Intentional Disintegration or Disjointedness in Modernist Poems
Modernist poems and literature often use disjointed information and views aimed at developing the reader’s curiosity. The idea of dense intellectual and intentionally difficult to comprehend scripts are based on the concept that authors of the poems have wide research and knowledge hence they design their work in a manner that they convey diverse ideas. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock is one of the modernist poems with a lot of disjointed and disintegrated information. The final image of the “Sunday Morning” provides a summary that sheds light on the poet’s arguments. The paper analyzes the poem the Love Song to describe the idea of intentional disjointed and disintegrated ideas in the writings while highlighting how the scenario of the “Sunday Morning” summarizes the poem.
The Love Song by Prufrock initially presents disjointedness and disintegration when by stretching from physical setting, the cityscape, fireplaces, lamplights and cooking spoons, to vague and invisible images in the ocean (Kousar 90). This aspect of describing love does not have a flow although it describes the level of emotional attachment that the speaker had with his lover. The disjointed flow in this instance shows that the speaker in the poem loved the woman from the physical appearance to the invisible features of the fantasized relationship. The first and second stanzas of the poem present diverse aspects of disjointed information. For example, the speaker appears to have won the heart of the lover at some point, yet there is no information from the author explaining how this happened. In the first stanza, the speaker is addressing a lover and requesting time with her while, the second stanza reveal the speaker’s fantasizes. Furthermore, the reader can hardly identify the relationship between the yellow smoke and the two lovebirds.
Moreover, the information linking the intention of the speaker to reality is fragmented because in the first stanza, the speaker seems to know the lover he talking about. However, in the fourth stanza, the speaker wonders of the kind of person her lover is (Xue 81). Intentional fragmentation of ideas also presents towards the end of the poem when the author fails to make it clear whether the speaker in the poem finally got the courage to speak out to his lover or not. Surprisingly, the poem ends with the ocean fantasy, which does not in any way link with the reality.
In the last part of the song, the poet creates a picture of the “Sunday Morning” that summarizes ideas presented in the poem. Initially, the song describes the voices that linger throughout the song as voices pointing to the tomb in Palestine like the tomb of Jesus (Rubin 16). This makes the reader understand the essence of the sounds mentioned earlier in the song although the speaker did not clarify what they stood for. The ending of the poem also clarifies the issue of the spirits lingering in Palestine. This phrase introduces a disintegrated void by describing this aspect as the spirit of Jesus among the people. It also shows the essence of the woman rendering her holiness to the dead.
The song also describes how the dark covers the mountains without a single command and the berries ripen in the wilderness under the harsh conditions. This describes the wonders that characterize the spirit of Jesus that is claimed to be in Palestine (Johnston 4). The last part of the poem summarizes the poem by highlighting the high level of obedience presented by people and how they interacted with nature freely thus feeling high sense of connection with natural powers. Disjointed and disintegrated information in the modernist poems and songs attracts the attention of the readers and develops their curiosity making them have a desire of reading more to know the outcomes. An author may choose to clarify disjoints as in the case with the idea of “Sunday Morning” while often; one may leave ideas pending for the readers to develop their own interpretations.
Works Cited
Johnston, Joe. "We do Not Talk Poetry here: Wallace Stevens and the Practice of Poetry, Law, and Life." Experience: the Magazine of the Senior Lawyers Division, American Bar Association 19.2 (2009): 36,40,4. ProQuest.Web. 23 Sep. 2013.
Kousar, Shazia. "An Analysis of Verbal Parallelism in T.S. Eliot's Poem the Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." Interdisciplinary Journal of Contemporary Research in Business 4.12 (2013): 87-96. ProQuest.Web. 23 Sep. 2013.
Rubin, Merle. "Raking Up the Century's Best Poetic Leaves."The Christian Science Monitor: 16. Apr 13 2000. ProQuest.Web. 23 Sep. 2013 .
Xue, Haiqin. "On "an Overwhelming Question" in the Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock/"UNE Question Ecrasante" Dans La Chanson D'amour De J. Alfred Prufrock." Canadian Social Science 5.2 (2009): 79-82. ProQuest.Web. 23 Sep. 2013.
