Literary Criticism of T. S. Eliot’s Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock
Introduction
The poem Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock feels as fresh to the readers now as it did to Ezra Pound when he first read it. Among other traits, Prufrock exhibits qualities of a characteristic example of modernism in literature, a literary work from the era of literary history that stood towering for its capability for never repeating the same act twice. The poem is a great example of characteristic qualities of modernist poetry namely fragmentation, montage and objective correlative. The narrator T.S. Eliot’s Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock is not the poet T. S. Eliot himself but J. Alfred Prufrock, a fictional creation of the poet. T. S. Eliot in his essay Tradition and Individual Talent said, “The poet has, not a “personality” to express, but a particular medium, which is only a medium and not a personality, in which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways.” (Pelias, 1999)
Prufrock as the narrator is at once imaginative, longing for companionship and in fear and despair. He is simultaneously the modern man and the modern poet. Yet he is not Eliot himself. Prufrock is a prude-in-the-frock – a proud yet effeminate character and this is his love song. Eliot is adept in creating a variety of narrators and his magnum opus The Waste Land is narrated by multiple narrators. The narrator in Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock is not sure of himself. We shall follow this narrator in our analysis and examine how he uses techniques mentioned above to create meaning or convey message.
Analysis
The poem starts with an invitation to the reader, “Let us go then, you and I,” With this invitation the reader will be led through several montages of images and objective correlatives will induce emotions. In this analysis we shall try to follow the narrator of the poem through close observation of the language used. It is not made clear by the narrator as to where he wants to take the reader in the first stanza. The stanza throws a montage of images corresponding to dingy repulsive places in the city. The objective correlative of these images leads to the feelings of loneliness. At the end of the stanza the author mentions that the poem might lead to an overwhelming question but suddenly disrupts the poetry with “Oh do not ask what is it? Let us go and make our visit.” This is the first time that the narrator perplexes the reader in his monologue and he will continue to do so through the entire poem. (Murphy, 2007)
The next two lines read, “In the room the women come and go/Talking of Michelangelo.” The article ‘the’ precedes the noun ‘room’. This seems like ‘the place’ where the author and his audience are intended to go to. The place is a rather mundane place where women are coming and going and they are talking of Michelangelo. The allusion is to art and literature, that art and literature, especially of the bygone era, have become dead talk among mundane people. In the lines that immediately follow these two, smoke and fog and an agile creature, perhaps a cat are mentioned. Again there is a montage of images describing gloomy areas of the city and the acrobatics of the feline creature. The animal performs some repulsive and disgusting acts and finally falls into an innocent sleep. The imagery has many meanings – one, it is a description of the modern city and pollution, second it can also be seen as modern literature that fails to make its way through to the canons of high-literature and art. Thirdly the smoke and the feline creature can also be seen as the narrator himself who fails to reach the place he wanted to go to. The objective correlative of these lines leads to the feelings of sensuality. (Pelias, 1999)
After the feline creature falls asleep, time is suddenly slowed down. In this stanza of twelve lines time is mentioned eight times all with the same intent – “there will be time” i.e. we have time or will have time to spare or to reflect. While we ‘have time’ we see the fragmentation that has come to modern life. The narrator asks the audience to pause and slow down while he talks about the pretensions and the violence of everyday life.
The narrative so far is a beautiful collection of reflections on modern life. However, the readers do not know, at least not know it consciously, that where is the poem going. We are still not clear as to what the narrator is trying to telling us and yet we are some distance through with the poem. This is in remarkable contrast to the poems of the Victorian era where the objective correlatives used to be very direct leading to a direct creation of effect. Instead, here the poet goes into apprehensive monologue, “Do I dare?” It is not just the readers who get perplexed with the narrator’s intent but narrator himself is perplexed. The narrator is actually struggling to dare something. Indeed he is trying to say something but he fears his saying it would disturb the universe and he is not capable or not ready to do it. We observe pride and incompetence at once. The fear has made him talk of the modern civilization in images. He is constantly trying and failing to speak. But the poem does not really seem like that because the narrator is actually quite adept with language. A mystery is created around narratorial intention. (Brooker, 1994)
Despite the unclear intention of the narrator and the mystery around it much has been said about the dismal situation of the modern civilization. At this point the narrator claims that he has known all of the people and all of life. It is a life, the life of his times that is measured by coffee spoons. Next few lines in the monologue expresses despair that when the narrator wants to say something there are expectations from him about which he knows everything. At this moment, so far into the poem, the narrator raises the question, “Then how should I begin?” This is another perplexing situation for the reader. The narrator has been talking for so long and so well too and he says he hasn’t begun yet. The mystery deepens.
In the next three lines the narrator concludes that he has just been talking of simple things – dusk, narrow streets, smoke from pipes and lonely men. But he says this as a question as to should he have said this and then he expresses his intent of how things should have been, how he should have been, “I should have been a pair of ragged claws/Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.”
After three stanzas of agitation about what he wants to say, the narrator speaks of silence and expresses it in a montage household imagery. However the monologue comes back to the question soon and this time the narrator asks, “Should I, after the tea and cakes and ices,/Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?” As the narrator describes his fear through montage of imagery that alludes to the Bible, the curiosity towards the intent of the poem takes a back seat. The desire to get to the intent of the poem changes into awe and openness to whatever the narrator will bring to the audience. (Moody, 2004)
While the previous stanza was about just how miserable the narrator has become in his fears, in this one he says what he wanted to say although it is not without a twist. After a montage of grand imagery of Lazarus coming from the dead to tell the audience everything and squeezing of the universe into a ball, the narrator says, “If one, settling a pillow by her head/Should say: "That is not what I meant at all;/ That is not it, at all.”"
Another stanza with montage of imagery growing even more beautiful than before repeats, “And turning toward the window, should say:/"That is not it at all,/That is not what I meant, at all."” In the same stanza he says it is just impossible to say what he means. He is declaring that, but in that declaration lays the irony, why say it at all then if it is impossible to say what one means? This irony points towards another condition - the definitiveness of literature is gone. Till the modernist era, literature in all its forms had messages. But now that is lost forever. The artist loses significance too. Indeed this was the state of the world in the beginning of the 20th century – colonial exploitation was on its full throttle, enormous wealth flowed in the country and nobody cared about moral truth that was literature’s sole aim in the Victorian era. The lost significance of the artist is expressed in self-reflexive speech of the narrator, “No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;/ Am an attendant lord, one that will do” and “At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—/ Almost, at times, the Fool.” (Shucard, 1990)
Beyond this Prufrock grows further older and his fears take even greater control of him. Despite his ability to see mermaids, he cannot make them talk to him. The meaning is, he can imagine beautiful things but he cannot experience them. The narrator concludes that the visit has been through most beautiful places. However, our time has passed now and now human voices will wake and they will drown both Prufrock and his audience.
Conclusion
One of the most representative poems of the modernist era, Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock expresses the fragmentation of identity that has happened to the modern man in the wake of the second industrial revolution and the cities have become disgusting places to live in. This same theme is much more emphatically and intensely portrayed in the poem The Waste Land. Beyond this the poem moves to further describing the mundane aspects of modern life in beautiful ways and also the changed situation for the artist or the poet. Self-reflexivity was one of the key innovations of the modernist era and T. S. Eliot marries it with Imagist concerns with great dexterity in the art of poetry.
Works cited:
Shucard, Allen. Modern American Poetry. University of Massachusetts Press, 1990. Print.
Pelias, Ronald J.. Writing Performance: Poeticizing the Researcher’s Body. SIU Press, 1999. Print.
Murphy, Russell E.. Critical Companion to T. S. Eliot: A Literary Reference to his Life and Work. Infobase Publishing 2007. Print.
Brooker, Jewel Spears. Mastery and Escape: T.S. Eliot and the Dialectic of Modernism. University of Massachusetts Press, 1994. Print.
Moody, A. David. Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot. Cambridge University Press 2004. Print.
