The Emptiness of J. Alfred Prufrock

The early twentieth century marked a significant change in American life, forcing upon the American people an urbanized, industrialized modernity, which not everyone embraced.  The intellectuals of the day devoted their creativity to responding to the rapid changes in their society, producing a body of work now known as "American literary modernism" ("Introduction" 1178).  Foremost among the Modernists was the conservative poet T. S. Eliot.  His 1918 poem, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," makes clear with every line his discontent with what he perceived as the emptiness and meaningless of modern life, especially as compared to the richness and beauty of the past.

From its first stanzas, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" evokes a world whose tawdriness Eliot seems to deplore.    The evening sky resembles "a patient etherised upon a table" (1577), suggesting an artificially induced helplessness and apathy, an anesthesia perhaps necessary to endure the ugly pointlessness of the city:

Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets, / The muttering retreats / Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels / And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells: / Streets that follow like a tedious argument / Of insidious intent (Eliot 1577)

The imagery is that of shabbiness, vague danger, and a deadening aimlessness, reinforced by the stream-of-consciousness pileup of images in the absence of orienting context or exposition.  The succession of sleazy locales resembles a purposeless ramble on an unoccupied evening.  This ramble seemingly leads nowhere, like the "tedious argument" of which Eliot speaks.  That aimlessness is borne out in the next line, "To lead you to an overwhelming question..." (Eliot 1577).  That question is never asked.  Such is the deadened quality of Prufrock's soul, and of his world.  Then an additional layer of grime descends upon the anesthetized twilight:

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes, / The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes, / Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening, / Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains, / Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys (Eliot 1577)

This filth covers the scene.  It seems clear by now that Eliot's conception of urban life was not that of glittering purpose, prosperity, and amusement, but rather one of dirtiness and indifference.

That impression of dirtiness and indifference has its antithesis in Eliot's first classical reference in the body of the poem, his reference to Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress" at the beginning of the fifth stanza:  "And indeed there will be time" (Eliot 1577).  This line echoes Marvell's "Had we but world enough, and time" (Marvell 1703).  In Marvell's world, it seems, the richness of life imparted a sense of urgency to everything, even mere matters of the heart.  In Eliot's time, one has all the time in the world, but nothing of particular importance lays claim to that time.  Prufrock goes from a meander through dingy streets to an insignificant gathering for tea and toast:  such is his evening, and his life.

The tea-party itself is as aimless and lacking in result as everything else in his existence.  His concerns are petty, and reflected by the petty details described by the poem.  His fears of what others may think of the "bald spot in the middle of [his] his hair" are enough to tempt him to turn back:  he lacks confidence and purpose.  Neither does he show any sense of urgency.  Wavering, indecisive, he tells himself that "In a minute there is time / For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse" (Eliot 1578).  The implication of decisions which can be reversed in a minute, of course, is that those decisions were never important in the first place.

The following stanzas provide another stream-of-consciousness recital of details calculated to evoke a life of meaningless monotony.  What Prufrock knows of his life, "the evenings, mornings, afternoons," is "measured out...in coffee spoons" (Eliot 1578).  Even the promise of an epic, Shakespearean love, indicated by the line "I know the voices dying with a dying fall" (Eliot 1578), an echo of Twelfth Night's Orsino saying, "If music be the food of love, play on, / ...That strain again, it had a dying fall" (Shakespeare 1080), fails to provoke Prufrock to action.  He is the quintessential modern man, "politic, cautious, and meticulous" (Eliot 1580), and cannot break free of his lassitude.  What, then, is the reason for his reticence?  Only this question, and these small impediments:  "Would it have been worth it, after all, / After the cups, the marmalade, and the tea, / Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me" (Eliot 1579).  In this portrait of a potential love affair played out among trifles and stymied by the hero’s impotence, Eliot paints a tragic picture of a society hampered by triviality and weakness.

The greatest tragedy of all lies in Prufrock’s own awareness of the opportunities he has known and lost:

I have heard the mermaids singing...  / I do not think that they will sing to me.  /...We have lingered in the chambers of the sea / By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown / Till human voices wake us, and we drown (Eliot 1580)

Prufrock, and by extension modern society, is aware of what greatness and beauty lie beyond the soot and fog of the modern world.  It is his, and society's, weakness that now prevent him from reaching that greatness and beauty.  In “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” T. S. Eliot paints us a picture of a world doomed by triviality, never again to achieve the greatness of the past.

Works Cited

Baym, Nina, ed.  The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 7th ed.  New York, NY:  W. W. Norton & Company, 2007.  Print.

Eliot, T. S.  "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."  Baym 1577-80.  Print.

Greenblatt, Stephen and M. H. Abrams, eds.  The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 8th ed.  New York, NY:  W. W. Norton & Company, 2006.  Print.

"Introduction."  Baym 1177-92.  Print.

Marvell, Andrew.  "To His Coy Mistress."  Greenblatt and Abrams 1703-4.  Print.

Shakespeare, William.  Twelfth Night.  Greenblatt and Abrams 1079-1139.  Print.