Love Song

 

            T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” has long been a favorite poem of mine, one which I recently rediscovered while watching “T. S. Eliot: The Search for Happiness.” It’s a long poem, and when I discussed it with my students we did not try to deal with the whole thing, but rather with sections a few lines long, which is what I will do here. This will read more like notes than a finished essay. So be it.

 

            Prufrock is an older guy with the concerns and insecurities that sometimes come with aging. I’m surprised that Eliot wrote it when he was in his 20s. I see in these fragments, and in the poem as a whole (Read it!), concerns that people my age have hopefully passed through, arriving in a better place.

 

Some passages that grip me:

 

            I have measured out my life with coffee spoons . . ..

 There is something here about the ordinariness of our daily routines that’s a bit depressing. Nothing wrong with coffee spoons, but is that how you want to measure out your life?

 

            I grow old . . . I grow old . . .

            I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

We geezers know that we lose height as a result of years and years of gravity, plus some tired tissue in the spine. Rolled trousers is not a fashion statement.

 

            Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?

            I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.

Hair loss worries? And then, what a low threshold for daring is simply eating a peach – though they do sometimes drip on my shirt. And then there’s Prufrock’s vision of himself as one of those old people with nothing better to do. He seems concerned about how he will be seen.

 

            I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

 

            I do not think that they will sing to me.

Prufrock has an awareness of the magical, perhaps romantic, connection that is possible, then the pause (the skipped line) followed by the realization that there’s no magical connection for him. Alas!

 

            There will be time, there will be time

            To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;

            There will be time to murder and create . . ..

Preparing a face suggests some kind of compromise in order to fit in. But then “time to murder and create”? Not happening.

 

            And indeed there will be time

            To wonder, “Do I dare?” and “Do I dare?”

            Time to turn back and descend the stair,

            With a bald spot in the middle of my hair—

            (They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”)

Again: hesitation, with a turning back instead of daring, and worry about looking old.

 

Love Song? Not quite. The poem does begin, "Let us go then, you and I," but there's not much about "you." I hope we are past the stage where we worry so much about getting old. We are old.

 

            I have to conclude with some humor: A team of doctors is doing surgery on an anesthetized patient, and one of them says, “Doesn’t he look like a foggy evening in London?”

(Read the opening of the poem to see why this is funny.)