Explanation:
T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is a modern journey into and dissection of the mind of a society man, J. Alfred Prufrock. Prufrock is pushed in two opposite directions by his desires: his desire to have the favor of the woman he admires from afar, and his desire to protect himself from rejection. This theme of division and opposites is seen throughout the poem, and even its protagonist’s name can be seen as an example of this– his last name, “Prufrock,” can be read two ways. Read as “Pru-frock,” the name is suggestive of a certain weakness; the two words that come to mind are “prudish/prudence” and “frock,” which suggest a womanly, restricted character. Read another way, “Pruf-rock,” the name suggests a manly, solid character. The poem builds inexorably to the “overwhelming question”, whether or not Prufrock will be able to conquer his fear and act, to win the favor of the lady in question.
The opening phrase, in italics, is from “The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri,” and it says, to paraphrase, “If I knew these words would or could be repeated, I would not say them.” This serves to perhaps put the reader into the frame of mind of an explorer, one who observes unseen; the last thing it seems Prufrock would want would be for anyone to know his true feelings, though as we see later it is himself who is doing the exploring. This theme is carried over into the opening lines of the first verse paragraph, when the speaker describes the evening as being “…[S]pread out against the sky like a patient etherized upon a table;” at first glance, this does not seem to make much sense, but consider—for what purpose is one anesthetized? One is “etherised” for surgery, for dissection, for exploration of the interior. If we take the poem to be an exploration of a
Divided mind, the meaning seems clear. Prufrock’s dilemma seems to have come to a head, on an evening among society—and perhaps in the company of his admiree, so I read the two as being synonymous—the evening, and Prufrock’s dilemma. Eliot goes on, in the first verse paragraph, to tell us that the message of the poem will not be told to us outright, but will be revealed to us through our observation and study of Prufrock’s interior stream-of-consciousness, when he says “Oh do not ask ‘What is it?'” The poet/speaker himself bows out of the scene at the end of the first verse paragraph, with the sentence “Let us go and make our visit….,” and we move into the mind of Prufrock.
