Running head: MORALITY AND MONOTONY: “THE LOVE SONG OF J. ALFRED PRUFROCK” 1
The overreaching theme of T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is one of
dying slowly. Life is filled up by coffee spoons, night walks, and banal conversations so slowly
that the person living through it does not notice that their mortality is approaching until it is too
late. What the author wants to say is left unsaid. However, there are other themes that emerge in
this complex poem: pollution, isolation, and the pointlessness of ritualized social niceties.
Through deconstruction of the poem’s formal elements of meter, imagery, and symbolism, we
can see how T. S. Eliot’s poem explores these issues both stylistically and thematically.
Interpretation through Formal Elements
T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” like much of his oeuvre, evokes the
desolation of modern industrial life through bleak imagery and depressing similes. The vastness
of the night sky inspires both poets and laypeople alike to experience what Kant calls the
sublime. When confronted with the sublime, most poets tap into this feeling of awe and humility
as well as aesthetics to use metaphors like glitter, diamonds, and lanterns. For T. S. Eliot though,
this is an opportunity to use an unconscious patient laid out on a table as a simile. The patient is
helpless, mortal, and at the mercy of a surgeon.
For Eliot, two people wandering under such a sky are made to feel helpless and
insignificant compared to the vastness of space. Around the time the poem was being written,
physics had discovered that the universe itself was moral and finite, appearing in a “Big Bang”
and destined to congeal in a “Big Crunch.” So, this poem can also function metaphorically as a
metonymy for existence itself, as mortal and flawed as a human body in need of fixing on the
surgeon’s table. The fix that the surgeon performs, however, ultimately buys only a little bit of
time before death extinguishes all experience and identity.
, Running head: MORALITY AND MONOTONY: “THE LOVE SONG OF J. ALFRED PRUFROCK” 2
As the poem continues, the two wanderers experience a string of hotels and restaurants,
as well as sparsely populated streets. These establishments lack names, suggesting that
monotony emerges out of a drive for novelty and entertainment. That the modern world can
leave one cold in the face of an excess of entertainment, alcohol, and excess population was an
emerging theme of the time. We can see it in Edward Hopper’s oil painting “The Nighthawks”
and read about similar wanderings in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. Unlike the journey that was
taken in our previous reading of “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” journeys of
contemporary life are more likely to lead to further self-alienation and even destruction.
The poem in the second stanza talks of a pervasive yellow fog/smoke that “rubs its back
upon the window-panes”. . .”licks its tongue into the corners of the evening” (quoted in Barnet et
al., 2014 p. 225). Here, Eliot uses metaphor in order to give the fog a zoomorphic quality. The
fog reminds the reader of David Gordon Green’s film George Washington, where a rust belt
environment finds a group of children playing in fetid water, overgrown lots, and even hazardous
waste drums that are leaking their contents. The tangible and ever-present specters of pollution
serve as potent symbols of the cost of a disposable society that extracts a powerful toll in terms
of human health and natural beauty.
A refrain is repeated throughout the poem: In the room we come and go/Talking of
Michelangelo. It seems that this refers to polite, high-brow conversation that people engage in in
order to impress one another and themselves. However, the banality and loneness of the rest of
the poem suggest that those who do so are “going through the motions” and, under a vast and
indifferent sky, are yet engaged in another fruitless and pointless activity. In the third stanza,
Eliot tells the reader that there will be time to prepare a face for the faces that you meet. In the
following line, Eliot makes assurances that there will be time to create and murder, suggesting
The overreaching theme of T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is one of
dying slowly. Life is filled up by coffee spoons, night walks, and banal conversations so slowly
that the person living through it does not notice that their mortality is approaching until it is too
late. What the author wants to say is left unsaid. However, there are other themes that emerge in
this complex poem: pollution, isolation, and the pointlessness of ritualized social niceties.
Through deconstruction of the poem’s formal elements of meter, imagery, and symbolism, we
can see how T. S. Eliot’s poem explores these issues both stylistically and thematically.
Interpretation through Formal Elements
T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” like much of his oeuvre, evokes the
desolation of modern industrial life through bleak imagery and depressing similes. The vastness
of the night sky inspires both poets and laypeople alike to experience what Kant calls the
sublime. When confronted with the sublime, most poets tap into this feeling of awe and humility
as well as aesthetics to use metaphors like glitter, diamonds, and lanterns. For T. S. Eliot though,
this is an opportunity to use an unconscious patient laid out on a table as a simile. The patient is
helpless, mortal, and at the mercy of a surgeon.
For Eliot, two people wandering under such a sky are made to feel helpless and
insignificant compared to the vastness of space. Around the time the poem was being written,
physics had discovered that the universe itself was moral and finite, appearing in a “Big Bang”
and destined to congeal in a “Big Crunch.” So, this poem can also function metaphorically as a
metonymy for existence itself, as mortal and flawed as a human body in need of fixing on the
surgeon’s table. The fix that the surgeon performs, however, ultimately buys only a little bit of
time before death extinguishes all experience and identity.
, Running head: MORALITY AND MONOTONY: “THE LOVE SONG OF J. ALFRED PRUFROCK” 2
As the poem continues, the two wanderers experience a string of hotels and restaurants,
as well as sparsely populated streets. These establishments lack names, suggesting that
monotony emerges out of a drive for novelty and entertainment. That the modern world can
leave one cold in the face of an excess of entertainment, alcohol, and excess population was an
emerging theme of the time. We can see it in Edward Hopper’s oil painting “The Nighthawks”
and read about similar wanderings in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. Unlike the journey that was
taken in our previous reading of “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” journeys of
contemporary life are more likely to lead to further self-alienation and even destruction.
The poem in the second stanza talks of a pervasive yellow fog/smoke that “rubs its back
upon the window-panes”. . .”licks its tongue into the corners of the evening” (quoted in Barnet et
al., 2014 p. 225). Here, Eliot uses metaphor in order to give the fog a zoomorphic quality. The
fog reminds the reader of David Gordon Green’s film George Washington, where a rust belt
environment finds a group of children playing in fetid water, overgrown lots, and even hazardous
waste drums that are leaking their contents. The tangible and ever-present specters of pollution
serve as potent symbols of the cost of a disposable society that extracts a powerful toll in terms
of human health and natural beauty.
A refrain is repeated throughout the poem: In the room we come and go/Talking of
Michelangelo. It seems that this refers to polite, high-brow conversation that people engage in in
order to impress one another and themselves. However, the banality and loneness of the rest of
the poem suggest that those who do so are “going through the motions” and, under a vast and
indifferent sky, are yet engaged in another fruitless and pointless activity. In the third stanza,
Eliot tells the reader that there will be time to prepare a face for the faces that you meet. In the
following line, Eliot makes assurances that there will be time to create and murder, suggesting
