There is a suggestion that if modern people shift their values, there is hope-even for an old man such as Prufrock, to take the risk and find the love that he has fled all his life. At the end of the poem there is a shift from “I” to “we,” which suggests that all of us in modernity live lives without passion and without risk. But love and sex are illustrations-Prufrock’s real focus is on living a life of risk and passion whatever that risk or passion might be. His “love life” is without meaning, more of a “sex without love” life than a love life, as he moves from one casual encounter to another. Prufrock feels worthless and uses a number of metaphors to express this feeling: his baldness, the butt-end of cigarettes, lobster claws-and unlike Hamlet, his suffering fails to ennoble him, but rather accentuates his degeneracy. Like Eliot’s other great modernist works, the poem is in the form of a collage which makes it difficult to follow, despite Eliot’s use of “objective correlatives” to induce a particular emotional response in the reader. Like Pound, the narrator’s emotions are communicated through imagery, in this case metaphor over metaphor. He invites the reader into his world by using romantic imagery followed by grim imagery, as Dante invites us in with the lure of a mysterious deep words and the presence of the great Roman poet Virgil. Prufrock clearly considers his crimes to be such that he is the scum of the earth, one of Dante’s damned souls confessing from the depths of hell.

Rather, focusing on similar issues to the post-World War II existentialists, he confesses to the crime of living a life without passion and without risk. Yet it is not a typical confessional poem, for Prufrock, an old, unattached man, is not confessing any conventional sin/crime such as murder or adultery. Alfred Prufrock” offers the reader a fragmented, painful confession of an old man that reflects the state of modern society. He struggles and asks himself “Shall I party my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?” He never recovers from his emasculation and this is shown by the final line where he states “till human voices wake us, and we drown.” He believes he will linger in the limbo of his impotence (treading water) between actually living (swimming) and dying (drowning) until someone else comes and saves him, which never occurs.Michaelpotts“The Love Song of J.

He is unable to even make the simplest decisions for himself. However despite this old age, he is still impotent. The yellow fog representing his impotence and emasculation fills the entire setting.Īs the poem develops, Prufrock describes his own maturity and old age. He never gets up from his seat while the “yellow fog” closes in around him. He follows his life and laments how he spent his life believing that “there will be time, there will be” (27) but then never being potent to change his destiny. The steam seems to follow the conscious of Prufrock as he examines what his life has been. Eliot plays with stream of conscious throughout the work. This work plays with many new techniques modernist writers were wrestling with. He talks about their arms, their eyes but never their souls. He refers this to women and how he only knows their body parts, not them as people. He states how he “has known them all already” which he restates to open multiple stanzas. Alfred Prufrock is a man who never experiences true love, with only passing encounters with women. It is titled as a love song however no love even takes place in the poem more specifically, J.

Despite it being one of his first published poems, it was widely popular though viewed as controversial it shot him to fame as a modernist writer.Īt its core, this work is paradoxical. Alfred Prufrock was one of Eliot’s first poems.

Published in 1915 with the help of Ezra Pound, The Love Song of J.

The lovesong of j alfred prufrock