![]() The streets are half-deserted and are the streets that pass through the red-light district, filled with restless nights, one-night cheap hotels, and sawdust restaurants with oyster shells. ![]() The very evening is equated to “a patient etherized upon a table”-numb, not conscious, awaiting to be cut open on the operating table. The description in the first stanza of the city as he goes at evening to the party is rife with imagery of darkness, death, and depression. The first four stanzas in the poem provide the setting of Prufrock going to a party, all the while agonizing whether he should have the courage to be his true self, or whether he should continue to wear the mask of his false self. In the same vein, the thoughts of Prufrock are thus presented as those interior thoughts he (and probably to a certain extent, everybody) harbors, but never dare share with others. In the Inferno, the only reason the spirit speaks to Dante is because he is certain that no one in the real world would ever hear his thoughts. I hear is true, I answer you without fear of infamy. Return to the world, this flame would stay without further movement.īut since none has ever returned alive from this depth, if what If I thought that my reply would be to one who would ever The poem begins with a quote from Dante’s Inferno, spoken by the spirit of Guido da Montefeltro: In many way, it reflects the tension that is within all of us. Thus, the poem shows the tension and insecurity of a man who is torn between questioning his existence and the meaning of life and going along with the status quo. In that sense, the interior dialogue is between Prufrock’s false self, the mask he shows to the world, and his real self, the inner man looking at how his false self interacts with the world and debating whether or not to show his real self to the world. Alfred Prufrock as he goes about his life, in particular in regard to his attending a certain social gathering. ![]() The poem as a whole is pretty much an interior dialogue of a certain J. ![]() And so, in this post, I’m going to say a few things about Prufrock-and I even have a short video of me reading it at the end. I understand it a lot better than I did as a 17-year-old kid, and I love it even more. I remember first reading it as a senior in high school and thinking, “I have no idea what this guy is saying, but there’s something about it that is really interesting!” Since then, I’ve read it quite a bit, and have even taught it a number of times. That poem, among all the poetry of Eliot, is evidently considered to be the easiest- and it isn’t that easy to understand. Eliot’s poetry can be when the one, if not only, poem almost every high school English Literature curriculum has of Eliot’s is The Love Song of J. It really says something about how difficult T.S. ![]()
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