The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock - Essay Example

The Love Song by J. Alfred Prufrock critique. This poem is earliest of Eliot’s main works and was completed around 1910 but not published until up to 1915 (Rampal 108). It is an analysis of the tortured soul of the prototypical contemporary man - overeducated, neurotic, eloquent, and emotionally stilted. The author, the poem’s speaker, appears to be addressing a particular potential lover, with whom he wishes “forcing the moment to its crisis” (CP 2) by somehow achieving their relationship.

Prufrocks paralysis follows certainly from this subjectivism of everything. If each perception is an opaque domain, then the author has no expectation of being understood by the readers. "No experience," asserts Bradley in a phrase that Eliot states, "can lie open to inspections from outside" (Rampal, 203). Prufrocks dream is incommunicable, and whatsoever he speaks to the lady is answered by, "That is not what I meant at all. That is not it, at all" (CP, 6). The lady is also trapped in her own domain, and the two domains can never, alike soap bubbles, turn into one.

Each domain is impassable to the other. If other consciousnesses occur only as opaque matters for Prufrock, he possess an equally unhappy relativity to space and time. One of the poem puzzles is the question of whether Prufrock leaves his room ever. It seems that he does not, hence infirm is his determination, so prepared "for a hundred indecisions, And for hundred visions and revisions, Before the taking of a toast and tea" (CP, 4). In another notion Prufrock would be incapable of going anywhere, no matter how hard he tried.

However far the author goes, he remains caged in his own individual space, and all he is experiencing is imaginary. It appears to be some opinion of this which makes him stay in his room, gratified to imagine himself walking through the streets, climbing the ladys stairs, and saying to the lady "all like Lazarus from the dead”. There remains no resurrection from death which has unfastened him, and this is an implication of the Dante epigraph. But time, just like space, has only subjective existence for Prufrock.

Consequently, future, present, and past are equally immediate, and the author is paralyzed. As a Bradleys finite centers asserts, he "is not in time," hence "contains [his] own past and future" (Rampal, 205). Memories, ironic reverberations of earlier poetry, current sensations, anticipations of what the author might do in future ("I grow old . . . I grow old . . . I shall wear my trousers bottoms rolled" (Rampal, 71) - which are equally present. Like the women speaking of Michelangelo, Prufrock exists in an eternal contemporaneous, a frozen time which everything that can possibly occur to him is as it had already occurred: "For I have already known them all, known them all" (CP, 4).

Within this time of unending repetition Prufrock cannot interrupt the world even if he should assume trying doing so. Everything that can happen is predictable, and in a universe where only a single mind exists the predictable has in effect already ocurred and no action is promising. Prufrocks will infirmity is not as such a moral paucity as his subjectivism consequence (Rampal 113).Works CitedRampal, D.K. Critical Study Of T.s. EliotEliot At 100 Years. New York: Atlantic Publishers & Dist, 2003. Print.