The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock is the main poem in the book Prufrock and Other Observations published by T. S. Eliot in 1917, which marked the start of his career as a writer. It is still one of the dozen most famous 20th century poems in English.

The poem itself tells the inner feelings of a man in love who realises that his aspirations and his outlook on life are much deeper than those of the rest of the people (including the woman he wishes to ask to marry him). He feels the need to stir those around him, to make them conscious of the seriousness of life and of their frivolity, but at the same time he fears being rejected and mocked. Another thematic element is the subject of aging: the speaker contemplates his wearied heart (vis a vis the mornings and afternoons he has known), the repetitions inherent in life causing his physical deterioration (a bald spot, weak teeth making him fear food), and the consuming idea of an impending death.

The poem begins with a quotation from Dante's Inferno (XXVII, 61-66), which reads:

"S`io credesse che mia risposta fosse

A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,

Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.

Ma perciocche giammai di questo fondo

Non torno vivo alcun, s'i'odo il vero,

Senza tema d'infamia ti rispondo."

Which translates as:

"If I believed that my answer would be

To someone who would ever return to earth,

This flame would move no more,

But because no one from this gulf

Has ever returned alive, if what I hear is true,

I can reply with no fear of infamy."

There are passages which may be viewed as a criticism of English society of the beginning of the 20th century.

The poem may be viewed as a embodiment of bathos (a Modernistic style-figure): the lover (Prufrock) wants to be serious but he is just an ordinary (and even comic) individual.

One of Eliot's key literary devices which renders this poem so successful is ironic deflation, evidenced in the first stanza. It reads:

Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherized upon a table;

The beginning of the simile in the second line inclines upwards, leading the reader into a image of beauty, which falls sharply in the third line into an image of squalor. This up and down 'sighing' tone, repeated throughout the poem, is essential to the sometimes comedic but always melancholic speaker's voice.

There are several images/expressions in the poem which have become famous, including:

In the room the women come and go

Talking of Michelangelo

(which appears twice in the poem)

Do I dare

Disturb the universe?

and

I grow old... I grow old...

I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

as well as

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;

This poem is liberally quoted in popular culture. In Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now, Dennis Hopper's character refers to himself, saying "I should have been a pair of ragged claws, scuttling across the floors of silent seas.". The Allman Brothers Band's 1972 album Eat a Peach dares the listener to embrace the immediate, sensuous reality that loomed so ambivalently for repressed Prufrock:

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?

I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each

See also: Modernism, Ezra Pound.