The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”—the first major work of American-born British poet Thomas Stearns (T. S.) Eliot—was published in Poetry magazine in 1915. A free verse, stream-of-consciousness monologue from the perspective of an aging everyman, the poem portrays modern disillusionment with the social isolation and emptiness of the early 20th century world. Eliot’s startling, precise imagery and his juxtaposition of classical allusions with banal, everyday concerns, established him as a voice of literary modernism, setting the stage for his future canonical works, like “Preludes” (1917) and “The Waste Land” (1922).

Eliot wrote “Prufrock” in 1910-11, while studying at Harvard University and developing the philosophical underpinnings that would inform later works. After completing his studies at Harvard, he moved to England and became acquainted with other major figures of modernism, including Ezra Pound who encouraged Eliot to send out “Prufrock” for publication.

“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” introduced Eliot to the literary scene, presenting ideas of modern alienation, fragmentation, and disillusionment with the world that would continue to form other works in his oeuvre. With its subject a middle-aged, despairing man who fails to connect with the world around him, “Prufrock” continues to rattle even contemporary readers in its striking portrayal of loneliness and isolation. Notably, in a move that rebels against the most optimistic tradition of the romantic poets who came before him, Eliot chooses to end his poem with the death of his speaker, underscoring the dangers inherent in the modern world.

Poet Biography

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in 1888 in St. Louis, Missouri to a prominent Boston family that had relocated to Missouri in 1834 to establish a Unitarian church. He was distant with his father, a successful businessman, but close to his mother—a poet who encouraged her son’s budding interest in literature. Although he was the youngest of six children, Eliot’s childhood was often solitary due to a medical condition that prevented him from physical activity. As a result, he developed a love of reading and writing at a young age, composing original poetry as early as 14.

As a teenager, Eliot attended preparatory school at Milton Academy in Massachusetts before matriculating at Harvard College, where he discovered many of the writers and texts—like Arthur Symon’s The Symbolist Movement—that would later become influential in his own poetics. Eliot attended the Sorbonne in Paris for a year before eventually earning a fellowship to Merton College, Oxford, in 1914. Around this time, a mutual friend introduced Eliot to Ezra Pound, whose friendship would have an enormous impact on his literary life. With Pound’s encouragement, Eliot published “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in Poetry magazine in 1915; it became the first of his major works. Pound was an influential editor to Eliot’s other works, including the canonical “The Waste Land,” published in 1934.

Eliot left Oxford but remained in England where he took on various jobs, including teaching, banking, and writing book reviews for supplementary income. He wed Vivienne Haigh-Wood in 1915, an unhappy marriage that resulted in separation in 1933. While Eliot had several public female companions in subsequent years, he did not marry again until 1957, when he wed his secretary, Esme Valerie Fletcher. Eliot produced no children with either wife.

In 1927, Eliot renounced his American citizenship in favor of British citizenship and converted to Anglicanism, a move that reverberated throughout his writing—most notably in the “Four Quartets” (1941), which was his last major poetic work. During the 1930s-50s, he continued to publish poems, plays, and essays and other critical works, cementing his role as one of the most influential figures of the modernist movement. In 1948, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Eliot died on January 4, 1965 in London.

Poem Text

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.

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:

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.

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.

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;

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.

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!”)

Do I dare

Disturb the universe?

In a minute there is time

For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

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?

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?

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?

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.

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?

But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,

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.

And would it have been worth it, after all,

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,

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.”

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!

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.”

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.

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.

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.

Eliot, T.S. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” 1915. Poetry Foundation.

Summary

The poem begins with an epigraph from Dante’s Inferno (c. 1307) in which Guido da Montefeltro, a resident of hell, explains he is willing to share his story with his interlocutor because he knows that person will never be able to return to the world and relay it to someone else.

The poem follows the fragmented consciousness of a middle-aged male speaker, J. Alfred Prufrock, as he navigates fears and concerns about his life and reflects upon his impotency and inability to create meaning for himself in the modern world. The poem dips in and out of Prufrock’s reflections and scenes of social anxiety he imagines for the reader.

In the first stanza, Prufrock begins with an invitation, asking the reader—or perhaps addressing a different part of his own psyche—to go out “through certain half-deserted streets” that “follow like a tedious argument / of insidious intent/to lead you to an overwhelming question” (Lines 4, 8, 10). The “overwhelming question” crops up in later sections of the poem, and Prufrock never satisfactorily answers it.

The images in the first four stanzas describe a seedy, urban scene, with an eerie “yellow fog” permeating the entire setting (Line 15). The speaker exhibits concern about the “overwhelming question” and anxiety about interacting with other humans. He describes scenes of fashionable women going about the room, “talking of Michelangelo” and other fashionable, elite topics, and expresses worry over how to present himself to other “faces that you meet" (Lines 14, 27).

Prufrock is painfully self-aware, describing his aging body, and his sense that others constantly watch and judge him. Disembodied voices enter the poem, commenting on Prufrock’s thinning hair and physical appearance, and these judgments paralyze him and prevent him from acting on any of his desires. He recalls the banal details of his life, one that has been “measured out […] with coffee spoons” (Line 51) in which nothing big or meaningful has ever happened. He is “pinned and wriggling on the wall” (Line 58) like a trapped insect, unable to escape his discomfort and unable to move or act.

Halfway through the poem, the speaker imagines a romantic, sexualized other, describing her “arms that are braceleted and white and bare” (Line 63). Prufrock is impotent in his approach to this figure, and to all female figures in the poem, seized by not knowing “how [he should] begin” (Line 69). He acknowledges his inability to communicate with this love interest, claiming it would have been better for him to have been “a pair of ragged claws / scuttling across the floors of silent seas” (Lines 73-74) as he is incapable of forming a connection with her.

Prufrock spends several stanzas reflecting further on the meaninglessness he experiences, drawing on Biblical allusions to John the Baptist and Lazarus to emphasize his lowliness in comparison. Even the “eternal Footman” (Line 85), or Death himself, snickers at Prufrock, finding him pitiful.

Prufrock desperately desires to connect with the female love interest, or with any human figure, but finds it impossible. He describes an effort to tell her a personal story, to approach once more the “overwhelming question,” only to hear her say “[t]hat is not what I meant at all; / that is not it, at all” (Lines 97-98). Communication breaks down to the point where Prufrock claims “It is impossible to say just what I mean!” (Line 104)

In the final movements of the poem, Prufrock compares himself not with Hamlet—a literary figure famous for his indecision—but rather the Fool in Hamlet’s court. Prufrock describes his aging, and reframes his earlier question from “Do I dare disturb the universe?” to the measly “Do I dare to eat a peach?” (Line 122) He imagines himself walking on a beach with mermaids singing to each other but ignoring him. In the final stanza, Prufrock describes these distant mermaids, drawing him out into the “chambers of the sea” (Line 129), which become his deathbed when “human voices wake us, and we drown” (Line 131).