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The setting of “Prufrock” is difficult to pin down, mainly because the references the speaker makes to concrete places are fragmentary and passing. The speaker glancingly mentions several interior spaces. Most memorable is the “room” where “women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo” (lines 13–14 and 35–36). The speaker also implies domestic settings with his references to teatime, lamplight, and a woman with her head on a pillow. Perhaps more important than the interior spaces, however, are the exterior settings. The opening lines of “Prufrock” clearly locate the action in a city. The speaker imagines taking a walk through the urban environment, which, shrouded in fog, he likens to that of a “patient etherised upon a table” (line 3). By the poem’s end, the location seems to shift from the cityscape to the oceanside, though again it seems as though Prufrock is imagining the seaside setting. Overall, Prufrock’s fragmentary references to physical place reflect the fractured nature of his own thoughts, pulled in numerous directions. In this sense, the poem’s “real” setting may be the speaker’s mind, which struggles to find clarity due to the bewilderment of modern life in the early twentieth century.

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