"Prufrock"

I wish that I had something profound to say regarding Eliot’s poetry, but the truth is that I find it less compelling than his prose. I was interested to learn after reading Torrens’s essay the applicability of his prose to his poetry. I suppose this may be obvious to some, but I had not made the connection until I read the ways “Hamlet” can be used in conjunction with “Prufrock” to offer an insightful reading of it. To view the poem as a “‘form of emotional relief’ for the author” (48) seems related to the paradox that is present in so much of Eliot’s criticism. The paradox that exists between the need for emotion and release in poetry in a medium which should simultaneously be void of such finds a balance in “Prufrock.”
There is a hopeful tone in the beginning of this poem, “Let us go then, you and I, / when the evening is spread out against the sky” (3). However, the speaker becomes less optimistic as we move into the third stanza. It is at this point that the poem takes a more ominous turn as putrid descriptions punctuate four of the next five lines, such as, “The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes / The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes” (3). The “yellow smoke” is reminiscent of Eliot’s scientific explanation in “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” The chemical reaction here works to shift the tone of the poem from initially positive and pleasant to dingy and desperate.
The descriptively grimy words continue through the third stanza, “pools that stand in drains, / Let fall upon its back in the soot that falls from chimneys” (3). These images which Eliot uses throughout “Prufrock” make the poem, and by extension its author, seem defeated. I think that it is in this way that this particular poem may perfectly illustrate how to be expressive of emotion while still denouncing it. Since the individual describing such dirty things in the poem seems to take steps to distance him from them, one can read the poem as attempting to move away from emotion, but the overall feeling for readers of “Prufrock” is easily that of emotional response.
This poem to me reads like a journey. This is perhaps best illustrated by a multitude of references to time. Time is a theme repeated throughout the work both explicitly and also in more covert ways. Lines such as “And indeed there will be time” and its near verbatim repetition after only two lines, “There will be time, there will be time” (4) signal a long and trying personal journey for readers. Eliot conveys this more subtly in his use of “evenings, mornings, afternoons” (4). The times of day pass in quicker succession than the years of the speaker’s life, but the focus of the passage of time is apparent at many points in the poem.
I find that this emphasis on lifetime may represent Eliot’s desire to relive his own. I do not mean that to suggest that this is a poem about second chances; in fact, I lean towards thinking the opposite. Instead of writing an emotional poem about an individual, “Prufrock” is instead a very dry account of a person. It is the reading of it and the emotions readers bring to it that make the poem seemingly full of emotion. It is in this way that Eliot’s work can survive his own nearly impossible requirements, to be at once pushing away from emotion yet truly able to express it.
Lines like “I grow old…I grow old…” do not necessarily have any emotional connotation; they are straight forward observations. However, when written alongside the rest of the unemotional equally straight forward lines in “Prufrock,” they begin to have a greater meaning. Although this work is less fragmented than say The Waste Land, the way in which the pieces fit make the whole nearly unrelated to the fragments which make it up.