prufaby

Dr. EK Sparks
Clemson U

Abyss Notes for T.S. Eliot's
"The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock"

The epigraph is from Dante's Inferno (Canto 27): the section where Dante speaks with a man burning in the eighth circle of hell for the sin of fraud through evil counsel. The man agrees to tell Dante the story of his life, but only because he knows that no one in hell will ever return to earth to publicize his story:

If I thought my answer were to one who ever could return to the world, this flame would shake no more.
But since none ever did return alive from this depth, if what I hear be true, without fear of infamy I answer thee.

What context does this epigraph set up for the poem? Why did Eliot choose it to introduce "a love song"? What does it tell us about the speaker in the poem and his situation?

What does the Title of the poem make you think of? (Eliot took the name Prufrock from a furniture store in St. Louis.) What kind of a person would "J. Alfred Prufrock" be? What associations can you make with other words and images his name suggests?

Who is the "you" the poet is addressing in the first line? (Critics have argued persuasively for several different interpretations here.)

What kind of a feeling do you get from the lines about the evening being "spread out against the sky/ Like a patient etherized upon a table"? Does this line give you an image? If it doesn't give you an image, how do you react to it?

What does the description of the city streets tell you about the mind of the speaker? (This poem is a dramatic monologue: a speech which reveals the character of the speaker by dramatizing what is going on in their mind.)

One of the big things you are going to have to figure out in the poem is what the Question is that the speaker is so afraid to ask.

How do you respond to the lines about the women coming and going? What do they make you think of? Who is Michelangelo and what is he famous for? How does he relate to the poem?

Why is the fog yellow? What does it make you think of?

What does the fact that it is "a soft October night" suggest?

All of the repetitions about time and how there will be so much time are back-references to a seventeenth-century poem written by Andrew Marvell, "To His Coy Mistress":

This is a seduction poem; the man is trying to convince the woman to make love with him. He says, we gotta do it now because there just isn't enough time to mess around and be coy. And besides we are all going to die, and what good will your chastity be then?

Considering this earlier poem, why do you think Prufrock keeps repeating that there will be enough time? Does the reference to the Marvell poem give us any clue as to what the "question" may be about?

There is another reference to the Marvell poem later on in "Prufrock." Can you find it? How does it work?

Notice that the poem does not have a conventional plot structure, but it does follow some kind of a journey. It seems like Prufrock is imagining going to pay a visit and have tea with some woman. If you watch the poem, he goes through all the steps of getting to her house, going up the stairs, coming into the room, making small talk etc.

When he starts talking about the "bald spot" in the middle of his head, what do you think he is worrying about?

When he starts talking about having known all the evenings already, what kind of a life do you think he has led?

When he talks about seeing his head brought in on a platter, he is referring to John the Baptist; that's why he says he is "no prophet." How are he and John the Baptist similar? Who is Salome?

In the stanza beginning "And would it have been worth it, after all," the speaker suddenly changes tenses; now he speaks in the pst tense. What does this change of tenses suggest about what he is thinking?

Why is it so devastating to him when the woman says "That is not it at all,/ That is not what I meant at all"?

What is Hamlet famous for? Is Prufrock really unlike Hamlet, or are there some similarities?

Why mermaids? What do they make you think of? Are they similar to anything else in the poem? Who are the mermaids?

Why does he drown when he wakes up?