“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” Summary

• "If I thought that my reply would be to someone who would ever return to earth, this flame would remain without further movement; but as no one has ever returned alive from this gulf, if what I hear is true, I can answer you with no fear of infamy."

  Let's go then, you and I, when the night sky is spread out like a patient anesthetized on an operating table. Let's walk down half-empty streets, which are marked by sleepless, cheap hotels where people only stay one night, and by shabby, run-down restaurants. The streets follow each other like a boring argument with malicious intentions. They make you think of some urgent question... but don't ask what it is. Let's go and make our visit.

  Women enter and exit the room while talking about Michelangelo.

  Yellow smoke rubs its back against the windows; it rubs its snout all over the windows, licks the corners of the night with its tongue, lingers above the stagnant water in the drains, mingles with soot from the chimneys, slips by the patio, and suddenly jumps—but seeing that it's a cool autumn night, curls around the house and fades away.

  Yes, there will be time to look at the yellow smoke that slides along the street, rubbing itself against the windows. There will be time, there will be time to prepare to meet people; to murder and create; for work and answering questions; time for both of us. And there will be time, still, for a hundred indecisions, to change my mind a hundred times, all before afternoon tea.

  Women enter and exit the room while talking about Michelangelo.

  Yes, there will be time to ask, “Do I dare?” And again, “Do I dare?” Time to turn around and go back downstairs, worried about the bald spot on the back of my head. (People will say: "His hair is really getting thin!") I'm wearing my morning coat, with my collar buttoned all the way up to my chin, along with an expensive but not overly showy necktie with a simple tie clip. (People will say: "His arms and legs are so skinny!") Do I have it in me, or am I brave enough, to change the world? A single minute contains enough time to make decisions and changes, although I'll just change my mind again a minute later.

  That's because I have done it all already. I've seen it all: I've experienced evenings, mornings, and afternoons, and I could measure out my life by the number of coffee spoons I've used. I've already heard the voices singing in the other room. So what gives me the right?

  And I already know how people look at me. I've seen all the looks people give—the way people look at me and dismiss me with some clichéd phrase, fixing me in their gaze like I'm an insect specimen pinned and wriggling against the wall. So how should I start to spit out the memories of my life, like the butt-ends of a cigarette? And what gives me the right?

  And I already know what women are like. I've known all kinds of women—those whose arms are covered with bracelets and have pale, hairless skin (although in the lamplight I can see that their arms are covered in light brown hair). Is it the smell of perfume from a dress that's making me lose my train of thought? I'm thinking of arms resting on a table, or wrapped up with a shawl. So what gives me the right? And how should I begin?

  Should I say: I've walked in the evening through narrow streets and watched lonely men leaning out of windows and smoking in their undershirts?

  I should have been a creature with worn-out claws, scurrying across the floors of the silent ocean.

  And as it gets later in the day, the night itself seems to sleep so peacefully! It's as if it's been stroked to sleep by long fingers. It's either asleep or tired—or maybe it's just pretending to be asleep, stretched out on the floor beside us. Should I, after afternoon tea, have enough strength left to disturb this moment and cause drama? I cry, refuse to eat, and pray—and like John the Baptist, I've seen my (now slightly bald) head brought in on a plate. But even so, I'm no holy messenger, and I don't have anything very important to say. There was a time when I could have been great, but that moment has passed for good; I've seen death's butler hold my coat, but he just laughed at me. And to put it bluntly, I was scared.

  And would it have been worth it anyway? After all the afternoon tea, as we were sitting among the porcelain teacups and talking idly, would it have been worth it to force a smile and bring up the problem I'm thinking about? To have smooshed and simplified this huge, all-encompassing problem into a manageable bit, like a ball, and then have rolled it towards some question that's so big it's hard to articulate or understand? To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead, come back to tell you everything, I'll tell you everything”? If someone, fluffing up her pillow, should say: “That is not what I meant at all; That is not what I meant, at all.”

  And would it have been worth it anyway? Would it have been worth it, after everything I've seen in life: the sunsets and the dooryards and the streets sprinkled with rain? Would it have been worth it after the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that graze the floor—and all of this, and so much more? I can't say what I want to! But if a magic lantern could take my nervous thoughts and put them in patterns on a screen that became words: Would it have been worth it—while fussing with a pillow or taking off a shawl, and turning towards the window—to say: “That is not it at all; That is not what I meant, at all.”

  No! I'm not Prince Hamlet, and I was never meant to be. I'm just a background character, a lord following the prince who can serve to fill a crowd, begin a scene or two, or give the prince advice. No doubt I'm an easy tool, subservient and happy to be useful. I'm polite, cautious, and careful; full of lots to say, but what I say is obscure and unclear. Sometimes I'm ridiculous—sometimes I'm even almost like a clown.

  I'm getting old. I'm getting old. l'll start rolling up the bottoms of my pants.

  Should I part my hair in a different place? Can I be bold enough to eat a peach? I'll wear white flannel pants, and walk on the beach. I have heard the mermaids singing to each other.

  I don't think those mermaids will sing to me.

  I have seen the mermaids riding towards the sea on the waves, the wind whipping up the waves' foam and making the water look like a swirl of black and white. We've been waiting in the rooms underneath the sea, next to mermaids wrapped in red and brown seaweed—waiting for human voices to wake us up, and then we'll drown.

“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” Themes

• 

  Anxiety, Indecision, and Inaction

  The speaker in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is paralyzed by indecision. The poem’s momentum is continuously frustrated by digressions—the speaker's thoughts trailing off in seemingly unrelated directions—and by the speaker’s sense of his own inadequacy. By depicting the speaker’s intense struggle with indecision, the poem suggests that excessive preoccupation with doing the right thing—whether when expressing yourself, forming relationships with others, or simply deciding how to style your hair or what to eat—can actually stop a person from ever venturing forth into the world or, in fact, doing much of anything at all.

  From the beginning, the poem sets up a juxtaposition between action and inaction. The first line states “let us go,” implying that the poem will move forward in time and space—in other words, that it will go somewhere. But that momentum is quickly stalled. These streets “follow like a tedious argument of insidious intent,” suggesting that the various paths they offer up feel both boring and threatening—that there is no clearly good path to take. And though the speaker says that the streets “lead you to an overwhelming question,” the speaker doesn't actually pose that question. Instead, he explicitly says not to inquire further: “Oh, do not ask, ‘What is it?’” Maybe the question is just which direction is best to walk in or, indeed, where they're going in the first place—simple queries that become hurdles in the speaker's mind.

  In any case, the speaker’s habitual procrastination seems to be rooted in social anxiety, since, paralyzed with fear about making the wrong choice, he appears to find even basic decisions about what to eat or how to dress overwhelming. In fact, the speaker admits that he finds time for “a hundred indecisions, / And for a hundred visions and revisions,” all before sitting down his afternoon tea! He imagines “descending the stair” and greeting people, but in reality he is too timid to do so because he imagines that people will laugh at his bald spot and shabby clothing (which, in turn, suggest that the speaker is getting older—and that he has been wasting his time with all this indecision).

  What’s more, it’s not just that the speaker can’t follow through on his planned actions. He doesn’t even seem to know how to begin to ask “the overwhelming question.” Instead he asks “how should I begin?” and “how should I presume?”—suggesting that he feels incapable of overcoming the first hurdle to taking action. He repeats those phrases at the end of two different stanzas, giving the impression of a stuttering or repeated failed start.

  For the speaker, trying to make the best choice repeatedly results in no choice at all. He is also paralyzed by a feeling of his own inadequacy, as implied by his reluctance to “presume” and his repetition of the phrase “Do I dare?” He doesn’t take action, in other words, because he doesn’t feel that he has the right to do so. Overcoming indecision requires agency, but the speaker remains trapped in his repeating patterns because he feels that he can’t “dare” to do anything.

  There are times when the speaker does seem close to doing something, but the poem ultimately indicates that wanting to act isn’t enough. Taking meaningful action, it suggests, requires that an individual “dare” to make a choice without being certain that it’s the best choice—a risk that the speaker can’t bring himself to take. And while the speaker thinks he'll have plenty of time to do things, this seems like wishful thinking. Given his propensity to waffle about every little decision, he'll likely continue to agonize over his choices until there's no time left—his indecision having stopped him from living a full life.

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• 

  Desire, Communication, and Disappointment

  Although the speaker in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” might appear silent and affectless to others, his interior life is alive with hope and desire. In particular, he appears to have a deep longing for romantic connection—but he struggles to communicate that desire, and so it remains mostly unfulfilled. Indeed, despite being a “love song,” the poem never quite manages to discuss love itself; instead, it stays bogged down in the false starts and half-finished thoughts that characterize the speaker’s attempts at connecting with other people. The poem makes it clear that people like the speaker can only really experience love by breaking through these communication barriers, but it also embodies just how difficult doing so can be.

  There are a few key moments in the poem that suggest the speaker feels romantic or sexual desire for women, but is unable to express those feelings. For example, he asks at one point if it is “perfume from a dress” that distracts him, and he is preoccupied with the image of a woman’s “arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl”—a fixation that seems erotic. However, his desires are soon stymied by self-doubt and recrimination. He asks himself: "And should I then presume? And how should I begin?” These repeated questions show that he doesn’t know how to begin a conversation with a woman and thinks that it would somehow be presumptuous to do so.

  The speaker’s sense of thwarted communication is so strong that it even colors his fantasies. When the speaker imagines expressing his desires and feelings to others, those scenes inevitably dissolve into disheartening moments of misunderstanding. For instance, the speaker imagines posing what he calls “the overwhelming question,” saying “I am Lazarus, come from the dead, / Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all.” However, although the speaker compares himself to the Biblical figure and offers the promise of total revelation—“to tell all”—he doesn’t actually manage to communicate much of anything. Instead, he imagines his listener falling asleep and needing “a pillow by her head.” Even in his fantasies, then, he experiences the disappointment of being unable to communicate, protesting: “That is not what I meant at all; That is not it, at all.”

  The speaker’s attempts at communication only grow less effective as he is overcome by hopelessness and disappointment. By the end of the poem, the speaker’s disappointment seems to have hardened to the point that it has become entrenched within him; he doesn’t seem to expect that his desires will ever be fulfilled. He describes the singing of mermaids in exquisite detail, but admits: “I do not think that they will sing to me.” Instead, he remarks that he “[grows] old.” Because the speaker’s efforts at communication have been unsuccessful, he gives up on trying, instead imagining that his opportunity to share his hopes and dreams has already passed.

  The speaker’s exclamation partway through the poem that “it is impossible to say just what [he] mean[s]” underscores exactly how interconnected desire, communication, and disappointment are for the speaker. His frustration suggests that romantic fulfillment requires clear communication—something the poem indicates the speaker might not be capable of.

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• 

  Modernity and Alienation

  “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is often regarded as one of the quintessential “modernist” poems, reflecting the social and intellectual conditions of the early 20th century. The poem emphasizes exciting features of modern life—like electricity and new medical technologies—but it also suggests that modernity comes with a persistent sense of alienation and isolation from others. Through the example of the speaker, the poem indicates that the modern condition essentially results in feeling alienated from the world.

  The poem refers to several technologies that would have been relatively new in the early 20th century, like lamplight, industrial factories, and anesthesia in hospitals. At the same time, all this new activity and industry seems to have left the speaker behind. He describes how the “yellow fog” slithers through the streets like a cat that “rubs its back upon the window-panes,” but he rarely interacts with actual people, as the streets are “half-deserted.” The smog seems more alive to him than the people themselves.

  The speaker already seems weary of this new world, in which events follow one another in a repetitive, cyclical fashion. He claims: “I have known them all already, known them all; / Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons, / I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.” He suggests that nothing can surprise him anymore or disturb the normal rituals of polite society. For the speaker, taking action would mean “to force the moment to its crisis,” which seems an impossible task after the civilized, sedate activity of taking “tea and cake and ices.” There is thus something emotionally deadening and alienating about the seemingly empty social rituals that characterize the modern world.

  Modernist literature was also often characterized by rejection of traditional figures of authority. In keeping with this tradition, the poem deconstructs the traditionally respected pillars of Western culture, religion, and literature, leaving the speaker feeling isolated and pessimistic about his diminished connection to those traditions. For example, the speaker comments ironically that he is “no prophet,” like John the Baptist, and that rather “the eternal Footman hold[s] my coat, and snicker[s]” (basically, death laughs at him).

  The poem thus makes its protagonist an object of mockery rather than a figure of greatness. The speaker himself seems to feel an inability to measure up against these literary greats, as when he proclaims that “I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be,” and is simply a nameless, subservient “attendant lord ” or even “a Fool.” He doesn’t draw strength or inspiration from these would-be authority figures of literature and culture; instead, they leave him feeling isolated and disheartened. This reaction suggests that modernist trends in literature may only enhance the alienating experience of living in the modern world.

  “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” suggests that, for all the wealth and technological comforts of modern life, there is something profoundly alienating about this new way of experiencing the world. The speaker feels unable to participate in the social life of the world around him or to relate to the literary context that has come before him. Modernity doesn’t connect him more with others; it just leaves him feeling even more alone.

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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

• Before Line 1

       S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse

       A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,

       Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.

       Ma percioche giammai di questo fondo

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

       Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.

  The initial six lines of the poem are in fact an epigraph. The lines, written in Italian, come from Canto 27 of Dante’s Inferno. The Inferno is a medieval Italian poem that traces a pilgrim’s journey through Hell, where he meets various sinners who narrate their suffering. These lines are spoken by one of the people imprisoned in Hell, a character named Guido da Montefeltro. The pilgrim asks Guido why he has been punished, and Guido responds with these words:

  If I thought that my reply would be to someone who would ever return to earth, this flame would remain without further movement; but as no one has ever returned alive from this gulf, if what I hear is true, I can answer you with no fear of infamy.

  On the literal level, Guido is telling the Pilgrim that he feels free to talk about his sins (which include war crimes and atrocities committed in battle) because he knows that no one can ever return from Hell, so the Pilgrim will never be able to tell the story of those sins. But why would Eliot choose these lines as the epigraph for his poem? For one, it is a strikingly direct address that promises secrets told in confidence. Since “Prufrock” is a dramatic monologue, these lines set up the expectation of direct address. The speaker of “Prufrock” will address the reader directly and divulge his secrets, just as Guido addresses the Pilgrim.

  The allusion to Dante’s Inferno is also suggestive because it positions the world of “Prufrock” in dialogue with Dante’s Hell. Like the Hell in Inferno, the world of “Prufrock” is characterized by stasis (like the flame of Guido’s body in Hell, which usually “remain[s] without further movement”). The effect of including this epigraph is to suggest that the speaker of “Prufrock” is also trapped in a kind of Hell from which he can’t escape.

• Lines 1-7

  Let us go then, you and I,
  When the evening is spread out against the sky
  Like a patient etherized upon a table;
  Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
  The muttering retreats
  Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
  And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:

  

  

  

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• Lines 8-14

  Streets that follow like a tedious argument
  Of insidious intent
  To lead you to an overwhelming question ...
  Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
  Let us go and make our visit.
  In the room the women come and go
  Talking of Michelangelo.

  

  

  

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• Lines 15-22

  The yellow fog 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.

  

  

  

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• Lines 23-30

  And indeed there will be time
  For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
  Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
  There will be time, there will be time
  To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
  There will be time to murder and create,
  And time for all the works and days of hands
  That lift and drop a question on your plate;

  

  

  

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• Lines 31-36

  Time for you and time for me,
  And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
  And for a hundred visions and revisions,
  Before the taking of a toast and tea.
  In the room the women come and go
  Talking of Michelangelo.

  

  

  

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• Lines 37-44

  And indeed there will be time
  To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”
  Time to turn back and descend the stair,
  With a bald spot in the middle of my hair —
  (They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”)
  My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
  My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin —
  (They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”)

  

  

  

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• Lines 45-48

  Do I dare
  Disturb the universe?
  In a minute there is time
  For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

  

  

  

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• Lines 49-54

  For I have known them all already, known them all:
  Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
  I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
  I know the voices dying with a dying fall
  Beneath the music from a farther room.
                 So how should I presume?

  

  

  

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• Lines 55-61

  And I have known the eyes already, known them all—
  The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
  And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
  When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
  Then how should I begin
  To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
                 And how should I presume?

  

  

  

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• Lines 62-69

  And I have known the arms already, known them all—
  Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
  (But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!)
  Is it perfume from a dress
  That makes me so digress?
  Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
                 And should I then presume?
                 And how should I begin?

  

  

  

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• Lines 70-74

  Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
  And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
  Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? ...
  I should have been a pair of ragged claws
  Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

  

  

  

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• Lines 75-80

  And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!
  Smoothed by long fingers,
  Asleep ... tired ... or it malingers,
  Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.
  Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
  Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?

  

  

  

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• Lines 82-86

  Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter,
  I am no prophet — and here’s no great matter;
  I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
  And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
  And in short, I was afraid.

  

  

  

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• Lines 88-93

  After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
  Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
  Would it have been worth while,
  To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
  To have squeezed the universe into a ball
  To roll it towards some overwhelming question,

  

  

  

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• Lines 94-98

  To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
  Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”—
  If one, settling a pillow by her head
                 Should say: “That is not what I meant at all;
                 That is not it, at all.”

  

  

  

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• Lines 99-104

  And would it have been worth it, after all,
  Would it have been worth while,
  After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
  After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—
  And this, and so much more?—
  It is impossible to say just what I mean!

  

  

  

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• Lines 105-110

  But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
  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.”

  

  

  

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• Lines 111-119

  No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
  Am an attendant lord, 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, but a bit obtuse;
  At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
  Almost, at times, the Fool.

  

  

  

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• Lines 120-124

  I grow old ... I grow old ...
  I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
  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.

  

  

  

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• Lines 125-131

  I do not think that they will sing to me.
  I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
  Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
  When the wind blows the water white and black.
  We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
  By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
  Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

  

  

  

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“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” Symbols

• 

  Yellow Fog

  When the speaker of “Prufrock” invites his listener to go on a walk with him, he imaginatively walks through a city filled with fog. This fog is described as “yellow,” since it reflects the electric light that powers the lamps and streetlights—and, implicitly, the pollution and smog of a modern industrial city. The yellow color of the fog is thus symbolic of the condition of modern life, which is shaped by technology and industrial production.

  This fog seems to pervade the streets and homes of the people who live there. It is described as “rubbing,” “licking,” and “lingering” along the windows of houses and among the city streets. The inescapable quality of the fog suggests the difficulty of evading the ills of pollution in a modern city. It also gives the poem a more abstract but still pervasive sense of unease, as if the entire city is colored by the seediness, corruption, and darkness with which the speaker characterizes the world around him. With the language of rubbing and licking, the fog is also likened imaginatively to a cat, a comparison that adds to the sense of unease. It is as if the fog is a living organism that takes on more life than the humans around it, symbolizing the speaker’s sense of alienation and isolation in a modern and literally and figuratively “foggy” world.

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• 

  Toast and Tea

  The poem is markedly, even oddly preoccupied with tea. In one sense, this reflects the cultural dominance of tea in early 20th century British culture, in which tea and the consumption of sandwiches and toast was a common, almost universal afternoon ritual. But in the poem, the seemingly quotidian and everyday objects of toast and tea also take on a symbolic function. For the speaker, they come to symbolize the banal and suffocating qualities of modern life, in which the same rituals proceed day after day. The speaker feels constrained by these rituals, and yet he also seems incapable of breaking free of them. He asks “do I dare to eat a peach?” but even the simple decision of changing his eating and drinking routine seems to be too much for him. His anxiety makes it nearly impossible for him to take decisive action, leading him to proclaim that he goes through “a hundred visions and revisions” before taking his tea. In this sense, tea represents both the stifling force of social convention and the speaker’s inability to claim the agency to make different choices.

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“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language

• Allusion

  “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is filled with allusions. The poem makes very frequent references to other authors—beginning with the epigraph, which is a quotation from Canto 27 of Dante’s Inferno. These lines are spoken by Guido da Montefeltro, a man condemned to hell who promises to tell the Inferno's speaker about the sins that have landed him in Hell. “Prufrock,” like these lines from Dante, is also a direct address from the speaker to the reader. Like Guido, Prufrock promises to tell the reader his sins and explain how he has been confined to a hellish, modern urban landscape. From the beginning of the poem, then, literary allusion helps set the stage and highlight important themes.

  This is far from the only allusion in the poem, however. The speaker also alludes to Biblical figures including Lazarus and John the Baptist. Other literary works cited or quoted include Shakespeare’s Hamlet, when the speaker laments that "I am not Prince Hamlet." Although this is the most explicit allusion to Shakespeare, there is also an allusion to Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night in the line about the “dying fall,” which alludes to Duke Orsino's famous words as he listens to music: "that strain again, it had a dying fall."

  In its final depiction of singing mermaids who lead the speaker to his doom, the poem also alludes to Homer’s The Odyssey and the classical trope of the "siren," beautiful women who lure sailors out to sea in order to kill them. Finally, the repetition of the phrase "the overwhelming question" alludes to James Fenimore Cooper’s novel The Pioneers (1823), one of Eliot's favorite books as a child, and the place in which that phrase first appears.

  The effect of these very frequent allusions is often to give the impression of a negative comparison. The speaker feels that he is inadequate and diminished in comparison with the “greatness” of figures like John the Baptist or Hamlet. His own head, if served on a platter like John the Baptist, would be “slightly bald”; he asserts that if he appeared in Hamlet, he would be a petty “attendant lord” or even a “Fool.” These self-deprecations serve to deflate the literary traditions to which the poem alludes. The speaker feels alienated from these literary greats even as he alludes to them, suggesting that the speaker’s sense of isolation from the world also extends to his sense of his place in the Western literary canon.

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• Caesura

  

  

  

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• End-Stopped Line

  

  

  

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• Refrain

  

  

  

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• Alliteration

  

  

  

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• Consonance

  

  

  

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• Enjambment

  

  

  

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• Metaphor

  

  

  

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• Personification

  

  

  

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• Simile

  

  

  

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• Anaphora

  

  

  

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• Apostrophe

  

  

  

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• Epizeuxis

  

  

  

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• Asyndeton

  

  

  

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• Polysyndeton

  

  

  

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• Assonance

  

  

  

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“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” Vocabulary

Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.

• Etherized
• Insidious
• Michaelangelo
• Muzzle
• Presume
• Butt-ends
• Digress
• Ragged
• Scuttling
• Malingers
• Marmalade
• Lazarus
• Prince Hamlet
• Deferential
• Meticulous
• High sentence
• Obtuse
• Politic
• The Fool
• Trousers
• Seaward
• Sea-girls
• Wreathed

• A patient that is "etherized" has been put to sleep with anesthesia using ether fumes. (This was an early form of anesthesia).

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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

• Form

  “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” doesn't follow a traditional form; its line and stanza lengths vary dramatically throughout. However, one literary form that it definitely does follow is the dramatic monologue—a direct address between the speaker and the reader. This is a highly intimate form that emphasizes the close connection between the speaker and the listener or reader to whom he has chosen to reveal his secrets.

  This expectation of revelation is established very early on in the poem through its epigraph, taken from Canto 27 of Dante’s Inferno (a poem that narrates a Pilgrim’s journey through Hell). Translated, the lines read as follows:

  If I thought that my reply would be to someone who would ever return to earth, this flame would remain without further movement; but as no one has ever returned alive from this gulf, if what I hear is true, I can answer you with no fear of infamy.

  The lines are spoken by Guido da Montefeltro, a sinner confined in Hell. Feeling confident that the Pilgrim will not be able to return to earth to tell his story, he promises to confess all his sins. These lines thus set up the expectation that the speaker of the poem, like Guido, is about to confess his sins in the form of a direct address, a private conversation between himself and the reader. Since these lines are set in Dante’s Hell, it also implies that the world of “Prufrock” is also a kind of Hell from which the speaker cannot escape. In a further twist, however, Dante’s Pilgrim does eventually escape Hell and return to earth. This turns the reader of “Prufrock” into a Dante-esque figure who can go to Hell and live to tell the tale.

  The poem’s status as a dramatic monologue explains the speaker’s continuing digressions and shifts to other seemingly, unrelated topics. The form allows the poet to experiment with a stream-of-consciousness style of narration—in which the reader is given access to the speaker’s thoughts exactly as they cross his mind. This gives the poem an immediacy that is arguably lacking in other, more traditional literary forms of narration.

• Meter

  “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” at first might look like it has no discernible meter. Its patterns of stresses often significantly diverge in the course of even a few lines, and it can’t be said to fit many of the traditional meters. However, although the poem doesn’t follow any one particular meter all the way through, it does move in and out of different meters. This formal flexibility allows the poet to experiment with and interrogate different metrical forms, just as he experiments with and questions many of the traditional assumptions of the Western literary and cultural tradition.

  Much of the poem is written simply in "free verse"—verse with no meter to speak of, as in lines like 120 and 121:

  I grow old ... I grow old ...
  I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

  These lines don't follow any discernible meter, in a formal laxity that mirrors the speaker's own sense of lack of direction and meaning. At other moments, however, the speaker employs blank verse in iambic pentameter, with its alternating pattern of five stressed and five unstressed syllables. Note lines 73 and 74:

  I should have been a pair of ragged claws
  Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

  This is not perfect—there is a trochee opening line 74—but it is still quite regular compared to other lines of the poem. It might seem odd that the speaker should employ one of the most traditional and respected meters in English literature in a poem generally noted for its anarchic and innovative "free verse." However, the speaker frequently uses these traditional meters in order to question and deconstruct them. For example, he sometimes also uses hexameter (in both iambic and trochaic forms), the traditional six-foot unit of heroic classical poetry, (seen, for example, in The Odyssey). However, these uses are rarely "heroic" in the conventional sense, and instead often contribute to descriptions of unsettling or disturbing images, as in lines 2 and 3:

  When the evening is spread out against the sky
  Like a patient etherized upon a table;

  It is startling to see this trochaic hexameter used for descriptions of surgery and anesthesia. Even when the poet does use traditional metrical forms, the subject matter focuses on the conditions of modern life. In this way, the poet is inaugurating a new form of poetry that uses traditional meters for untraditional purposes.

• Rhyme Scheme

  "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is written largely in blank verse, meaning that it doesn't rhyme. However, this is not to say that the poem makes no use of rhyme . On the contrary, rhyme makes frequent—albeit inconsistent—appearances in the poem. For example, the first two lines feature an AA rhyme:

  Let us go then, you and I,
  When the evening is spread out against the sky

  Such AA rhymes appear at various places in the poem.

  Other lines use an AABB pattern, which also appears in the first stanza:

  Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
  The muttering retreats
  Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
  And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:

  Rhyme thus has an oddly prominent role at the beginning of a poem that generally does not use end-rhymes. Clearly the poet is still making a significant use of rhyme, even when he seems to turn away from it. Rhyme is given similar prominence in the poem's most frequently-used refrain, the rhyming couplet, which also follows an AA rhyme scheme:

  In the room the women come and go
  Talking of Michelangelo,

  The poem also features use of rime riche, the repetition of the exact same word at the end of the line. This appears in lines 15-16, which rhyme "window-panes" and "window-panes."

  Often, though, the speaker's rhyme pairings seem comical or deflationary, as in lines like these:

  Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
  Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?

  I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
  And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker

  "Flicker" is paired with "snicker" and "ices" is paired with "crisis," in two incongruous associations. The pairing is "crisis" with "ices" makes the speaker's predicament seem less serious and even comical. Similarly, "snicker" is a deflation of the speaker's sense of his possible "moment of greatness."

  Rhyme, then, has an ambiguous function in the poem. It is seemingly not, as it would have been for 19th-century poets, an opportunity for the poet to show off his virtuosic skill with language. Instead, at the turn of the 20th century, when "Prufrock" was written, rhyme starts to look in this poem like something a bit silly and out-dated—an opportunity to show what is absurd about the world, rather than a performance of artistic accomplishment.

“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” Speaker

• The speaker of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is an aging man confronting his increasing sense of isolation and alienation from the world around him. He may be the man—"J. Alfred Prufrock"—named in the title, although the poem never confirms or denies this, since the speaker's name is not mentioned again. Indeed, even this name itself is rather unclear, since what the "J" stands for never gets revealed. There is something about the speaker, then, that always remains mysterious.

  In his physical appearance, he is not particularly distinctive; he describes himself as “slightly bald,” with “thin” arms and legs. His inner life, however, is a mass of contradictions and indecisions. He is so anxious about making the wrong choice that he can barely make any decisions at all. It is challenging for him to contemplate even leaving his room to go out and meet others in the world, since he admits that he always feels the need to “prepare a face” and fears that people are judging him. He has strong and deep feelings, and frequently expresses the desire to voice an “overwhelming question” to a person (possibly a woman) who he cares about. However, he never manages to take that decisive step and “force the moment to its crisis,” since he is too worried that he will be misunderstood. In this sense, although the speaker shares his intimate thoughts and feelings with the reader, he is unable to express himself to the people around him.

“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” Setting

• The poem is set in what often appears to be a desolate and hostile urban landscape. The speaker describes "half-deserted streets," "cheap hotels," and a city clogged with "yellow fog" that rubs against "window-panes," "drains," and "chimneys." The overall impression is that of a city suffering from pollution, and that there is a persistent divide between the poor, who live in these hostile streets, and the middle-class, who sit in drawing rooms drinking tea and "talking of Michelangelo."

  But although the modern city is the most immediate and obvious setting for the poem, it takes in other settings as well. The speaker at various points appears to be both outside, prowling the city at night, and indoors, "stretched on the floor" after his afternoon tea. The most dramatic metamorphosis of the setting occurs at the end of the poem, when the speaker claims that he is confined in an underground cavern, listening to the sounds of mermaids singing. This ambiguous, dreamlike ending suggests that perhaps it is the city that has been the mirage all along, and the reality is that the speaker has drowned himself beneath the waves.

Literary and Historical Context of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

Literary Context

T. S. Eliot published “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" in 1915 and later included it as the title poem in his 1917 collection Prufrock and Other Observations. "Prufrock" shocked many contemporary critics when it was first published, with its irregular form and disturbing subject matter. The poem is now considered a landmark in 20th-century English literary history.

Eliot wrote "Prufrock" during a period of widespread literary experimentation known as modernism. Modernist writers such as Eliot, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf challenged the literary norms they had inherited from the 19th century. These norms were both formal—related to the structure and style of poems, plays, and novels—and social: sex, drugs and alcohol, feminism, and working-class life all became new subjects for serious literature during this period.

Eliot's influence on Western literary culture was immense. Poems like "The Waste Land" and "Four Quartets" cast a long shadow over 20th-century writing, and Eliot was regarded as the premier literary critic and tastemaker of his era. His achievements won him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948.

Historical Context

"Prufrock" is considered one of the defining texts of modernism because it speaks to many of the social and historical conditions that characterized that era in English literary history. At the beginning of the 20th century, European and American life had undergone significant and irrevocable changes. Industrialization had transformed society and the workforce, creating both new economic opportunities as well as a sharper division between rich and poor. New technologies and industries improved the quality of life for some while creating polluted environments and unsafe working conditions for others. The speaker of "Prufrock" registers these changes in society with his reference to "yellow fog" and "smoke," as well as with his sense of the sharp class divisions between middle-class drawing rooms where "women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo" and the "half-deserted streets" with "one-night cheap hotels."

When poems from Prufrock and Other Observations were first printed, World War I had just begun. The immense violence of the "Great War" shook ideals inherited from the previous century and shattered the old European order. The new technologies that had seemingly improved life for so many were used to kill on an industrial scale. All these developments made modernist artists deeply skeptical of the modern world. At the same time, modernist thinking stirred up animosity towards older ways of living; after all, it was the old European empires that had led the continent into war. "Prufrock" reflects this spirit in its ambiguous and sometimes mocking attitude toward convention and traditional authority.

More “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” Resources

• External Resources

  • Critical Reception of "Prufrock" — This overview of critical responses to the poem focuses particularly on the period between 1917-1919, when many people were shocked by the poem's "free verse" style and disturbing subject matter.

  • Audio Recording of the Poem — Hear the poem read by T.S. Eliot himself!

  • Fragmentation, Interruption, and Fog — Another scholarly but accessible article from the British Library analyzes the poem with attention to its use of symbols, particularly the pervasiveness of fog and smoke. The author also makes sense of the poem's characteristic and perplexing fragmentation.

  • Annotated Version of the Poem — This is an annotated version of the poem with commentary and explanations of the poem's allusions.

  • A Close Reading of the Poem — This article from the British Library provides an accessible introduction to the poem's themes and some of its formal features, with special attention to the distinctive voice of the speaker.

• LitCharts on Other Poems by T. S. Eliot

  • Four Quartets: Burnt Norton

  • Journey of the Magi

  • La Figlia Che Piange

  • Morning at the Window

  • Portrait of a Lady

  • Preludes

  • Rhapsody on a Windy Night

  • The Hollow Men

  • The Waste Land