"I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas."

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

"And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep … tired … or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me."

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

"And I have known the eyes already, known them all—
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and way?
And how should I presume?"

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

"And indeed there will be time
To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair—"

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

"Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows?…

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas."

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

"It is perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
And should I then presume?
And how should I begin?"

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

"And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile…"

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

That Is Not What I Meant At All.

Not entirely sure how many of you are looking for any sort of commentary, or even personal revelation on my part about T. S. Eliot’s amazing poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, but I have been reading this poem over and over again the last few days due to circumstances in my life, so I figured that here would be as good a place as any to share with you, my fellow fans, what goes through my mind when I read this poem, and why Mr. Eliot was giving us incredible insight into the dynamic of so many relationships. If you’d rather not read my probably mediocre commentary, feel free to skip over this. I promise I’ll be posting more of Mr. Eliot’s work very soon.

As we all can probably deduce, the key to the poem lies in the simple lines which repeat at various intervals throughout: “In the room the women come and go/ Talking of Michelangelo.” The entirety of the poem stands on the foundation of those two lines; within those two lines are bitterness, pain, disappointment, inadequacy, jealousy, discontent, malice, sadness, heartbreak, sarcasm and a menagerie of other emotions. How else could Eliot so contain the very essences of those emotions than to compare reality to the artist who created the model for human perfection? “Michelangelo” refers to more than just the man himself, but rather it represents the ideal human male, to whom, when compared, Mr. Prufrock obviously feels inadequate. This dichotomy may indeed be even more true now in our highly sexualized and materialized society, where the boundaries of perfection are as wide as Photoshop can make them. Yet, at the same time Eliot, or Mr. Prufrock, is comparing himself to the competition around him, who seem to him as gods among men. These men, to him, seem so far beyond him that the only comparison he can make is that of the perfection which Michelangelo created.

Mr. Prufrock is obviously dissatisfied not only in his situation with the woman whom he pursues, but with the absolute fervor which every other woman seems to desire these living Statues of David. As we see by the end of the poem, the belief in his mind that he can never achieve what they have is his own undoing. Does not his situation harken back to The Hollow Men, when Eliot says “This is the way the world ends/ Not with a bang but a whimper.” Mr. Prufrock, bound by his own inadequacy and pain, is unable to move on past his current situations. He lusts for what the Statues of David have, yet he never achieves his wishes. By the final act of the poem, he cannot help but say to himself, “I do not think they will sing to me.” He continually puts off thinking about the and accepting the answer to the hardest question he may ever have to ask himself, “Do I dare disturb the universe?”

My purpose in writing all this comes down to this: please, take The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock to heart. If you are bound by your own inadequacy, reality or fiction, you are better than that. I am telling you that, though, more importantly, T. S. Eliot is telling you that. I have spent far too long shackled by my past. I have spent far too long wriggling while pinned to the wall. We should dare to disturb the universe which we are a part. Recently, I have thought about the innumerable times which I have said to myself, “She will eventually come to find you to be a Michelangelo.” But, as some or most of us have probably experienced, that moment rarely comes. That moment is a fleeting hope which our brains use as a defense mechanism to keep us from moving forward. We must move on. We must disturb our universe. We will hear the mermaids sing. We will do all of this before the taking of toast and tea, not allowing ourselves to be discouraged by the myriad of ways which we could revise and come up with a hundred indecisions.

We will go out with a bang, and not a whimper.

"It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while if one, settling a
Pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
“That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all."

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

"I grow old… I grow old…
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled."

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock