The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 385the men of the poem, who are referred to in the
singular (Michelangelo, “the eternal Footman,”
Lazarus, Hamlet, an attendant lord). Unlike the
women flowing freely through the room, men are
“lonely” and uncomfortable in interiors, seen “lean-
ing out of windows” (72). The female-dominated
room (a metaphor for the vagina) is a site of danger
and fierce scrutiny, a room Prufrock would prefer
not to enter, hoping to “descend the stair” of sexual
foreplay that leads there. It is not surprising that
his female companion turns away from him in the
bedroom, settling a pillow down to sleep or mov-
ing from the bed to the window as Prufrock fails to
understand or satisfy her.
Prufrock’s alienation is intensified by the disori-
entating landscapes he occupies, from the dreamlike
“sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells” (l. 7), which
blurs the restaurant with the hospital (sawdust was
spread on the floor of 19th-century operating the-
aters to soak up blood), to menacing scenes of hotels
that offer no assurance of sleep and claustrophobic
“narrow” streets that sap his energy like a “tedious
argument” while threatening to turn on him with
“insidious intent.” Spaces are marked by a discon-
certing inertia reflecting Prufrock’s emotional and
spiritual paralysis, such as the floor, which is a space
for passivity and futility where the afternoon
“sleeps” and “malingers” or where bodiless claws
“scuttle” aimlessly, mirroring Prufrock’s experience of
tea parlors as he ruminates endlessly.
Prufrock’s alienation is extended to the poem’s
form, which estranges the reader. A modernist
reworking of the dramatic monologue, the title of
the poem bears little connection to its content—this
is hardly a passionate love song. The strong, hyp-
notic rhythm and heavy use of full and partial rhyme
draws the reader in only to encounter images of dis-
connection, severances that are enacted in the free-
verse structure of the poem where lines and stanzas
of variable lengths forge short-lived connections
through repeated phrases. In the persistent repeti-
tions and frequent use of parallelisms, the poem cuts
itself off from the richness and variety of language,
favoring a limited pool of words and phrases evoca-
tive of Prufrock’s limited sensibility.
Such alienation is typical of modernist texts,
which are often concerned with the effects of rapid
social and technological change on the individual
and his/her consequent estrangement from the
natural world, as well such effects on the modern-
ist artist struggling to find new artistic forms amid
increasing sociopolitical fragmentations.
Sarah BarnsleydeatH in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
A meditation on life and death, T. S. Eliot’s dramatic
monologue charts J. Alfred Prufrock’s social death
as he wrestles with the modern world, climaxing
with his physical death by drowning. The poem is
replete with death imagery and famous dead figures
( John the Baptist, Lazarus) as Prufrock continually
postpones asking an unspecified question (possibly
“Is there an afterlife?” or “Will I be damned?”) that
threatens to overwhelm and destroy him. Though he
claims that there is time to “murder and create”—
to live as well as to die—death haunts Prufrock’s
mental landscape so relentlessly that he envisions a
variety of punitive, violent ends such as decapitation
and impalement.
The idea that Prufrock is actually already dead
is hinted at in the Latin epigraph, which presents
the words of the Count Guido da Montefeltro, a
damned schemer who is found in the Eighth Circle
of Hell in Dante’s Inferno. The reader is left to
guess whether Prufrock is another Guido, dead and
continuing his confessional lines from the “hell” of
the modern world, or another Dante, descending
into the “underworld” of his dreams and nightmares
in search of spiritual guidance. Eliot’s opening line,
with its entreaty to the plural us, furthers this con-
fusion, as does the poem’s emphasis on the past and
future—Prufrock makes comparably fewer asser-
tions in the present tense, causing the reader to
doubt that he is alive in the present world. The men-
acing atmosphere of endless narrow, winding streets
and the various oppressive parlors, stairways, and
bedrooms suggest that Prufrock’s urban cityscape
is a modern Inferno, each street, building, and room
representing a different circle of hell as he makes his
journey, or “visit,” to the depths of himself. It is no
accident that the poem begins with an image of the
sky and closes with an image of a funereal seabed
decorated with wreathed creatures in hellish hues of
red and brown. The geographical descent parallels