386 Eliot, T. S.
various descents down the “the stair” of life through-
out the poem as Prufrock ruminates to the point of
mental collapse and rapidly ages (as recalled by his
ever-receding, greying hair) to the point of physical
death. The inner circle of Prufrock’s hell is charac-
terized not by flame but by water: He has visions of
being a pair of ragged crab claws scuttling across the
seabed, and it is in the chambers of the sea where
he becomes entombed after being drawn (or exiled)
to the margins of the beach from the city. The sea’s
watery tomb was a popular romantic fantasy, seen
as a portal to the lost world of classical antiquity
with its promise of an ideal order. It holds similar
appeal for Prufrock, who gains no pleasure from
the banality of earthly living and instead seeks an
elevated existence where his efforts would be “worth
it,” despite his fear of death, which he personifies as
a footman holding his coat as if ushering him out
of a party.
Prufrock is wracked with indecision, the stasis
of death becoming a metaphor for his social inepti-
tude. His mind is pervaded by disturbing images of
deathly figures as he struggles, like the lonely men
in shirtsleeves, to connect with others. He associ-
ates with the anesthetized patient, with a live insect
impaled on a pin, and with the ghostly movement of
the city fog. Inanimate objects—particularly crock-
ery, clothes, and food—are given unusual promi-
nence in an increasingly inert world dominated by
the image of sleep (a euphemism for death), where
images of soot, smoke, and cigarette butts suggest
the petering-out of life’s fire. Images of a cat licking
up pools around drains (like milk from a saucer)
and hollowed-out oyster shells evoke a sense of the
world being sucked dry of life, mirroring Prufrock’s
experience of his life being drunk and eaten up
through the endless rounds of trivial tea parties.
“I have measured out my life with coffee spoons,”
Prufrock laments (l. 51), suggesting that his life can
be measured by the number of coffee spoons he has
stirred, or that his life has been ground to pieces like
coffee grains. The agency implied by the active verb
measured is reflective of a wider tension that runs
through the poem, that of one’s control over life and
death. As much as he is a modernist antihero at odds
with capitalist society, Prufrock’s obsession with this
control also makes him a universal human type wor-
thy of the public attention he so nervously shirks.
Sarah Barnsleyidentity in “The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock”
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” reveals little
about who the protagonist J. Alfred Prufrock is
or to whom his supposed “love song” is addressed,
just as we can never be sure what, exactly, is the
“overwhelming question” that vexes him. We know
the protagonist’s surname (itself uncommon and
strange) and middle name, yet we are only offered
the initial of his first name. Indeed “J” may be read as
a distorted “I,” suggestive of the many estranged “I”s
haunting the poem, unable to settle on a satisfactory
sense of self.
Prufrock visualizes himself in a variety of guises,
none of them adequate to describe him. There is the
“yellow fog” journeying through the streets like Pru-
frock, its gaseous state corresponding to Prufrock’s
insubstantiality. This image is inflected with other
images, suggesting the instability of identity. The
fog behaves like a cat, but it also resembles a snake
that “slides” through the streets, which, with his
sense of thinning arms and legs, Prufrock fears he
may become. Like fog, the self is transient, located in
impermanent locations like “one-night cheap hotels”
and rooms where people do not settle but “come and
go” or lean out of windows.
This transience of identity is marked by the
poem’s tone and register, which continually vacil-
lates between confidence and doubt. It is difficult to
trust the poem’s voice. Prufrock contradicts himself,
asserting that there is time for “a hundred visions”
(l. 33), envisioning his own decapitation, but later
denying prophetic ability. Though a “love song,”
the only emotion Prufrock nominates is fear (“in
short, I was afraid” [l. 86]). Such contradictions
extend to the identity of the poem itself. Suppos-
edly a dramatic monologue, it is not that dramatic
at all. Assertive statements are quickly followed by
bathetic, self-mocking phrases as Prufrock rejects
the dramatic mantle, identifying instead with a
marginal “attendant lord” in a Shakespearean play. It
is unclear whether the poem is really a monologue,
either. Prufrock seems alone, yet he refers to an