So called Love Song
The ironic character of "The Love 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, about the absence of love, and the poem, so far from being a "song," is a meditation on the failure of romance.The opening image 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 sky / Like a patient etherized upon a table" (2-3). According to Berryman, with this line begins modern poetry (197). The urban location of the poem is confrontational instead of being alluring. Eliot, as a Modernist, sets his poem in a decayed cityscape, " a drab neighborhood of cheap hotels and restaurants, where Prufrock lives in solitary gloom" (Harlan 265). The experience of Prufrock is set against that of unnamed "women" (13), collectively representing womankind. Their unattainable status is represented 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 c
Berryman, John. "Prufrock's Dilemma" The Freedom of the Poet. Farrar: Strauss, 1976: 270-78. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Dedria Bryfonski and Laurie Harris. Vol. 13. Detroit: Gale, 1982. 197-98. Eliot, T.S. "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." Literature and the Writing Process. Elisabeth Mc Mahan, Susan X Day, and Robert Funk. 5th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice, 1999. 577-80. He rehearses various conversational strategies in the hope that, at last, he will find the means to divert the women from their "[t]alking of Michelangelo" (14). These include images from the earlier part of the poem, such as "lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows" (72). However, even as he does so, Prufrock is aware of the inadequacy of his procedure and would become a crab, "[s]cuttling across the floors of silent seas" (74). This is another image in the poem that is both disturbing and strangely appealing. It is an image of escape.
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Approximate Word count = 1423
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)
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