4/15/2023 0 Comments J alfred prufrockHe has perhaps been tempted to approach prostitutes (see the reference to bare, braceleted arms in ‘the lamplight’, suggesting women he encounters in the street), but how much experience he’s ever had with women is doubtful. Alfred Prufrock (rather than, for instance, John Prufrock or James Prufrock). He is perhaps slightly pretentious and affected, given the styling of his name in the title as J. Who is Prufrock? Middle-aged, perhaps around 40 (his head has ‘grown slightly bald’ and Eliot himself said he had this age roughly in mind), socially awkward, living in a world he considers stifling and unsatisfying, his own place in that world not clearly defined (he is not a prophet like John the Baptist nor is he Prince Hamlet, but ‘an attendant lord’ or ‘the Fool’ – in other words, a bit-part actor rather than the starring role, even in his own life). And this is before we even begin to analyse the significance of Prufrock comparing himself to John the Baptist… Alfred Prufrock’ is far trickier to analyse than earlier examples of the dramatic monologue, given the way Prufrock’s thoughts dart about the place, without explaining his train of thought or why, for instance, we have skipped from talking about something as small and seemingly inconsequential as cakes and ices to the momentous Biblical scene of the head of John the Baptist being brought in on a platter for Salome. We cannot always be sure that what he is confiding to us is actually being uttered: we may instead have a direct line to his thoughts, to the inside of his head. Tennyson and Browning virtually invented this new form of poetry in the 1830s and 1840s, and their names were synonymous with it.īut Prufrock is a modern-day, urban speaker, who talks frankly about his failures: chiefly, his failure to ‘grasp the nettle’ or ‘seize the day’, his lack of sexual fulfilment, and his overall sense of failure. Alfred Prufrock’ about? It’s a dramatic monologue, but utterly unlike those written by Robert Browning and Alfred, Lord Tennyson in the previous century. Alfred Prufrock’īut what is ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ transcends this and becomes a much more universal statement about not fitting in, and about feeling social pressures to behave in a way we find uncomfortable. But if the poem did have a personal root, ‘The Love Song of J. Eliot, including Lyndall Gordon, have located the origins of this poem in Eliot’s own shyness around women as a student at Harvard. He lingers in this ‘happy place’, the chambers of the sea, until the human voices chattering around him in some drawing-room return him to the less pleasant reality of his life, and he ‘drowns’ again in the social pressures of those tea parties and the knowledge that society expects him to follow convention, marry one of the women he seems to find so intimidating, and settle down.Ĭuriously, many biographers of T. At the end of the poem, this oceanic imagery returns, with Prufrock hearing the song of the mermaids but thinking that they would not sing to him, only to each other.Įven in his fantasies he sees himself as inadequate, such is the crippling social anxiety of the early twentieth-century New England world (somewhat prudish and even puritanical in its attitudes). See the metaphors he uses to describe himself: he doesn’t just wish he’d been born someone else, but that he’d been born a completely different species, a crab or pair of ragged claws that roams the ocean bed. He also dreams of escaping the suffocating social world he inhabits, of tea parties and pretentious chatter about art (‘Talking of Michelangelo’).
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