The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock: Key Poetic Devices

Allusion

An allusion (uh-LOO-zhun) is a passing reference to a literary or historical person, place, or event, usually made without explicit identification. Allusion plays an unusually significant role in “Prufrock,” whose well-educated speaker has a wide range of literary, biblical, and classical references. Before the poem even begins, we get six unattributed verses written in Italian. These lines come from Dante’s Inferno, which in Robert and Jean Hollander’s translation read as follows (canto 27, lines 61–66):

If I but thought that my response were made
to one perhaps returning to the world,
this tongue of flame would cease to flicker.
But since, up from these depths, no one has yet
returned alive, if what I hear is true,
I answer without fear of being shamed.

The speaker of these lines is a man named Guido da Montefeltro, who has been consumed in flames as punishment for having given false counsel. Here, he confesses his shame freely, since he believes that Dante had died and hence can never return to the realm of the living. This quotation from Dante’s poem about hell offers a framework in which to read the speaker of “Prufrock,” who is in his own sort of hell, and who, like Guido, will reveal his own sources of shame. Other major allusions in the poem reference the work of William Shakespeare, and particularly to the character of Hamlet. Though Prufrock shares Hamlet’s obsessiveness and indecision, he cannot match the prince of Denmark’s status as a major character. Prufrock is decidedly minor.

However, the most significant allusions in “Prufrock” relate to Andrew Marvell’s seventeenth-century poem, “To His Coy Mistress.” Marvell’s poem features an anonymous lover who attempts to convince his mistress to have sex with him. The speaker begins by fantasizing how wonderful it would be if he and his mistress had all the time in the world for flirtatious foreplay (lines 1–4):

Had we but world enough and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.
We would sit down, and think which way
To walk, and pass our long love’s day.

Unfortunately, since death is inevitable, the speaker insists that he and his mistress should seize the day and make love before it’s too late. Like Marvell’s speaker, Prufrock is also with a potential lover, considering whether and how to try to seduce her. However, Prufrock seems decidedly less rushed (lines 23–34):

And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of toast and tea.

Given his usual indecision, Prufrock is oddly confident that “indeed there will be time.” Yet for all the extravagant confidence exhibited in this passage, the fragmentary nature of “Prufrock” as a whole suggests that no amount of time can return the disorder of modern life to a meaningful whole. As such, whereas Marvell’s speaker anticipates sexual consummation by rolling up into a “ball” with his beloved, Prufrock envisions a far less satisfying scenario:

squeez[ing] the universe into a ball
To roll it towards some overwhelming question

Fragmentation and Juxtaposition

A defining characteristic of Eliot’s poem is its use of fragmentation and juxtaposition to present a vision of modern life as broken down and fundamentally confused. Eliot frequently uses these techniques to create a collage-like assemblage of Prufrock’s thoughts. As an example, consider how the poet puts a series of fragmented images side by side in lines 87–98:

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,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it towards some overwhelming question,
To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”—
If one, settling a pillow by her head
   Should say: “That is not what I meant at all;
   That is not it, at all.”

Without offering a framework that would tie them together, Eliot races through a jumble of fragmentary images. He has Prufrock begin by referencing the trappings of a traditional English teatime. Prufrock then entertains an abstract image of “squeez[ing] the universe into ball,” which alludes to Andrew Marvell’s poem, “To His Coy Mistress.” The speaker of that poem attempts to convince his mistress to have sex with him, saying, “Let us roll all our strength and all / Our sweetness up into one ball.” Whereas Marvell’s ball expresses sexual consummation, Eliot’s ball leads to the irresolvable quandary of “some overwhelming question.” From here, the speaker’s offers a biblical quote from the book of John referencing Christ’s resurrection of Lazarus. Finally, the stanza ends with the image of a woman in bed, insisting that she’s been misunderstood. The dizzying array of images and references gives the impression of a profoundly disordered mind.

Repetition

Repetition is one of the most notable hallmarks of “Prufrock.” Though many different types of repetition appear, all of them ultimately emphasize the indecision and uncertainty that characterize the speaker. Perhaps the most important type of repetition in the poem is refrain, which refers to any word, phrase, or line that gets repeated over the course of a poem. The most famous refrain in “Prufrock” appears in lines 13–14 and 35–36:

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

These lines may represent a concrete setting where Prufrock either is or has been before. Either way, they illustrate his isolation, standing aside as women bustle about and speak of an artist who belongs to an illustrious but outmoded aesthetic tradition. Elsewhere in the poem, Eliot uses repetition to mimic Prufrock’s obsessive and circling thought. To give just one example, consider lines 49–53:

For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.

Here, the speaker sounds almost manic in the way he insists on knowing so much. Yet despite this insistence, Eliot meticulously breaks down the initial phrase “I have known them” into fragments that belie the speaker’s apparent certainty: “known them,” “have known,” “have,” and finally “know.” The many other instances of repetition throughout the poem do similar work of underscoring the speaker’s fundamental lack of certainty and security.

Rhetorical Questions

Rhetorical questions aren’t generally meant to be answered. Rather, writers use them to make a point or create a dramatic effect. Eliot uses rhetorical questions throughout “Prufrock” as a way of dramatizing the speaker’s feelings of insecurity and uncertainty. Rhetorical questions appear most frequently in the middle third of the poem. The first instance of this device comes in lines 37–38:

And indeed there will be time
To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”

It isn’t clear what action the speaker wonders if he should “dare” to do, though it’s likely he’s referring to his prospective seduction of his potential lover. But what’s curious here is how his repeated question—“Do I dare?”—is itself entirely speculative and hence reserved for the future. That is, he’s saying that there will be time, at some point, to ask this question, but as yet he isn’t prepared to ask it. A similar mode of speculation characterizes a question the speaker repeatedly poses in lines 54, 61, and 68:

So how should I presume?

And how should I presume?

And should I then presume?

These questions are linked to another question Prufrock asks about how he should “begin” (see lines 59–60 and 69). Again, it seems as though he’s referencing a potential seduction, but before he’s even decided to act, he’s already torn between the desire to initiate and concern that to do wo would be presumptuous. In other words, his rhetorical questions have a stalling function.

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