The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (Unobscured)

“So the critic to whom I am most grateful is the one who can make me look at something I have never looked at before, or looked at only with eyes clouded by prejudice, set me face to face with it and then leave me alone with it. From that point, I must rely upon my own sensibility, intelligence, and capacity for wisdom.” (T. S. Eliot, “The Frontiers of Criticism”, 1956.)

“Your majesty, the blind people have seen the elephant.” (A Buddhist Sutra no less.)

Cautionary Statement

A unified and coherent interpretation of Eliot’s “Prufrock” is offered here. If the poem’s underlying structure and predictability are not in evidence in this reading, then it may be argued that this brief write-up is in some way deficient in its claims. If the poem reads predictably enough and holds together convincingly but the topic “isn’t what I thought it would be” or “isn’t nice” then let the reader blame the poet. A unified and coherent interpretation of a poem, if convincing, has the small virtue of being known to the poet. It implies that the underlying structure was put there by the poet and it’s predictability was scripted by the poet. There’s nothing formally wrong with putting forward an interpretation of a poem that severs all ties to the poet. And with Eliot that’s what people like to do. “Prufrock” is “inscrutable” and “impenetrably obscure”. That’s what they say. Not so.

“Prufrock” Unobscured

“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is a poem replete with evasion. The poet evades the reader by calling his poem a “Love Song” when it is anything but. He evades the women at the literary reception where his poem is situated by barricading himself in the upstairs bathroom. And he evades himself by falling asleep on the toilet. In essence, the poet arrives at the reception in a state of disarray after being overwhelmed by his dinner on the way over. That represents the complete entelechy of the poem: the entire narrative sweep: cause to effect to aftermath. A brief sketch follows.

Eliot, identified with Prufrock throughout, is confined to the bathroom from the end of the first stanza until the end of the poem. His need to locate a toilet is the “overwhelming question” in the first stanza that leads him to “make our visit.” He is in place immediately with the women at the reception denied access, “In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo.” He can hear them and, by reciprocity, they can hear him as his bout proceeds.

The epigraph contains the story in miniature. There Dante visits a soul in hell, a metaphor for the bathroom, and is granted an interview after a brief but circumspect examination. The soul is concerned about his disgrace, the “fear of infamy”, and is reassured by the impossibility of ever rejoining those outside, “no one returns alive from this pit”. The epigraph ends with a violent heave, “without fear of infamy I answer you”, addressed physically to his interlocutor, Dante.

Eliot’s pants were soiled en route. His effort to contain the movement was difficult and in vain, “But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed”. In the litany of his wardrobe the pants are missing, “My morning coat, my collar ..., / My necktie”. Later, the pants are mentioned once implicitly, “Stretched on the floor”, and twice explicitly, as “trousers” - in the future tense - near the end.

Much time in the bathroom is devoted to an attempt to clean up the mess. The cleanup commences with “a hundred indecisions” and “a hundred visions and revisions”. The despairing, “And how should I begin?”, sums it up. Toilet paper is changed, “sprawling on a pin ... pinned and wriggling on the wall”, and Eliot’s hands are soiled in the process. He laments this, the mess, the awkward inconvenience, and the need for unbroken silence and much clean water in the compact sentence, “I should have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.” Eventually, he falls asleep, “I have heard the mermaids singing ... / I have seen them ...”, to be awakened, “in the chambers of the sea”, by friends, “human voices wake us,” with a flush, “and we drown.”

A more detailed analysis is developed in the article “No Room to Maneuver” found in “A Still Small Voice: T. S. Eliot Unobscured”, a recently completed manuscript that examines a cascade of Eliot poems.

Nine Simple Questions

1. Where does Eliot mention a toilet?
2. Where does Eliot mention an evacuation?
3. Where is a flush cycle described from beginning to end?
4. Where does Eliot open the window?
5. Where are Eliot’s sleeves rolled up and his pants missing?
6. Where does Eliot change the toilet paper?
7. Find "rip/wind/wipe" in three consecutive lines.
8. Where is Eliot, asleep on the toilet, dreaming in black & white? Color?
9. How many times is the word “trousers” used? “Floor”? “Overwhelming”? “Crisis”?

Answers:

1. 18, 129
2. 19, 60
3. 15-22
4. 24
5. 44
6. 57-8
7. 91-3
8. 126-8, 129-131
9. 2, 3, 2, 1

See P. UNRECONSTRUCTED

Published Criticism on “Prufrock”

One of the puzzles of the poem is the question as to whether Prufrock ever leaves his room. It appears that he does not, ... (J. Hillis Miller)

The poem’s linguistic and thematic strategy consistently opposes active verbs to the passive voice which causes things to be spread out, etherized, smoothed, and stretched. (David Spurr)

For Eliot, poetic representation of a powerful female presence created difficulty in embodying the male. In order to do so, Eliot avoids envisioning the female, indeed, avoids attaching gender to bodies. (Carol Christ)

Prufrock’s acute consciousness of his age is thus the classic symptom of Eliot’s philosophical and literary problem. Prufrock’s body is presented as a text, for he literally carries the burden of the past on his body ... (Mutlu Konuk Blasing)

... the reader who tries to pin down the indeterminate identities and locations of ‘you and I’ in the poem will always be mistaken. (John Paul Riquelme)

The general fragmentation of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is obvious and notorious. (Michael North)

J. Alfred Prufrock is not just the speaker of one of Eliot’s poems. He is the Representative Man of early Modernism. ... The speakers of all these early poems are trapped inside their own excessive alertness. They look out on the world from deep inside some private cave of feeling, and though they see the world and themselves with unflattering exactness, they cannot or will not do anything about their dilemma and finally fall back on self-serving explanation. They quake before the world, ... (Roger Mitchell)

Prufrock seemed to me a poem about a man’s dread of being no good. (Denis Donoghue, Words Alone: The Poet T. S. Eliot)

... I tried to catch my sense of this catching, even catchy, yet uncatchable poem. We should all do our best, not least because Eliot truly did his. (Christopher Ricks, Prufrock, J. Alfred Prufrock, Atlantic Unbound, April 11, 2001)

The purpose of the visit is to relieve him, through ordeal by embarrassment, of any remaining thought of an overwhelming question. (David Trotter, Prof. of English Literature, Univ. of Cambridge, T. S. Eliot and the Cinema, The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press., 2006)

... and the way to read it is to move with its movement, ride its little shocks, and, in a sense, live along its lines. The point is worth dwelling on here, since that is also the way to handle the much tougher poems that follow Prufrock. (Frank Kermode, The Oxford Anthology of English Literature Volume II: 1800 to the Present, Oxford Univ. Press, 1973, p. 1972.)

I was jolly well right about Eliot. He has sent in the best poem I have yet had or seen from an American. (Ezra Pound in a letter to Harriet Monroe, publisher of Poetry, Sept. 30, 1914.)

’I have tried to write of a few things that really have moved me’ is so far as I know, the sum of Mr. Eliot’s ‘poetic theory.’ (Ezra Pound, Drunken Helots and Mr. Eliot, Egoist. June 1917, vol. iv, 72-4.)

I must admit that I am, on one conspicuous occasion, not guiltless of having led critics into temptation. (T. S. Eliot, The Frontiers of Criticism, 1956.)

Yet when Eliot died, an ailing Pound rallied his forces to produce a late tribute to a memorial volume. "Who is there now for me to share a joke with?" asked Pound. (The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound, 1999, Cambridge University Press)

Come to lunch on Sunday. Tom is coming, and, what is more, is coming with a four-piece suit. (Virginia Woolf recounted by Clive Bell in “How Pleasant to know Mr Eliot”)