to shake while he has to live through innumerable ‘works and days’. They are hands which can do nothing more than ‘lift and drop’ a question (the overwhelming question?) on a plate. A weakness invades his soul, which ‘murders’ and ‘creates’ little more than ‘a hundred indecisions’, ‘a hundred visions and revisions’. A soul that pushes everything as far from it as possible by merely whispering, ‘There will be time, there will be time’. In short, it is a very unsteady, shaky Prufrock that goes about his ‘toast and tea’ in a room besieged from outside by unbreathable smoke and fog.

Objects and beings (more specifically women) become aggressive. The only exception is that ‘you’ of the poem, unseen and only three times briefly mentioned. In her (his) vicinity, the afternoon and evening fall asleep ‘peacefully’, stroked by ‘long fingers’. The day grows tired and quiet. Time itself is hidden inside a veil, while the day of the poem leaves reality, making for the dream. All the other inhabitants of the poem are painfully alive, and irreversibly waste their lives on trifles. In the room, Prufrock obsessively repeats,

‘the women come and go

Talking of Michelangelo’.

At the top of the staircase, which Prufrock feels he is going to descend very soon, ‘they’ look critically at the ‘bald spot’ in the middle of his hair, at his ‘thin’ (which means old, withered) arms and legs. They contemplate his growing old as if unaware of their own lives leaking out, of the fact that they themselves will have to descend the stairs sooner or later, to experience the same feeling of loss which leaves Prufrock powerless, inert.

Other people's hands are said to have ‘measured out’ Prufrock's life with ‘coffee spoons’. He has heard voices ‘dying’, and seen autumn itself die along with them. Other eyes have fixed him, pinned him against a wall, where he ‘sprawled’ and ‘wriggled’ on a pin. Anyway, he describes his helplessness when it is much too late to change it, when all that he can finally do is to ‘spit out’ the ‘butt-ends’ of his ‘days and ways’. Braceleted or bare arms, ‘downed with light brown hair’ (reminiscent, how much, of John Donne), and the perfume of dresses have made him ‘digress’, lose his way: they have prevented him from forcing the moment to its ‘crisis’. Retrospectively he remembers he has ‘wept and fasted, wept and prayed’, but to no effect. He still had to see his slightly bald head severed from his body by those inimical hands, and brought in ‘upon a platter’, to be seen by those inimical faces. In short, he has seen the ‘eternal Footman’ (time) hold his coat, ushering him in and out, and ‘snicker’. The only feeling left inside him was that he was ‘afraid’.

Victimizing strangers gather round Prufrock at a remarkable speed. He feels they pin him to a wall, they cut off his head. He feels he is not far from being like Lazarus, who returns from the dead and is received with as much indifference as if the death he experienced were ‘no great matter’. He feels drowned among cups, marmalade, porcelain, ices, spoons, cakes, toast and tea, skirts, shawls, pillows, novels, walls, windows and the mechanical female prattle about Michelangelo. His loneliness benumbs him. He is feeble and has lost all appetite for the life spent in a room (in the company of females). He reiterates his helplessness in meaningless self-questionings: ‘Do I dare / Disturb the universe?’, ‘how should I presume?’, ‘And how should I begin?’, ‘Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?’ His life seems to have been squeezed off. He feels he is very far from the strength of prince Hamlet. He can only obey the flow of time, and he does so inertly. He contemplates his own powerlessness and whispers:

‘I grow old ... I grow old ...’

He finds nothing else to do about that, except to wear the bottoms of his trousers ridiculously ‘rolled’.

The largest part of the poem is haunted by this sad helplessness of a doomed being. The story of Prufrock's real life is a tale of failure. The poem is rather a loveless, than a love song of J. Alfred Prufrock. No song sung at all, as a matter of fact. Not by the hero, anyway. Yet, this real sense of frustration and failure is not the only feeling aroused by the poem. There exists a parallel world, a parallel mood, a parallel aspiration, which is never uttered, but secretly accompanies all these sad, unfulfilled moments. Prufrock himself complains of an inability to express what lies at the core of his life. He first entreats, ‘do not ask, 'What is it?'‘. Then he complains, ‘how should I begin / To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?’, and ‘It is impossible to say just what I mean!’ He is sure that, instead of making his visit to a room wherein ‘the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo’, he would have preferred to be ‘a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas’. He is afraid that the mermaids, the women of the sea, will never sing to him. Their song would certainly be different from the empty talks is rooms, among teas and ices. It would be the only song (unreal) in the poem, as a matter of fact. The end of the poem abruptly reveals that, while all the episodes of loneliness in rooms and among real people have been projected ‘in patterns upon a screen’, a mysterious couple (‘we’) have been lingering far away from the true town, ‘in the chambers of the sea’. All through the poem, this unuttered sea-dream has dogged each moment of unfulfilment, until it now finally seems to have gathered enough strength to become visible. Only Eliot is not the kind of poet to live in a dream. All his dreams (rather few, as a matter of fact) turn out to be uninhabitable, in the end. So, the end of Prufrock's loveless whispering is an unambiguously, painfully true menace. He warns that his dream will endure only

‘Till human voices wake us and we drown’.