Title: Ironic - is neither a song nor very much to do with love.
TS Eliot wrote this poem about a balding confused older man when he was in his twenties. ...he also had a phase when he signed himself "T Stearns Eliot" ^^ ...it has been described as "the anthem for young people with old souls and ironic nonconformists." Just a thought :)
Lines are of varying lengths, rhyme varies from free verse (lines 70-75) to subtle rhyme (lines 5-12) to slightly irregular (lines 1-4) or the painfully obvious unsubtly of "In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo" etc - this is nothing like a rhythmically reassuring song.
'J Alfred Prufrock' - sounds slightly (or more than slightly!) pretentious, insecure. Associations of "prude" and "frock"...
The quote at the beginning "S'io credessi..." is from Dante's Inferno - linked perhaps because Prufrock like the speaker here is trapped in his own personal hell.
The first two lines of poem are a romantic invitation, a rhyming couplet - but Prufrock is unable to sustain these pleasant, outward-looking ideas. "Modern poetry began at line 3 of Prufrock"(! I can't remember where I got that quote, unfortunately.) Image of "a patient etherized upon a table" stubbornly unromantic, disturbing, suggesting death/near-death, injury, waste - as well as the paralysis Prufrock feels in society.
The little unromantic tour of the city, beginning up in the sky, works its way down all the way to the sawdust covered floors of cheap restaurants. The language becomes decidedly unromantic too or 'unpoetic' - "one-night cheap hotels" - the opposite of love and romance.
"Insidious" perhaps has a slightly sinister ring to it, some ulterior motive, but mollified by "tedious" - it's all happened before, ineffectual. "Streets that follow like a tedious argument" - an unusual simile, but very clever. Makes perfect sense - a road that goes round and round/nowhere and is not worth the travelling...
Following these streets to the end of line 9, suspense is built up, and heightened with the use of the ellipsis "lead you to an overwhelming question..." - but left unsatisfied; ridiculously dismissed and unresolved with "Oh, do not ask..."
"Oh do not ask "What is it?" / Let us go and make our visit." - another example of the awkward, obvious rhyme that shows Prufrock's character trying and failing to be impressive and witty - he just becomes laughable, though pitiable too.
"In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo" - apart from being another obvious laboured rhyme, this shows the artificiality of the culture still more - the pretensions of these 'educated' women who like to appear above everyone else. The lines are set apart; Prufrock feels this is important, but he is isolated from their talk. Another possible connotation is Michelangelo as the sculptor of "David" - a paragon of young male beauty -- Prufrock cannot compare!
The fog/cat simile at once conveys an unpleasant/disturbing sensuality (for example: "licked its tongue into the corners of the evening"... think about that for moment, or maybe you'd rather not!) - but also, like Prufrock the observer, it lingers on the outside of the houses, at the window-panes and chimneys. Nevertheless, the pollution seems to get everywhere in the city to the point where it is almost comforting and protecting: "Curled once about the house"... (I think the cat simile is rather cute and comforting by the last few lines.)
The next stanza concerning time uses Biblical ideas (Eccesiastes 3) and dramatic language: "There will be time to murder and create" - but Prufrock's cares and concerns remain absurdly trivial. He is obsessed with this introspection and self-critique; he is concerned above all that "before the taking of toasts and tea" - the most defining moment as he can think of - he has had time for his indecision, time to go back over what he has already done!
A lot of the poem is in the present tense - references to the past are usually made more laboured with "have somethinged", the future is clouded in daunted uncertainty and full of question marks: "How should I presume?" etc. It is as if for the most part Prufrock does not actually dare to do anything about his old mistakes, cannot think past his present insecurities.
This discussion of Time is interrupted once more with "In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo" - they are still at it, and he is still outside.
All the worry of daring and disturbing the universe is conjured up just by thinking about walking up the stairs - he reassures himself that there is still time to "turn back and descend". Then - as if from nowhere - comes a classic worry of middle-age "How his hair is growing thin!" He anticipates other people's scornful comments about him, and ultimately decides that, no, he does not dare "Disturb the universe" by doing anything.
"To prepare a face to meet that faces that you meet" - he is both seeking and dreading social contact. This is a very striking expression of a familiar (at least to me!) feeling.
Prufrock is insecure, confused, but very self-aware and actually quite a keen observer (as was Eliot). "For I have known them all already, known them all" and its variations sound tired like an old story. He is also painfully aware of the passage of time: "the evenings, mornings, afternoons / I have measured out my life with coffee spoons". The wonderfully trivial connotations of 'coffee spoons' add to the futility which seems to exist now in everything.
"...dying fall" has echoes and connotations with Twelfth Night - from Orsino's first "If music be the food of love" speech. Continuing these associations links "the music" in the next line with love, and again, Prufrock is outside that world entirely; the music comes from "a farther room" - love is very far away from him. This also perhaps links back to the title - it has become clear by this point that the poem is in fact anything but a song of love.
The social anxiety becomes acute as Prufrock imagines what will happen if he does dare to go into this far off room. "formulated" especially as it is repeated strongly suggests that other people too will calculate and scientifically analyze him - and this is what he most fears. He feels he has nothing in him of worth - nothing but "the butt-ends of my days and ways" - so he does not dare. The synecdoche here (and later with arms) emphasises the point: eyes dominate the stanza and the room - it is their cold stares that thus paralyze him.
"Sprawling on a pin... pinning and wriggling..." suggests helplessness, pain... and like the butterfly/beetle the simile seems to refer to, he is insignifigant in himself, but (afraid of) being studied and pulled apart. Analyzed. And life is so very fragile...
The obsessive observance without action shows itself again with the imaginings of all different kinds of arms - arms that hold and embrace; outside all this, Prufrock longs for physical contact with someone.
Prufrock is middle-aged, but in rare view of the future (a question again, of course) he thinks of "lonely old men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows" - what he fears he will become.
The earlier comparison with a beetle or some sort of insect pinned on a wall, and now the idea "I should have been born a pair of ragged claws..." shows again Prufrock's sense of his own worthlessness. Crabs are clingy, parasitical. Also - there is perhaps another link with Shakespeare here (see later Hamlet reference) Hamlet says to Polonious: "For yourself, sir, should be as old as I am, if, like a crab, you could go backward." Prufrock can never advance forward; he scuttles awkwardly around the edges of life, going over old ground and gaining nothing.
""And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!" - the exclamation suggests surprise, as if he himself can never be peaceful. The constant awareness of time is here again: the times of day seem absolutely tangible, sleeping right "here beside you and me".
Another silly rhyme "Should I, after tea and cakes and ices / Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?" shows both indecision and the extreme absurdity of many of his worries, "crisis" being linked now with "tea and cakes and ices"!
The Biblical ideas in the next stanza appear to add weight to his musings - but that effect is immediately made ridiculous by the pathetically human worry about baldness again placed in parathenses "wept and prayed, / Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter." (John the Baptist beheaded) "I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker" could be either interpreted as referring to another human experience that Prufrock is now living in complete dread of, or as Death itself which also frightens him... Some sort of fear that Death will be just as awkward and embarrassing and painful as his life is?
It takes a few lines to get to the real point of the next stanza, broken up by dashes - it is as if Prufrock can hardly face the mere consideration of such 'great things'. First comes a long description; a list of staid social conventions; then "Would it have been worth while" is asked again, and finally when the point is reached it is done with great dramatics, overreaching what is required in an effort to get it right. And then, with great anticlimax, we come to Prufrock's greatest fear. If, after all he has to offer, if it was the very secrets of the universe... he should be rejected, misunderstood, dismissed and totally humiliated. The very exposure is excruciating painful to him, expressed with: "as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen", and the rejection or misunderstanding seems so easy and casual for someone else to do, merely: "settling a pillow or throwing a shawl". (More juxtaposed references to the plain and everyday.)
The reference to Lazarus could be referring to the story of the beggar and Lazarus, in which case it offers a nice link to the Dante fragment at the start (seeing hell etc), and indeed to Prufrock's own situation; there are things which each has to offer, but can or will only say them on the condition that they will not be passed on. Of course, in Prufrock's case, what he has to offer are not the secrets of the universe but just his own unhappy introspection and an unsuccessful "love song".
Prince Hamlet is of course the ultimate indecisive tragic hero - but although Prufrock can be identified with him in that respect, he's no hero at all, as he readily admits. This stanza uses lists to convey Prufrock's intense self-pity: "Deferential, glad to be of use, / politic, cautious, and meticulous" - nothing too bad so far, but... - "full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse..." - his thoughts continue their downward path - "at times, indeed, almost ridiculous - / Almost, at times, the Fool." This is another severely self-aware moment: Prufrock knows he is something of an Extra in life, someone to make up the numbers "to swell a progress, start a scene or two."
Moving back to one of his favourite worries: "I grow old... I grow old...". The next few lines are filled with trivial worries: "Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?" - but they also contain the first decisions that we have seen Prufrock take. They may be trivial, but the repeated use of "I shall" is something of an answer to the trivial questions he frames throughout: "I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled" and "I shall wear white trousers and walk upon the beach." Rolled trousers was a young fashion - the allusion suggests Prufrock is making some sort of attempt to break away from the middle-aged man he is and the old one he is to become. He fears the passage of time; maybe this is a way to stop it.
However, any brief moment which almost seems like a resolution of a sort is shattered as his mermaid fantasy: "I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each" is brought back to earth with "I do not think that they will sing to me." (not even worthy to be lured by Sirens?) But this fantasy is a brief escape - a reminder of the terrifying reality of social traps: "human voices" (perhaps like the music and voices from "a farther room" earlier?) "wake us, and we drown."
The "we" referred to in the last three lines is probably more ambiguous than the "you" at the start of the poem - is Prufrock to be grouped with the reader? the mermaids? Or is he now shown as a depressive sort of Everyman - representing as he does the most extreme forms of social anxiety, indecision, paranoia that probably exist in smaller infrequent doses in most people?
It is a particularly sombre end to a poem which throughout has had it's moments of cynicism/satire/parody/black humour... Continuing perhaps the downward movement suggested throughout, down right into the deepest sea chambers...? (link to Dante - descent to hell.) It's our own personal, very human and very mundane hell too. "Human voices wake us." We may 'drown' in fantasy, but it's Life that will really kill us.