The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Eliot, a severe self-critic, knew his worth; he grouped some of the work in his
Collected Poems as ‘Minor Poems’. His most notable poems are The Love Song of J.
Alfred Prufrock (1911);The Waste Land (1922); and Four Quartets (1942). Ezra
Pound got the first two published. Between the first two came the chill quatrains
of ‘Sweeney Among the Nightingales’ (1918); between the second, a series of
poems recording painful progress towards an ascetic Christianity, notably Ash
Wednesday. (In the 1930s, Eliot’s wife became mentally ill; her brother signed the
order to place her in an asylum in 1938; she died in 1947. A second marriage in
1957 was happy.)
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
Ofrestless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster shells;
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question ...
Oh, do not ask, ‘What is it?’
Let us go and make our visit.So begins Prufrock’s love song. The twisting of meaning in ‘spread out’ is character-
istic of Eliot’s doubleness: the romantic evening is displayed as for surgery. The like-
ness of the evening clouds to a supine patient is more than visual, for the passive
sufferer never makes his visit nor asks ‘the overwhelming question’. Images of heroic
martyrdom suggest that the question might have been ‘To be or not to be’; images
of distant sexual attraction, ‘Could you love me?’ Absurd rhymes make it clear that
Prufrock is capable of neither love nor sacrifice; insistent rhythms suggest a ritual
approach to a climax that syntax always defers. Accepting that the visit would not
have been ‘worth it after all’, Prufrock faces the future:
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.The Waste Land
Dramatic monologues are multiplied in The Waste Land, an earlier title for which
was ‘He Do the Police in Different Voices’ (from Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend). The
poem collates modern voices and ancient beauty and wisdom; its lives are incoher-
ent, shabby, incomplete, unloving, lost. But not all is lost.
O City city, I can sometimes hear
Beside a public bar in Lower Thames Street,
The pleasant whining of a mandoline
And a clatter and a chatter from within
Where fishmen lounge at noon: where the walls
OfMagnus Martyr hold
Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold.‘MODERNISM’: 1914–27 351