The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock: Themes

The Bleakness of Modern Life

In both its content and its form, “Prufrock” powerfully conveys the bleakness of modern life. This bleakness is represented through the poem’s speaker, J. Alfred Prufrock, who exemplifies the tortured psyche of the prototypical modern person: well educated and eloquent, and yet neurotic and emotionally stilted. Isolated in his own meandering, digressive, and relentlessly self-critical thoughts, Prufrock exists in a constant state of disappointment and indecision. In many ways, his internal experience mirrors the realities of urban life under conditions of industrial modernity. Prufrock suggests as much in the poem’s opening stanza, where he describes an imaginary walk through the city (lines 1–10):

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
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
To lead you to an overwhelming question ...

With bitter humor, the speaker undercuts the implied romanticism of the first two lines when he describes the evening sky as “a patient etherised upon a table.” Following this image of incapacitation, Prufrock describes a walk that proceeds “through certain half-deserted streets” characterized by different avatars of spiritual hollowness: “cheap hotels,” “sawdust restaurants,” and “oyster-shells.” The description culminates in a sinister image that conflates an urban walk with “a tedious argument / Of insidious intent.” The bleakness of the modern city, it seems, leads inevitably to “an overwhelming question” about the very nature and meaning of existence.

The Longing for Remote Traditions

In the face of modernity’s bleakness, Prufrock alludes to a range of different traditions that appeal to him enormously and yet remain remote. Throughout the poem, the speaker references daily rituals such as teatime, the art of the Italian Renaissance, and, most significantly, the Western literary tradition. In addition to the quotation from Dante’s Inferno that precedes the poem, Prufrock references the Bible and the Greek poet Hesiod, as well as William Shakespeare and Andrew Marvell. The speaker’s frequent allusions bespeak a longing that he cannot articulate directly. Consider the famous refrain in lines 13–14 and 35–36:

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

The speaker is presumably attracted to the women mentioned here, and yet they remain remote from him, going about their own business and talking amongst themselves. That they are talking specifically of Michelangelo exacerbates the speaker’s sense of alienation, since the work of the great Renaissance artist seems equally remote. Everywhere in the poem, Prufrock’s unspoken longing for tradition exists in tension with his modern reality. Whereas tradition promises a reassuring framework that guarantees continuity and meaningfulness, modernity fractures continuity and disseminates meaning. Hence Prufrock’s heartbreaking insistence on misunderstanding (“That is not what I meant, at all” [line 110]) and the failure to communicate (“It is impossible to say just what I mean!” [line 104]).

Prufrock’s Frustrated Sexuality

Closely bound up with his general sense of malaise, indecision, and isolation is Prufrock’s frustrated sexuality. At every turn, the poem’s speaker seems to desire women who at best remain remote or aloof, and who at worst confront him directly with misgivings or disapproval. For example, the women in the room who “come and go / Talking of Michelangelo” (lines 13–14 and 35–36) are busy with their own affairs. They don’t even seem to notice that Prufrock is present. Remote women appear again at the poem’s end, where the speaker envisions mermaids swimming and singing to each other in the distant sea, but “they will [not] sing to me” (line 125). Elsewhere in the poem, women reject Prufrock in ways that emasculate him. These rejections seem to occur entirely in the speaker’s own mind. For example, imagining a gallery of critics looking down on him as he descends a staircase, he contrasts his own attempt at dressing elegantly with women’s judgment of his physique (lines 42–44):

My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin —
(They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”)

In another instance, Prufrock imagines the shame he would feel if, “settling a pillow by her head,” a woman “should say: ‘That is not what I meant at all; / That is not it, at all” (lines 96–98). Far from being a proper “love song,” Eliot’s poem is ultimately a fragmented lament for Prufrock’s thwarted love life.

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