Summary
This poem, the earliest of Eliot’s major works, was completed
in 1910 or 1911 but
not published until 1915.
It is an examination of the tortured psyche of the prototypical
modern man—overeducated, eloquent, neurotic, and emotionally stilted.
Prufrock, the poem’s speaker, seems to be addressing a potential
lover, with whom he would like to “force the moment to its crisis”
by somehow consummating their relationship. But Prufrock knows too
much of life to “dare” an approach to the woman: In his mind he
hears the comments others make about his inadequacies, and he chides
himself for “presuming” emotional interaction could be possible
at all. The poem moves from a series of fairly concrete (for Eliot)
physical settings—a cityscape (the famous “patient etherised upon
a table”) and several interiors (women’s arms in the lamplight,
coffee spoons, fireplaces)—to a series of vague ocean images conveying
Prufrock’s emotional distance from the world as he comes to recognize
his second-rate status (“I am not Prince Hamlet’). “Prufrock” is
powerful for its range of intellectual reference and also for the
vividness of character achieved.
Form
“Prufrock” is a variation on the dramatic monologue, a
type of poem popular with Eliot’s predecessors. Dramatic monologues
are similar to soliloquies in plays. Three things characterize the
dramatic monologue, according to M.H. Abrams. First, they are the
utterances of a specific individual (not the poet) at a specific moment
in time. Secondly, the monologue is specifically directed at a listener
or listeners whose presence is not directly referenced but is merely
suggested in the speaker’s words. Third, the primary focus is the
development and revelation of the speaker’s character. Eliot modernizes
the form by removing the implied listeners and focusing on Prufrock’s
interiority and isolation. The epigraph to this poem, from Dante’s Inferno, describes
Prufrock’s ideal listener: one who is as lost as the speaker and
will never betray to the world the content of Prufrock’s present
confessions. In the world Prufrock describes, though, no such sympathetic
figure exists, and he must, therefore, be content with silent reflection.
In its focus on character and its dramatic sensibility, “Prufrock”
anticipates Eliot’s later, dramatic works.
The rhyme scheme of this poem is irregular but not random.
While sections of the poem may resemble free verse, in reality,
“Prufrock” is a carefully structured amalgamation of poetic forms.
The bits and pieces of rhyme become much more apparent when the
poem is read aloud. One of the most prominent formal characteristics
of this work is the use of refrains. Prufrock’s continual return
to the “women [who] come and go / Talking of Michelangelo” and his
recurrent questionings (“how should I presume?”) and pessimistic
appraisals (“That is not it, at all.”) both reference an earlier
poetic tradition and help Eliot describe the consciousness of a
modern, neurotic individual. Prufrock’s obsessiveness is aesthetic,
but it is also a sign of compulsiveness and isolation. Another important
formal feature is the use of fragments of sonnet form, particularly
at the poem’s conclusion. The three three-line stanzas are rhymed
as the conclusion of a Petrarchan sonnet would be, but their pessimistic,
anti-romantic content, coupled with the despairing interjection,
“I do not think they (the mermaids) would sing to me,” creates a
contrast that comments bitterly on the bleakness of modernity.
Commentary
“Prufrock” displays the two most important characteristics
of Eliot’s early poetry. First, it is strongly influenced by the
French Symbolists, like Mallarmé, Rimbaud, and Baudelaire, whom
Eliot had been reading almost constantly while writing the poem.
From the Symbolists, Eliot takes his sensuous language and eye for unnerving
or anti-aesthetic detail that nevertheless contributes to the overall
beauty of the poem (the yellow smoke and the hair-covered arms of
the women are two good examples of this). The Symbolists, too, privileged
the same kind of individual Eliot creates with Prufrock: the moody,
urban, isolated-yet-sensitive thinker. However, whereas the Symbolists
would have been more likely to make their speaker himself a poet or
artist, Eliot chooses to make Prufrock an unacknowledged poet, a
sort of artist for the common man.
The second defining characteristic of this poem is its
use of fragmentation and juxtaposition. Eliot sustained his interest
in fragmentation and its applications throughout his career, and
his use of the technique changes in important ways across his body
of work: Here, the subjects undergoing fragmentation (and reassembly)
are mental focus and certain sets of imagery; in The Waste
Land, it is modern culture that splinters; in the Four
Quartets we find the fragments of attempted philosophical
systems. Eliot’s use of bits and pieces of formal structure suggests
that fragmentation, although anxiety-provoking, is nevertheless
productive; had he chosen to write in free verse, the poem would
have seemed much more nihilistic. The kinds of imagery Eliot uses
also suggest that something new can be made from the ruins: The
series of hypothetical encounters at the poem’s center are iterated
and discontinuous but nevertheless lead to a sort of epiphany (albeit
a dark one) rather than just leading nowhere. Eliot also introduces
an image that will recur in his later poetry, that of the scavenger.
Prufrock thinks that he “should have been a pair of ragged claws
/ Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.” Crabs are scavengers,
garbage-eaters who live off refuse that makes its way to the sea
floor. Eliot’s discussions of his own poetic technique (see especially
his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent”) suggest that making
something beautiful out of the refuse of modern life, as a crab
sustains and nourishes itself on garbage, may, in fact, be the highest
form of art. At the very least, this notion subverts romantic ideals about
art; at best, it suggests that fragments may become reintegrated,
that art may be in some way therapeutic for a broken modern world.
In The Waste Land, crabs become rats, and the optimism
disappears, but here Eliot seems to assert only the limitless potential
of scavenging.
“Prufrock” ends with the hero assigning himself a role
in one of Shakespeare’s plays: While he is no Hamlet, he may yet
be useful and important as “an attendant lord, one that will do
/ To swell a progress, start a scene or two...” This implies that
there is still a continuity between Shakespeare’s world and ours,
that Hamlet is still relevant to us and that we
are still part of a world that could produce something like Shakespeare’s plays.
Implicit in this, of course, is the suggestion that Eliot, who has
created an “attendant lord,” may now go on to create another Hamlet.
While “Prufrock” ends with a devaluation of its hero, it exalts
its creator. Or does it? The last line of the poem suggests otherwise—that
when the world intrudes, when “human voices wake us,” the dream
is shattered: “we drown.” With this single line, Eliot dismantles
the romantic notion that poetic genius is all that is needed to
triumph over the destructive, impersonal forces of the modern world.
In reality, Eliot the poet is little better than his creation: He
differs from Prufrock only by retaining a bit of hubris, which shows
through from time to time. Eliot’s poetic creation, thus, mirrors
Prufrock’s soliloquy: Both are an expression of aesthetic ability
and sensitivity that seems to have no place in the modern world. This
realistic, anti-romantic outlook sets the stage for Eliot’s later
works, including The Waste Land.
