T.S. Eliot`s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 1917

p The Love Song of J . Alfred Prufrock

The Love Song of J . Alfred Prufrock ' begins with an overtly ironic gesture - - the titular provocation stymied by an opening quotation from Dante 's Inferno ' This irony poses an immediate thematic tension between the ideal (a love song ) and the damned (the ensuing lines from Dante . The irony also propels character development the speaker of the poem confiding to the reader his status as a damned ' confessor

What Prufrock wants to do is to find a way to understand himself , his age

, life , love , sex , art , and the meaning of life . What he finds instead is inner-impotency and chaos . The poems ' speaker becomes the subject of the poem itself : providing an extensive , ironic confession of his impotency and malaise . Prufrock is modern , urbane , scholarly , but devoid of direction , incapable of making a decisive move . He moves as though a paralytic through drab neighborhoods , cheap hotels : solitary and dispossessed . Let us go then , you and I /When the evening is spread out against the sky /Like a patient etherised upon a table /Let us go , through certain half-deserted streets /The muttering retreats /Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels

Prufrock 's identity , the sum of his days , finds a suitable and famous epigram in the lines : 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 'which indicate the extreme impotence with which Prufrock meets the modern world

For T .S . Eliot , The Love Song of J . Alfred Prufrock can be said to be the addressing of age , life , and one 's personal fight with the passing of days . The many allusions throughout the poem may be attributed to various issues concerning one 's growing old . In line two , for example Eliot makes the comparison of the evening to an unconscious patient on an operating table . The consequence of this comparison is that the reader begins to see the evening as not the end of a day , but rather the end of someone 's life -- old age . With this allusion used in Eliot 's poem the reader is allowed to explore their own understanding of how their life has been in comparison to the illustrations used by Eliot This is a glimpse into the way Prufrock sees himself and how he views life : basically as a losing proposition and a meaningless one , as well

The personification of the time of day at the beginning of the poem then leads the reader to view the rest of the poem in a manner conducive to that comparison -- with all of the metaphors dealing with life . This comparison is further pressed in line 23 , with And indeed there will be time . This solidifies the metaphor of time , and a person 's dealings with it . Eliot seemed to enjoy writing in the metaphysical aspects and indeed this is strongly reflected in Prufrock , while Eliot balances this writing with...