There's great irony in this title. This is supposed to be a love song, an intimate exposure of one’s feelings, but we don't even know Prufrock's first name. The original title Eliot had for this poem was "Prufrock Among the Women." This is a love song, but it’s a dramatic monologue (with all the ironic self-exposure attached to that form).
Some features of a dramatic monologue:
A single person, who is not the poet, utters the speech that makes up the poem, in a specific situation at a critical moment.
This person may be addressing or interacting with one or more other people; but we know of the listeners’ presence, and what they say and do, only from clues in the speech of the single speaker.
The speaker, knowingly or unknowingly, reveals their character and temperament through the speech
Prufrock is singing to himself, the only being he may be capable of loving. He is the ultimate 20th-century man: self-conscious, concerned with exterior realities, intellectually and emotionally impotent, and alienated to the point of anomie.
Anomie is a term from sociology, one of the newest scientific disciplines when Eliot was writing this poem. Emile Durkheim noted that some modern social forces tend to break down the moral strands of social cohesion. Anomie is an extreme form of this alienation, the circumstance of individuals whose relationship to the social whole is extremely weak. Prufrock is the perfect example of this state of being; he is so alienated from society that he is alienated even from himself.
There's a pretty decent graphic version of this poem (as in graphic novel). Julian Peters has illustrated some important texts, and "Prufrock" is chief among them. You can check out Julian Peters' work here. This image is his title page for the poem.
If I thought my reply were meant for one
who ever could return into the world,
this flame would stir no more;
and yet, since none (if what I hear is true)
ever returned alive from this abyss,
then without fear of facing infamy,
I answer you.
The speaker is Guido da Montefeltro, who is condemned to the 8th pit in the 8th circle of hell for giving false counsel. Like Prufrock, he knows he’s in hell, and so he can tell the truth about his life, since no one has ever escaped from hell to tell living humans about soeone there. The great irony is, of course, that Dante actually does get out of Hell, and so he can smear Guido’s name on earth through his poem.
The connection here is that Prufrock thinks he's sharing his private hell with us because we're all in it as well, and we'll never be able to get out of it to speak or think ill of him. But his private thoughts here are broadcast wide, and we all end up knowing why he's in this hell and what kind of person he is.
You can argue that Modernism begins with this line. The two lines that precede it could have been written by Pope or Keats, or almost anyone else writing verse in the previous two centuries.
But this simile is thoroughly modern: cold, sterile, imitative of both a performance (in an operating theater) and death itself. It's certainly not romantic or Romantic. The evening isn't spread out like Wordsworth would have it:
It is a beauteous evening, calm and free,
The holy time is quiet as a Nun
Breathless with adoration; the broad sun
Is sinking down in its tranquility;
The gentleness of heaven broods o’er the Sea …
Instead, it's a deliberately ghastly image. There's no real emotion here; the image is literally clinical. An etherized patient isn't beauteous, and, a;lthough they might look tranquil, that's because they look like they're already dead. So this image perfectly illustrates both the Modernist movement and Prufrock's state of mind. This is the best Prufrock can offer a woman.
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Instead, we're in a seedy section of London, where the streets aren’t wide and straight, where romance is gone, and everything is tawdry and cheap.
A retreat usually means a place of refuge from the cares of the everyday world. This area of the city doesn't seem conducive to peacefulness or rest. The one-night cheap hotels (in the next line) wouldn't inspire a good night's rest. And, if they do communicate anything to s (as they will later in their argument), they mutter.
This is an example of the Pathetic Fallacy, where the setting can be used to reflect a character's mood or state of mind. Prufrock is empty, convoluted, and inwardly-focused, like these streets.
A scene from what was called at the time a "Low Lodging House."
Conditions in these hotels, which catered to the poor, immigrants, and those without a consistent source of income, were controlled to some degree by Shaftesbury's Common Lodging-House Act of 1851.
So for the second half of the nineteenth century, this would be illustrative of the conditions that many people who emigrated to London were apt to find.
Confusing close quarters that make it easy to get lost.
Tedious arguments double back upon themselves, or go on and on, or reiterate the same thing, over and over again. The end result is that you end up losing patience or getting lost.
Although the streets appear confusing, and double back on themselves, and circle around strangely, they always end up in the same place: the question Prufrock can't face.
You can't answer the question when you don't even know what the question is.
The question: this haunts Prufrock throughout the text. Is it marriage? Sex? Something different? Something more? In the end, pinning this down doesn’t matter, because he doesn’t have the courage to risk the thin little life/relationship he has now for the chance at something better.
The allusion is to James Fenimore Cooper's The Pioneers, the first of The Leatherstocking novels, about life on the frontier in early America. In Cooper, the overwhelming question is about a top-of-the-line military ship, and is asked with great eloquence. Here it is about something that may be overwhelming only to Prufrock, who has absolutely no eloquence.
We can't ask Prufrock what the question is; he's still trying to formulate it for himself. And, as we'll see, he has enough trouble communicating when he knows what he wants to say, so don't expect anything coherent from him while he's still trying to figure out what's going on for himself.
This is the third time he's prodded us to go in just twelve lines. But where are we going? Some critics say we're headed to a brothel, given the route of our walk. Others say this is just another indicator of Prufrock's inability to deal with social situations.
The use of "the" here, a definite article, implies that we've seen this room before in the poem. But we haven't. So we're left to conclude that this usage is for a common point of reference, a room Prufrock isn't in presently (and may never be able to enter)
What kind of people can actually carry on a conversation about Michelangelo? Prufrock is showing his associations with the upper class, those with enough money, education, leisure, and a willingness to see Michelangelo's works.
Most of this stanza deals with the city, London. The fog is yellow (or sometimes black or green) because it contains soot particulates and sulphur dioxide, a poisonous gas. With the rise of industrialization it became common in London, created by water vapor in the air mxed with the smoke given off by burning soft coal in home furnaces and in industrial processes. It can get so bad that it becomes deadly to people with respiratory problems, the very young, and the elderly.
Under certain conditions, these London fogs lasted for days. By the 1880s, there were usually 60 or so multi-day fogs each year in London. The Great Smog of London, in December of 1952, killed over 4,000 people, while over 100,000 more were made ill by the smog's effects.
But "yellow" also implies cowardice and fear, something Prufrock demonstrates throughout the poem.
The fog-smoke-cat connection is spelled out, but Prufrock is also the cat, looking into rooms, trying to decide to enter, then curling up alone. The cat and Prufrock are always outsiders. Prufrock is too timid to enter, sticks to the corners as a wallflower, then suffers derision (or so he thinks).
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that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.
Prufrock is concerned about time, and in this stanza he's trying desperately to convince himself that he has a lot of it. Eliot is alluding to Marvell’s "To His Coy Mistress": "Had we but world enough, and time." In Marvell, the speaker urges his beloved not to be coy but instead to seize the moment, to take advantage of youth and "sport us while we may." Prufrock continually postpones even meeting a woman, saying "There will be time."
This also echoes Ecclesiastes 3:1-8: "To everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven. A time to be born, and a time to die . . ."
We all prepare a face to meet the faces that we meet
We all put on a persona, a false front, when we meet people. We even codify this, with aphorisms like "Dating is just the process of hiding your crazy long enough to get the other person to commit." We all want to be liked, and we all want to present our best sides to the world, so we all prepare different faces for different crowds.
. . . And a time for every purpose under heaven . . .
Time to end a life or begin one. Here's the love-death connection, the Eros/Thanatos conflict, neatly summed up in the French phrase for an orgasm: "la petit mort," or "the little death."
Works and Days is a long poem by Hesiod describing the life of the farmer and recognizing that work gives life meaning, enabling one to overcome a lazy and pointless existence. This is especially appropriate for Prufrock in his indecision, timidity, and fear. it also connects with the shepherd reference from Marvell in line 23, contrasting the simplicity and physicality of the pastoral life with Prufrock's inward, frustrated urban life.
The hands are those of a hostess serving at tea. Instead of putting food on Prufrock’s plate, though, she serves him a question about the purpose of his life.
Prufrock dines on the unspoken questions people have about him.
His friends feed him with concern and questions, plopped on his plate like food.
This image plays into Prufrock's synecdochizing of women, the type of rigidly formal social events he attends, and his inability to chew on or digest the problems set before him.
Prufrock is trying to convince himself that he has time to act. But he only sees time for INdecisions, not decisions. He’ll hem and haw as long as possible.
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for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.
Serving tea in the Edwardian age
These are metonyms for the small social conventions; they make up the majority of Prufrock's life. This isn't a proper meal, hardly even a snack. It's dry and lifeless, sterile and so rigidly correct that almost anything of significance is squeezed out of it.
We return to the scene, after Prufrock’s digressions, and everything is still the same; his indecision hasn’t changed anything. The women return, doing the exact same thing. Their lives are repetitive, just like Prufrock’s. The women are implied to be pseudo-intellectual and pretentious, who don’t do anything of real use but spend their days "visiting," "lunching," "taking tea," and talking about the appropriate topics for such visits: classical art and literature, the things women of that era were told they were supposed to interest themselves in. Contrast them with Hesiod’s farmers.
See also 19c French poet Jules Laforgue, a major early influence on Eliot:
Dans la piece les femmes vont et viennent En parlant des maîtres de Sienne.
("In the room the women come and go
Talking of the Siennese masters.")
This repetition shows Prufrock desperately trying to convince himself that he has time, but the enormity of the choices before him paralyze him. There is time to ponder the options available to him, but he spends his life wondering whether or not he should "dare," and ends up doing nothing, filled with regret and frustration.
He turns back, perhaps thinking himself not worthy or capable of ascending to a higher level/order of living. Some read this as his desire to enter the room/conversational group/social circle of the women, but it's apparent later in the poem that he's already in that social stratum.
Prufrock is aware that he is aging, but he is far more aware that others notice his aging. These unnamed commentators could be the women conversing about Michelangelo, or society in general. Or they could just be the product of Prufrock's own self-consciousness and alienation.
The strange thing about this is that this feeling of self-consciousness is something that adolescents go through, not adults.
The imaginary audience describes the adolescent's belief that other people are as keenly interested in his or her concerns and needs as the adolescent is. Adolescents may feel as though they are always on stage, as though all eyes are continually scrutinizing how they look, what they wear, and how they act (Frankenberger, 2000). They view themselves as the center of attention and feel extremely self-conscious and overly concerned about the slightest flaw in their appearance ("How could they not notice this blemish? Everybody will notice!").
Nevid, Jeffrey S. Essentials of Psychology: Concepts and Applications. 5th edition. Cengage Learning, 2018, p. 352.
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(They will say: "How his hair is growing thin!") My morning coat,
Morning coats
A morning coat is a single-breasted coat, with the front parts usually meeting at one button in the middle, and curving away gradually into a pair of tails behind.
The sack suit (which looks like a contemporary men's suit, without tails) had been replacing the morning coat for over 30 years, so Prufrock’s clothes are out of fashion.
As the fashion moved toward something more casual, Prufrock cannot give up his formality, because it's what gets him through these terrible social situations.
Prufrock breaks people into their constituent parts, since he can't cope with relating to real, whole, people. So he assumes that everyone does the same thing with him. This is the second comment that the undefined "they" have said about him. We don't know who "they" are, and maybe neither does Prufrock. But we know that they pick him apart, reducing him to hair, arms, and legs.
Notice that both of these comments are in parentheses, as Prufrock tells us/himself this as an aside, a warning whispered behind his hand, reminding us/him that not only is he growing old and not looking so good, but that people are noticing the passage of time and its effects on him.
The most iconic line in the poem, perhaps in all of Modernism.
Every action one does, every life, "disturbs" the universe. If Prufrock cannot disturb the universe, he cannot live. He seems to feel like he's caught in some sort of mechanistic trap, where every action in the universe has been predetermined, and if he acts to please himself, or even of his own will, he'll somehow disrupt the harmony of the entire universe.
The literary connotations of "revisions" and the line in general underline Prufrock’s attempt to self-dramatize. Like Hamlet, Prufrock will always postpone the dramatic climax, because he can’t decide what he’ll say to the woman.
Prufrock can’t take on full days, so he breaks them into their constituent parts, just as he does with humans. But the way he orders them here, from one evening to the next morning, to the next afternoon, tells us that time is passing, as night becomes day, and with each passing day, Prufrock has less time.
"dying fall" refers to notes in music that fade away. In Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, the lovesick Duke Orsino says,
If music be the food of love, play on;
Give me excess of it; that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die. —
That strain again; it had a dying fall.
There’s also the sex=death, orgasm=dying connection. And these voices aren’t in the room he’s in, as with the women who come and go.
Prufrock has the idea that any attempt to break out of the life he now has is somehow presumptive of him, as if he doesn’t deserve to have a life which he enjoys. The universe has deemed that he must be a small man with a small, sad life. Since he’s not part of any real community, how could he presume to join one or presume upon one to accept him?
A formulated phrase is one that is reduced to or expressed as a formula; it's a definite and systematic statement. To Prufrock, a woman, especially one who is definite, can crush him into insignificance.
This stanza connects with the tiepin in 43. Prufrock sees himself as an insect, pinned to the wall by the look of a woman. His arms and legs are thin, and the tiepin fixes him to the wall.
One method for preserving insects was to drop them in a mixture of formaldehyde and water called formalin. This process was called "formulating."
For Prufrock, his reduction to a mere insect through the appraising look of a woman is inevitable. He doesn't say, "And IF I am formulated, . . ." but "And WHEN I am formulated, . . . ."
Maybe he sees this as what the universe wants for him, the fate that he would escape if he dared to disturb that universe. But it turns out that he doesn't have the courage to actually break with this terrible fate.
If you catch a grasshopper, they’ll appear to "spit" out something that looks like tobacco juice. This is a defense mechanism, used whenever something frightening gets too close to the insect. Prufrock is a grasshopper. He also connects his life with cigarette butts, the part spit out or thrown away.
Singly they’re known as grasshoppers, but in a swarm they’re known as locusts -- see lines 82-83.
From John Donne’s "The Relic": "A bracelet of bright hair about the bone."
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(But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!)
Is it perfume from a dress
Now it’s not just the sight of a woman that disconcerts Prufrock, but even the smell of one. The sense of smell is closely linked with memory, probably more so than any of our other senses. It's called "olfactory memory," and it's why the smell of a pine tree might remind you of Christmas, or the smell of a particular brand of suntan lotion may take you back to summer days at the pool. Our brains are instantly triggered into finding associated memories to help us identify what we are smelling.
Prufrock is digressing, so he knows he's lost the main train of his thought. It's a callback to the streets that double back on themselves from line 8. And because he's concerned himself with memory, he's looking to the past, not to the future. The past can stretch out behind us forever; there's always enough time in the past. But Prufrock's future is ever-shortening, and facing it is his biggest problem.
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Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
And should I then presume? And how should I begin?
We’re 69 lines into the poem, and Prufrock hasn’t even begun yet. He’s terrified about committing to something so risky. He's now going to try to practice talking to a woman. What should he say to convince her to say "Yes"?
The first of two major breaks in the poem, this one sees Prufrock practicing what we might call his pick-up line. Instead of something charming or witty, he tells us of an image that signifies nothing but sadness, loneliness, and longing.
It's not exactly a good line, and Prufrock knows it. He's filled with self-loathing at his inability to communicate, or to have the courage to risk asking forwhat he wants.
This section set off by the markers is Prufrock trying to practice his argument/question. He’s trying to lay bare his life in hopes that she will yoke her life to his. But when the only image he can go to is so forlorn and desolate, even he realizes that his desires will always be frustrated.
It's even worse than you think it is. It's bad enough that Prufrock conjures up an image of lonely old men looking out of their windows—with each of them locked in their own empty apartments. But he's not even looking at the men; he's concentrating on the smoke that comes off of their pipes. Smoke: it's even more ephemeral than those old men. Those men will die soon, but the smoke will vanish into nothingness even as Prufrock watches it.
Prufrock says that he should have been something sub-human, cold, and alone.The synecdoches he uses with women and days now extend to himself as a crab. And this is truly the perfect animal for him:
(1) Crabs don’t communicate. As we see in the line above, Prufrock has a problem with that.
(2) Crabs are bottom-feeders, eating only what sinks past everything higher than them in the ocean. Prufrock sees himself as undeserving of anything better than this.
(3) Crabs cannot approach anything directly; they can only move from side to side and tack their way from point A to point B. This is the only way Prufrock can communicate, through indirection.
These seas would suit him well. Because they're silent, there would be no need for him to have to communicate. But as we'll see later in the poem, even the seas are filled with beings that form a community, one that would not include him.
More manageable parts: the thought of handling an entire day is again overwhelming, so he breaks it into smaller segments of time. Then he personifies the day, and even though it's sleeping, it's like a person, and thus MUST be broken up.
And now there are three people in the room: Prufrock, "you," and the day, stretched on the floor. A day, of course, is a measurement of time, so Prufrock is acknowledging that time itself is the third wheel in all of his relationships. He's constantly aware of the passage of time, and constantly lying to himself about it.
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Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
A "crisis" was a euphemism in Victorian pornography for an orgasm. Prufrock connects asking his question with having an orgasm, so his self-doubt is about both his mental strength and his sense of impotence.
This is an ancient method for purifying yourself, or for making sure that you are worthy to communicate with the Divine. This particular OT passage shows this mixture of abnegation and preparation.
Nehemiah 1:3-6:
And they said to me, “The survivors there in the province who escaped exile are in great trouble and shame; the wall of Jerusalem is broken down, and its gates are destroyed by fire.”
When I heard these words I sat down and wept, and mourned for days; and I continued fasting and praying before the God of heaven.
And I said, “O Lord God of heaven, the great and terrible God who keeps covenant and steadfast love with those who love him and keep his commandments;
let thy ear be attentive, and thy eyes open, to hear the prayer of thy servant which I now pray before thee day and night for the people of Israel thy servants, confessing the sins of the people of Israel, which we have sinned against thee.
Prufrock is presenting himself as someone who has been through the wringer, who has felt sorrow, practiced self-denial, and asked for divine intervention. He follows a long line of prophets, preachers, and Jesus himself.close
Prufrock has wept, fasted, and prayed. His head on a platter sets him up as John the Baptist, a man whose most famous directive to himself was "He must increase; I must decrease," and who announced that "there is One who comes after me; I am unworthy to untie the strap of his sandal." John was a professional belittler of himself, and so a perfect model for Prufrock.
But John’s usual food was "locusts and wild honey," so Prufrock, the grasshopper/locust, isn’t even the guy who belittles himself; he’s the insects that guy eats.
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— and here’s no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman
Even Death laughs at Prufrock
This is an allusion to Emily Dickinson’s poem number 479, "Because I Could Not Stop For Death." When Prufrock comes to die, Death itself will laugh at how little he has made out of his life.
Of course he's afraid. At the root of his fears about the passage of time is the fear of that which will bring all time to a close: death. He can't even face a full day; how could he possibly face the idea of an eternity of nonexistence?
Most of the lines in the next stanzas are in the conditional mood in the future perfect tense, as unstable and distant as you can get. The torturous nature of the grammar here reflects Prufrock's tortured state of mind. He offers a counterfactual argument: what if I ask my question, and she says that I have misunderstood her? How will I feel then? Will I feel like this whole thing was still worth it?
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after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
The "you" here is obviously the woman, but Prufrock is there and so are the readers, so it’s all three meanings from line 1. And remember that third wheel in all his relationships—time/death—that's here too.
Many dung beetles, known as rollers, roll dung into round balls, which are used as a food source or breeding chambers.
Prufrock connects himself with another insect, a dung beetle. Prufrock the dung beetle asks if it would have been worth it to roll up this shitty universe toward the huge question.
He's also alluding to a far more successful rcommunicator with women, Andrew Marvell’s poem, "To His Coy Mistress":
Let us roll all our strength and all
Our sweetness up into one ball,
And tear our pleasures with rough strife.
"To His Coy Mistress" is one of the finest examples of a seduction poem. The way Marvell couches that seduction is that we have only a limited amount of time on Earth, and so we must take advantege of that time while we can. He says that if he had thousands of years to be with her, he could spend centuries praising and worshiping her. But he doesn't have an unlimited amount of time, so she and he should get busy getting busy right now. Marvell turns his awareness of the fleetingness of existence into seduction. Prufrock turns the same awareness into stagnation.
This poem also has the famous lines,
But at my back I always hear
Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
So Prufrock’s idea that "there will be time" finds no support here, and Marvell's ball of strength and sweetness is, in Prufrock's hands, nothing more than dung.
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To roll it towards some overwhelming question,
To say: "I am Lazarus,
Parable of the Rich Man and the Beggar Lazarus from the Codex Aureus Epternacensis Illuminated Manuscript, c. 1035-1040 CE.
This isn't Lazarus of Bethany, the one Jesus raised from the dead, but rather Lazarus from the parable in Luke 16:19–31. Here's the story Jesus tells:
“There was a rich man, who was clothed in purple and fine linen and who feasted sumptuously every day. And at his gate lay a poor man named Laz′arus, full of sores, who desired to be fed with what fell from the rich man’s table; moreover the dogs came and licked his sores. The poor man died and was carried by the angels to Abraham’s bosom. The rich man also died and was buried; and in Hades, being in torment, he lifted up his eyes, and saw Abraham far off and Laz′arus in his bosom. And he called out, ‘Father Abraham, have mercy upon me, and send Laz′arus to dip the end of his finger in water and cool my tongue; for I am in anguish in this flame.’ But Abraham said, ‘Son, remember that you in your lifetime received your good things, and Laz′arus in like manner evil things; but now he is comforted here, and you are in anguish. And besides all this, between us and you a great chasm has been fixed, in order that those who would pass from here to you may not be able, and none may cross from there to us.’ And he said, ‘Then I beg you, father, to send him to my father’s house, for I have five brothers, so that he may warn them, lest they also come into this place of torment.’ But Abraham said, ‘They have Moses and the prophets; let them hear them.’ And he said, ‘No, father Abraham; but if some one goes to them from the dead, they will repent.’ He said to him, ‘If they do not hear Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced if some one should rise from the dead.’” (Revised Standard Version)
Dante made it back from the dead, and told the story of Guido da Montefeltro (from the epigraph). Prufrock, in his death-in-life, is both Dante and Guido, as well as Dives. He is telling us his own story, about how he is trapped in this hell for eternity.
So for Prufrock, even if he were given the power to rise from the dead, such a thing would mean nothing compared to misunderstanding a woman. Even if resurrection did exist, it would be powerless in the face of an uninterested woman.
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come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all"—
If one,
The "one" here removes the personal. It’s not "she" or "her," and especially not anything so intimate—and thus terrifying for Prufrock—as the name of the woman in question.
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settling a pillow by her head
Should say: "That is not what I meant at all;
That is not it, at all."
This stanza reinforces the previous one: can Prufrock risk it, if he can imagine that she doesn’t feel the same way he does, that he has misunderstood her?
An allusion to Whitman’s "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed," an elegy on the death of Abraham Lincoln. The sunset is a dirunal image, where we associate the length of a life with the length of a day. In its usage, the sunset can be either the movement into old age or death.
The first three lines of the poem set up the image of the dooryard. What Eliot is interested in is what Whitman associates with the image:
When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d,
And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,
I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.
The juxtaposition of spring, a time of new life and rebirth, with both past and future mourning, seems perfect for Prufrock.
Those sprinkled streets are, for Whitman, wet from a dark cloud of mourning that has descended upon them as Lincoln's coffin passes through them. From Whitman:
Coffin that passes through lanes and streets,
Through day and night with the great cloud darkening the land,
As well as:
And the streets how their throbbings throbb’d, and the cities pent—lo, then and there,
Falling upon them all and among them all, enveloping me with the rest,
Appear’d the cloud, appear’d the long black trail,
And I knew death, its thought, and the sacred knowledge of death.
Within an elegy, all these images make sense. But Prufrock here associates all of them with his life and his own timid relationships. He's summing up what he can recall of his past moments, and we're left with what looks like a deth in life.
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Prufrock recognizes his inability to communicate, but his responsibility in that situtation is deliberately vague here. Is it impossible because he is incapable of talking in such an intimate manner to anyone? Or is it impossible because the very nature of language does not allow anyone to fully communicate everything they mean in any statement?
An 1886 advertisement for a magic lantern with three lenses
This is an image projector, first developed in the 17th century, and in widespeard educational use during the 19th century. A light source passed through one or more lenses and projected an image of a picture, painting, print, or photograph onto a screen. It was still in use until the middle of the 20th century when it was replaced by something more technologically advanced and cost-effective, the slide projector.
Prufrock imagines a projector that would make him transparent, to allow others to see through to the real man. But even if he became completely transparent, and his meaning and intent were perfectly obvious and clear, such a state wouldn’t be worth it if the woman was not really interested in him. Some see this as aporia, an expression of doubt, but it looks less like a rhetorical device and more like giving up in the face of such risks. But even here the lack of a personal pronoun it's the, not my) puts distance between himself and this level of apparent transparency. And the image of himself that is projected is not the whole self, but only the nerves. Cuts and wounds expose nerve endings, and so cause pain. Imagine how painful it would be to have your entire nervous system exposed. No wonder Prufrock is terrified of this; becoming transparent about what he means would be more painful than we can imagine.
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Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
"That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all."
The break here signifies the end of Prufrock's questioning, as we now turn to his answers. He starts off with a forceful "No!," beginning in denial and negation.
Shakespeare's Hamlet, and his famous soliloquy, "To be or not to be . . . "
He’s not Hamlet, because Hamlet is the main character in a play about his own life.
If someone wrote a play about Prufrock’s life, he wouldn’t even star in it.
The second half of the line alludes to Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy. Here are the first few lines:
To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them.
In this soliloquy Hamlet considers suicide, but he imagines what the consequences might be of such an act, and this imagining stops him. The imaginings Prufrock has just been through stop him as well. Hamlet is famous for hesitation, inaction, and delay, and Prufrock isn’t even there, though he shares those traits.
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Prufrock thinks so little of himself that the self-definition here is like the line itself: it’s missing a subject, missing an "I."
Rather, he’s Polonius: foolish, bumbling, too old to communicate with the young, but certainly not the star of the show.
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one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous; Full of high sentence,
In Chaucer's General Prologue of The Canterbury Tales, the Clerk of Oxford is "Ful of hy sentence." In Chaucer the description is a compliment, but Prufrock turns it around to sound pompous and silly.
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but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.
Hamlet and the skull of Yorick, the jester who entertained him when he was young
The real Fool in Hamlet is Yorick. Hamlet's constant brooding about death and humanity comes to a (grotesque) head in the graveyard scene, where Hamlet holds up the unearthed skull of Yorick, whom he knew and loved as a young boy. The skull itself is a physical reminder of the inevitability and finality of death. Prufrock is perhaps recognizing that he doesn't have as much time as he was trying to think he did earlier in the poem
King Edward VII is said to have made turn-ups (cuffs) fashionable in the 1890s. He designed them to be worn when the weather was bad, because the cuffs raised the pant leg and avoided muddying the trouser bottoms. Prior to this, men rolled up their pants legs by hand to protect the fabric from the mud (since not all city streets and sidewalks were paved or cobbled.
Is Prufrock trying to update his wardrobe? If that’s true, he’s still 20 years behind the fashion. Or he could be preparing for his walk along the beach, in which case these would be white flannel trousers.
We understand why older people might not eat apples, but peaches?
Many old people are afraid to eat apples because they might lose their teeth. But Prufrock is over-cautious, afraid to eat even a soft peach.
This is also an allusion to Augustine’s Confessions, where Augustine recalls stealing peaches not because he wanted them, but because he wanted to do something he knew was wrong.
This is an allusion to John Donne’s "Song, Go and Catch a Falling Star":
Go and catch a falling star,
Get with child a mandrake root,
Tell me where all past years are,
Or who cleft the devil's foot,
Teach me to hear mermaids singing,
Or to keep off envy's stinging,
The view of women in Donne's poem is negative; Prufrock thinks he has done the impossible, and he has learned about women. But now he knows there’s no one for him.
We can also think of the Sirens from The Odyssey. They were beautiful but dangerous, luring sailors with their enchanting music and voices to wreck their ships on the rocky coast of their island.
It stands alone, without a stanza, like Prufrock himself. Mermaids are imaginary creatures; they exist only in the mind. Prufrock has heard them, and, as he tells us in the next line, he has seen them. So he's created them in his own mind. But these beings that he himself has conjured up won’t communicate with him. It’s as if he’s created imaginary friends, and even they won’t play with him.
As with the women in the room and the voices dying in the other room, there’s a community here that Prufrock can watch from the outside, but cannot be a part of.
See lines 41 [(They will say: "How his hair is growing thin!")]; 82 [Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter,] and 123 [Shall I part my hair behind?], all having to do with hair and balding.
Even the waves have hair, so much of it that the wind blows it back and the mermaids themselves comb it — in the direction opposite the one Pruforck is thinking of combing his own hair.
Prufrock again uses that slippery first-person plural pronoun, "we." Does "we" include the mermaids above? The next line seems to indicate that. But the fact that "we" are lingering near those sea-girls seems to say that "we" doesn't include them. So we're back to the multiple significations of "you" in the very first line. Prufrock has bracketed the entire poem with his ambiguous and inclusive self/woman/reader trinity. But this time it's not about walking around in the real world; it's all about living in a fantasy world.
What more would we expect from Prufrock? He can't handle relationships or people in general, he's terrified by his own aging and the inevitability of death, but he's also paralyzed by living. So what kills him? Human voices. Communication. Interaction. It's certainly in keeping with his character.
However, this time he's dragging us down with him. The pronouns here are first person plural, so it's not "Till human voices wake me and I drown." Remember the "you and I" of the first line? Now it's changed. I'll borrow a couple lines from Michael Jackson's classic song, "Ben":
I used to say "I" and "me"
Now it's "us," now it's "we."
But those voices do something else before they kill us.
Here's Eliot clinching the final thought in the poem. And notice that I'm saying Eliot, not Prufrock. In this last line "we" drown; we succumb to death, and human voices are what kills us. But how do they do that? They wake us. Hmmmmm.
So what's Eliot doing here? Have we been asleep, and dreaming? It seems like we have been. In fact, this whole poem isn't real, is it? Every time we open a book, every time we read a poem, we enter a different world, one that exists within that book or that poem. And what happens when we finish reading that text? We close the book, we get on with the rest of our lives. So that world inside the book dies. Oh, it'll be there for us again the next time we open that book, but it doesn't exist in the "real" world, the world that contains human voices. Those human voices call us out of the dream, out of the imaginary world, and into the everyday world.
Remember, Eliot is one of the greatest Modernist writers. And one of the fundamental tenets of Modernism is that we should always be aware that we're looking at a work of art, and not the real world. Eliot is reminding us that we're been looking at something constructed from his imagination. When we finish reading the poem, the other activities of this world call us back to that life, and the world of the poem, one that we have constructed in our own minds, is drowned.
