A Love Song for Prufrock
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock has held a special place in my heart for the past thirty years. I was introduced to the poem and T.S. Eliot by my first love, at the tender age of seventeen. While our love did not endure my love of Prufrock and Eliot did.
There is something about Eliot's voice I find captivating. Through the use of plain language and everyday objects and settings he's able to create something otherworldly. There is a sense of the strange, of being on the outside looking in. There is a gentle melancholy in Eliot. He finds a resigned beauty in the reality of the world. What others see as ugly, especially of the urban landscape, Eliot finds a beauty, or an appreciation for life and the truth of life in the modern world. There no untouched meadows or briers of roses to sing about. Eliot works with the world he finds.
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the windowpanes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the windowpanes,
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.
I dare one to find a more beautiful, more complete, more accurate, and more emotive description of London smog than Eliot's slumbering beast curled about the house. But more than the imagery, the use of repetition and echo, is what I love most about Eliot and Prufrock.
The first two lines almost mirror each other with "fog" replaced with "smoke" and "upon" replaced with a simple "on" in the second line, creating an echo while also creating a feeling of a lament, a dirge for the approaching fog.
Eliot then echoes the tongue pressing against the pallet at the beginning of the next three lines. The "L" sound also mimics the action of licking, of the tongue lingering on the pallet and then letting the tongue fall like the soot does on the back of the fog.
Just as we are settling into the slow advance of the fog licking and lingering, exploring the half-deserted streets, we're met with two short, sharp pieces of action. First the slip and then the sudden leap. The change in rhythm from the previous lines slips in, leaps suddenly to surprise us only to once again settle into a slower pace and then slip into sleep.
Eliot tells us the fog fell asleep instead of slipping into sleep. The falling action echoes the fall of soot, of the leap from the terrace. Eliot continues to use echo in the stanza with evening approaching and the soft night of October, daring one to imagine the twilight turning the streets into soft pastel renderings.
The stanza also builds in layers, adding detail upon detail, but also builds the actual actions on top of each other. It begins with rubbing against the windowpanes and then standing on pools in the drains. The soot then covers the fog which covers the house and street.
Eliot continues the echoes, the repetition and layering to build a sense of malaise, of tedium, of bringing the "moment to a crisis." As we begin to be overwhelmed and begin to drown in the malaise, Eliot starts to bring in the idea of the ocean, of "being a pair of ragged claws/scuttling across the floors of silent seas." Prufrock is also drowning. He begins to struggle, fight for air, asking questions of how to rescue himself from drowning in the tedium of his life. Realizing he has no answers, "it is impossible to say just what I mean!", the setting shifts almost entirely to an aging man walking on the beach, not able to attract the attention of the mermaids that, "Come and go, talking of Michelangelo." In the end, reality wakes him from the dream of being what he is not, and reality, of being absent of human connection, and drowns him.
The idea of being a pair of ragged claws at the bottom of the sea has always stuck with me. As one who struggles with human relationships and making connections, I understand the desire of being alone at the bottom of a silent sea.
The influence of Prufrock and Eliot on my own writing is very strong. There are echoes of Prufrock in over a dozen of my poems. My short story Mermaids Singing Each to Each, is directly inspired by Prufrock. Eliot's voice whispers in my ear whenever I put pen to paper. I have tried to emulate his ability to see beauty in the everyday and turn the ugly, grimy modern world into something magical, ethereal. Most importantly, I keep asking myself the same question Eliot has Prufrock ask:
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?
I keep telling myself: "Yes."