The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
From Oneiropedia
“I should have been a pair of ragged claws / scuttling across the floors of silent seas...”
~ J. Alfred Prufrock
"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is maybe the best poem of all time. Jury's still out on this one. But one helluva poem. Oh, and it's by T.S. Eliot, from his collection Prufrock and Other Observations.
Protagonist
Poor J. Alfred just (can't get no) satisfaction. He's got a girl he's fond of, but she doesn't reciprocate. In fact, she laughs at him, with all his high-class friends. But what's he supposed to do? He's stuck in his position. And besides, he does not think that the mermaids will sing for him. So he's stuck in his fantasy world wishing he were somebody significant, or that he had the ability to do anything. Poor, dumb bastard.
Allusions
Among other things, "Love Song" features allusions to:
- The Bible ("seen my head...brought in upon a platter," Lazarus)
- Hamlet (pretty self-evident)
- Dante (the epigraph)
- Hesiod ("works and days of hands...")
- Michelangelo
Structure
One element of "Love Song" that really fascinates me is its structure. It's so irregular, and yet so perfect. There's a powerful balance to it, with stanzas varying in length, mind-boggling rhyme schemes jumping all over the place, and ideas recurring with symbolic resonance. Here's one theory I put forward: the structure resembles how an actual love song (especially by such an awkward narrator) would be written. It starts off a little forcefully ("Let us go!") then he tosses in this remark about women coming and going ("God, those pretentious bitches!" he's thinking) and then a whole stanza about fog ("That should symbolize my state of mind well enough! 'Made a sudden leap'...") and keeps going with the references to fog, repeats the line about the women, but ventures down whole new alleys of delusion, persecution, and anxiety. At one point he even shouts, "It impossible to say just what I mean!" This, for me, is another sign of the poem's genius: in its text are hints to the process of its own creation within the mind of its own fictional protagonist!
