Preview

The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
1181 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock
Prufrock Essay
In T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, Prufrock who is the narrator speaks with an unconfident tone towards finding love. Throughout the poem Prufrock has an unmotivated attitude in which he is regretful about being insecure with himself, especially, in front of women. The reader may notice that Prufrock is very self conscious of himself when he is in the presence of a woman. He also has no drive or motivation to go after them. Prufrock’s lack of confidence causes him to easily be rejected or humiliated by woman. Therefore he does not try to find his love, to keep from being denied and have his hopes and dreams crushed by this woman even more. The negative outlook Prufrock has on life restricts him from being able to find a woman to settle down and start his life with. The Introduction of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” begins with an epigraph in which Prufrock admits his fear about his insecurities to only one person who is in the same predicament as he is. Knowing that this person will not be capable of telling anyone else the confession about his personal self doubtfulness, the only reason Prufrock is able to admit this to another is because, “If I thought my answer were to someone who/ might see the world again, then there would be/ no more stirrings of this flame. Since it is true” (epigraph). Prufrock understands that this other guy that he is addressing throughout the poem and him have no chance of ever being able to see life again. So there is no possibility of this man telling another soul about what Prufrock is about to say. At this point is the only time is the poem Prufrock is confident in him from talking to someone else about his fears and lack of confidence. As he says “Should I, after tea and cakes and ices, / Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?”(79-80) referring to how he decided not to go up and talk to this lady, but debated whether or not he should have. After talking about this

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Powerful Essays

    1. How does the epigraph from Dante’s Inferno help Eliot comment on the modern world in“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”? What does it tell us about the setting of this poem? How is Montefeltro’s miscalculation related to the poem?…

    • 4195 Words
    • 17 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Better Essays

    Alfred Prufrock,” Eliot represents age and time through parallelism and situational irony to show that one must not squander his opportunities in life. Parallelism is prevalent throughout the poem and is used to present age in a nagging, incessant way. The phrase “there will be time” is paralleled throughout the piece, including in the stanza “There will be time, there will be time / [...] There will be time to murder and create, / [...] And time yet for a hundred indecisions” (“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” 26, 28, 32). Prufrock, the protagonist of the poem, repeatedly reminds himself of how much time he has; he uses the concept of time to console himself due to his embarrassment of being too afraid to act on his desires. As the poem goes on to explain, Prufrock does not actually have an endless amount of time, and he begins to age and die. He is “unable to act [... and] he consoles himself with the repeated speculation that ‘there will be time’ to act on his social [...] anxiety” (Persoon and Watson 4). Eliot himself connects with the character of Prufrock because he was known to be extremely introverted and shy; he over-analyzed things until his chance had long passed, much like Prufrock (Bush 1). Another tool that Eliot uses to display the ubiquity of death is situational irony. In the stanza “Let us go then, you and I, / When the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherised upon a table,” situational irony is used between lines 2 and 3 to show how death disturbingly appears into Prufrock’s thoughts (“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” 1-3). The reader is not expecting to read such a morbid phrase; “the opening line [...] invites [the reader] to imagine strolling ‘When the evening is spread out against the sky,’ but [the] expectation of romantic reverie is quickly undercut by the macabre image of ‘a patient etherised upon a table’” (Bloom, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” 3). Prufrock is haunted and…

    • 2609 Words
    • 11 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock’s tone is sadness. This is proven when Eliot describes the setting in lines 4-9 as half deserted streets, muttering retreats, one night cheap hotels and streets like a tedious argument of insidious intent. Words like half deserted, muttering, restless, tedious and insidious portray this tone. However in Afternoons and Coffee Spoons the tone is more fearful. It’s as though the writer is having these health problems, and is seeing his life being measured out as he gets older. In lines 16-17 we see “Maybe if I could do a play by playback I could change the test results that I will get back” the lyrics display that he demonstrates fear of the future and fear of getting older. He hopes to go back and change the results for a better future. Therefore the tone in these poems…

    • 648 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The poem by T.S. Eliot “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is a dramatic monologue written in 1915. Close to the end of the poem Mr. Prufrock stated “It is impossible to say just what I mean” (104). This statement will be analyzed to discover the hidden connotation of this phrase and convey the speaker’s ultimate goal. The questions that will be answered are: What does Prufrock mean when stating “It is impossible to say just what I mean” (104)? Is this statement stated due to a lack of vocabulary, words cannot convey his actual emotions, or is he just unable to express his own emotions to the listener? Are there other underlying circumstances to cause Prufrock not to speak his mind? By the end these questions will be understood along with the true…

    • 790 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    TS Eliot’s 20th Century poem ‘The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock’ is widely seen as a modernist work that Eliot employs to make the reader of the poem actually create their own opinion of what is actually meant by the poem. The modernist movement happened mainly in the late 19th to early 20th Century and started with the French poet, Jules Laforgue. It is easy to draw similarities between Eliot’s Lovesong and all of Laforgue’s works as they both employ symbolist and modernist aspects in the way they describe everything through metaphor. Throughout the poem, Eliot uses many metaphors to describe what Prufrock is seeing, ‘through [those] certain half-deserted streets.’ What Prufrock is seeing is often shown through his fragile mindset. The use of metaphor is an interesting one as, despite promoting a great sense of uncertainty with the actual events that Prufrock is experiencing, it gives the reader a very clear idea of Prufrock’s character. It is undeniable that Prufrock is presented as ‘awkward and emasculated’ as his social and sexual insecurities are portrayed by Eliot throughout.…

    • 1567 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    Figurative language is most abundant in this poem. Throughout, parts of the city are personified as being human while Prufrock is personified as being less than human. The "yellow fog" and the sky which is like "a patient" appear intelligent to the reader of the poem. On the other hand, Prufrock thinks of himself as a crab which should be scuttling across the floor of the sea or a senile old man who wears flannel trousers. This evidence the city and nature which are the yellow fog and the sky are taking mastery over Prufrock. They have become king. The phrase, "But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on the screen"(105) has thematic importance as well. A magic lantern is a movie projector; hence, Prufrock is viewing his life and thought as a movie with a predetermined end. This predetermined end is that his love would not like him and that he would fail in his proposal of love. Irony exists in the title, for this poem is not a lovesong but rather a piece mourning a man's fear to propose love. Nearly all of Prufrock's allusions are overstatement. He speaks of himself as one decapitated and one absolutely banned from telling his story of love. This, however, is not the case as Prufrock's only limitation is himself.…

    • 1687 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    On the way, Prufrock deliberates on whether he can find value in the cold superficial environment, and ask the question, "Do I dare/ Disturb the universe?"(45). He feels if he can gain the courage to ask the question, he may at last find value in his life: "would it have been worth while/ To have bitten off the matter with a smile,? To have squeezed the universe into a ball."(89) Ultimately, he fails at both tasks. Throughout the poem,…

    • 971 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    “A Love Song for Bobby Long” written by Grayson Capps and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” written by TS Eliot remind the world of men who struggle with the demons of life. The little voices in your head saying “I don’t think you can do that.” These voices cause you to doubt yourself and your talents. They take the life out of you, and cause you to wonder if you even have a purpose here on earth. Now let’s take a deeper look into these poems and closely analyze their similarities and differences.…

    • 723 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The isolation of individuals within society was a key feature of Modernism, and was suggested by man’s uncertainty and lack of direction, therefore leading to the inability to take initiative. Prufrock in Eliot’s piece Love Song by J. Alfred Prufrock is portrayed as being a self-conscious, indecisive individual in an Upper class setting. In the beginning of the piece Eliot had included an extract from Dante’s Inferno. Eliot used this piece in Prufrock’s “love song” as if he is taking the audience on a journey through his own living hell, which is his Reality. Prufrock’s trapped state is further reinforced by the image of “a patient, etherized upon a table”, suggesting his alive yet unconscious state. The description of the sky contrasted harshly with the traditional romantic image of an immobilized patient that has no control on their movements. In the poem Prufrock asks both trivial and significant questions, however none of these are answered, and Prufrock himself states that he is “no prophet”, showing the audience his uncertainty. His inability to act on his thoughts is conveyed as he constantly reassures the audience (and himself) that “there will be time”, however the repetition of this sentence instead implies the opposite; he has run out of time instead. The extended metaphor that calls Prufrock an insect, “pinned and wriggling”, suggests his vulnerability and the feeling of being trapped.…

    • 1241 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    <br>In T.S. Eliot's poem J. Alfred Prufrock tells the reader of his fear of rejection. He is a lonely man and wants to ask someone to make his life a little less desolate. He doesn't know what…

    • 555 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    In line 92, Prufrock says, “To have squeezed the universe into a ball. To roll it towards some overwhelming question,” (Eliot, 92). Prufrock references Marvel as a guide to what he should be doing with someone he is interested in. He questions whether he should do the same thing as the speaker in “His Coy Mistress” when Marvel says, “Let us roll all our strength and all. Our sweetness up into one ball…” (Marvel, 43-44). Because Prufrock is an older man he feels the burden of time on his shoulders, much like the speaker in “His Coy Mistress.” He thinks he must find a woman quickly which could slow time/universe for him, and seize the day with her. Prufrock has too good of a concept of mortality, which inhibits him from being happy, he wants to stop the universe and freeze time so that he can feel something, but he struggles in his mind because he doesn’t see the point of it all if the end is still the…

    • 1043 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Alfred Prufrock Suffering

    • 1552 Words
    • 7 Pages

    Prufrock's fear of judgment and his lack of progression along with his refusal to believe of his own incompetence leads to regret and dissatisfaction with life. He wants so bad to go back in time “To say: ‘I am Lazarus, come from the dead,/Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all’-”(94-95). The abrasive tone of this passage proves desire for an immediate change of the past. He tricked himself out of his own life by not facing his fears. In this fantasy, he wishes he could go back in time to warn himself of the mistakes he will make. Bringing Lazarus, the man who rose from the dead, into the poem convinces the reader of how Prufrock truly sees himself. He is so hopeless that he feels he is no longer living. As he looks back on his life he realizes his foolishness and regrets wasting his life in this way and when the fairy tale ends, the “human voices wake us, and we drown”(131). Prufrock became so lost and purposeless that he dies. so the answer to his previous questions of whether or not it would have been worth it is finally resolved as…

    • 1552 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    As people reach the middle of their lives, their age comes many things: wisdom, experience, a different point of view compared to when they were younger. But what about a middle age crisis? In T.S Elliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, Elliot exemplifies the contrast between ages as he writes about the circumstances of the narrator, Prufrock.…

    • 1234 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Prufrock, throughout lines 26-30, not only delineates his insecurity but also his indecisiveness and fear of rejection. These few lines give readers a snapshot of what the poem consists of: Prufrock’s constant self-doubt, ambivalence and passivity. Furthermore, it reveals that he overanalyzes situations to the point where it is unhealthy. As a result of his negativity and lack of initiative, Prufrock sends the message that he is an unhappy and lonely man who yearns for love but cannot even bring himself to open up to a woman, let alone ask her this “overwhelming question”.…

    • 952 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Prufrock is in-love with a woman or being in-love about his experiences in life. In the first stanza, “Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky”, Prufrock, wants us to believe that he is with a woman but the third line, Prufrock he talks someone that is sick. In addition, the stanza that I like is in line 26 - 29, “There will be time, there will be time…” this is the time for Prufrock to think and start meeting new people or new woman. He works hard for himself and but he doesn’t have family to leave all his things…

    • 110 Words
    • 1 Page
    Satisfactory Essays