And You May Ask Yourself, Am I Right…Am I Wrong: T. S. Eliot’s Love Song

“The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock” is one of T. S. Eliot’s greatest poems and something to be admired. Eliot’s use of imagery throughout the poem is detailed and fascinating. While not as interesting as the rest of the poem, one of the first parts, rhetorically, that catches ones eye is not the rhyme scheme or stanza breaks, but his use of imagery and metaphor in the third stanza. Eliot is able to make the reader believe the fog that settles into the streets is cat like without ever actually calling it a cat. He brilliantly depicts the fog as it “rubs its back on the window-panes” and “rubs its muzzle on the window-panes” (15-16). Giving the fog these animalistic attributes helps to show how lazily it lingers in the streets and eventually settles. The fog didn’t settle though, instead it “curled once about the house, and fell asleep,” much like a cat would do (22). Eliot is able to capture the movement of the cat and metaphorically transpose it to that of the fog.

The next time Eliot gives animal like characteristics to inanimate objects in his poem, is on line 75. Eliot beings the stanza with:

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. (75-78)

Again, Eliot describes the afternoon as if it were a cat or a dog lounging about the house. He continually brings the image of nature to the poem by liking it to an animal. Evening and afternoon are asleep as they are pet by long fingers. It is a creepy image to picture in the readers mind, but important none-the-less. Eliot’s use of giving animalistic attributes to the fog and afternoon show how the day works to his character in the poem. Things don’t just happen around him, they are lazily lulled to sleep and stroke. Nature is manipulated by time that Eliot has created himself. He gives the fog a mind, the mind of a cat. He gives the afternoon a master to help it fall sleep and lounge on the floor. The afternoon doesn’t just turn into evening; it gets tired and decides to lie down.

Eliot goes beyond what is sometimes understandable. His many allusions to classical works make it difficult to understand some of the references, and even once referenced, the reader is lost in his mind. It could be difficult for readers to differentiate between brilliance and insanity, and sometimes that seems to be what is happening in these poems. The book mentions a little bit as to what this poem is about, and I can understand where it is coming from. A lot of what happens in the poem is confusion. The dead ends are reopened and then closed again. Allusions to classical works and questions that run throughout our heads everyday are a plenty in this poem. Prufrock is just an average man who and this is a look inside his head. Like the book says, “Prufrock, like modern European humanity whom he represents, is unable to penetrate the thick husk of habit, custom, and cliché to arrive at something substantial” (1192). The poem is supposed to take the reader on a journey (“let us go then, you and I” (1)), but in the end, Eliot leaves us with Prufrock’s musings on mermaids and such. The poem is hard to penetrate by one look, and even his unique take on nature is not enough to crack open some of the stanzas. There are allusions to parties (“in the room the women come and go / talking of Michelangelo” (13-14, 35-36)) that add to, I would guess, the custom and habit of the modern European. Either a lot is lost on the fact that time has moved on, or there are too many layers present in this poem for the reader to decipher.