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The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (published in 1915, Poetry magazine) at one level is the inner monologue
of a city gentleman who is stricken by feelings of isolation and inadequacy, and an incapability of taking
decisive action. It is an examination of the prototypical modern man-overeducated, eloquent, neurotic &
emotionally stilted.

The fragmented poetic landscape of T.S. Eliot’s poem represents the summation of the poet`s achievement in
his early poetry in terms of its stylistic innovation, thematic & linguistic complexity, and its enactment of
psychic conflicts. The poem demonstrates his mastery of the rhythms of conversation, which he gave form in
verse, his colloquialisms, witty use of rhyme, and allusions to Dante, Shakespeare and historical/religious
figures.

The form is a variation on the dramatic monologue (DM), a type of writing which was very popular from
around 1757 to 1922, popularly used by Robert Browning. DM employed the utterances of a specific individual
(not the poet) at a specific moment in time, showing the development & revelation of the speaker`s mind. Eliot
experiments with the use of voices within the form of dramatic monologues. The poem removes the implied
listeners & rather focuses on Prufrock`s interior self. There is only one voice in the dialogue (of Prufrock)
whereas the voice of the auditor (listener) is suppressed. There is a complex interplay of voices and points of
view which displaces the reader & introduces several levels of indeterminacy regarding language, the nature of
the self, and the relationship of the author to his persona and to the reader.

The rhyme scheme of this poem is irregular but not random. While sections of the poem may resemble free
verse, in reality, “Prufrock” is a carefully structured amalgamation of poetic forms. The use of refrains
with Prufrock’s continual return to the “women [who] come and go / Talking of Michelangelo” and his
recurrent questionings (“how should I presume?”) and pessimistic appraisals (“That is not it, at all.”) both
reference an earlier poetic tradition and help Eliot describe the consciousness of a modern, neurotic
individual.
The poem features a loose rhyming, which means, that there is no consistent rhyme scheme and no regular
pattern to the rhythm.
But there are substantial sections with rhyme:
 for example lines 23-67 contain plenty of full and slant rhyme - street/meet, create/plate,
dare/stair/hair, room/presume - and a good proportion of the rest of the poem has rhyme.
 Lines 37-48 in particular have an unusual set of rhymes which not only help to reinforce Prufrock's
neurotic personality but add a comic effect to the idea that he might dare to disturb the universe, in one
minute. Check out dare/stair/hairand thin/chin/pin/thin whilst time and dare repeat towards the end of the
stanza.
 These rhymes certainly give the sense of song and bring a lyrical feel to the poem.

Epigraph: Eliot doesn’t attribute or translate the lines from Dante’s poem himself: he is relying on his reader to
identify them. This is another key feature of much modernist poetry: literary allusion, often to very specific
texts which only a highly educated reader would be able to recognize. Is Prufrock like Guido da Montefeltro,
the thirteenth-century Italian military man who speaks the lines above, in Dante’s poem? Guido is in Hell (the
Inferno), addressing these lines to Dante himself and telling him that the only reason he feels comfortable in
confessing his deepest, darkest sins to the poet is that he knows that nobody who is in Hell alongside him can go
and tell everyone back in the land of the living about them. So, with that in mind, we might surmise that Eliot
wishes us to see Prufrock as somehow confessing something, as confiding something which he feels shame
about (his difficulties with girls, perhaps). Alternatively, we might place the emphasis on where Guido utters
these lines, and suggest that, for Prufrock, modern-day society is a form of living hell. The allusion is
significant as they are corroborated elsewhere in the body of the poem. For instance, the idea of being in the
afterlife (like Guido) and coming back from there is applicable to the lines about Lazarus coming back from the
dead which we find later in poem. Lazarus was famously brought back from the dead by Jesus.

Beginning of the poem

The opening line ‘Let us go then, you and I’ provides the reader with a hint that the poem needs to be read as
an internalized monologue – it gives us the idea that the narrator is speaking to another person, and thus what
is being said is a reflection of his own personality. In this case, the personality of Alfred J. Prufrock is one that’s
pedantic, slightly miserable (‘like a patient etherized upon a table’), and focused mainly on the negatives
(‘restless nights in one-night cheap hotels’). The emptiness of the world is exemplified by ‘oyster-shells’,
‘sawdust restaurants’; everything is impermanent and on the verge of dissolving into nothing. The world
(setting) presented by the poem is transitory, half-broken, unpopulated, and about to collapse.

The language of the opening line is decisiveness itself, and involves a determination to get going, along with a
firm address to another person; but the sense of purpose is quickly dissipated as the speaker becomes absorbed
in a lyrical evocation of the light effects of dusk, which in turn then gets waylaid by the sheer oddity of the
simile that seems to come, unsolicited, to his mind to describe them. The play between the belated
romanticism of an evening ‘spread out against the sky’ and the incongruous modernity of ‘a patient etherised
upon a table’ purposefully sets different sorts of world in juxtaposition: the poetical and the medical, the lyrical
and the hospital; and this juxtapositional method will be the main way the poem gets to work. The title of the
poem announces that method as it braces the romance of ‘The Love Song’ against the precise social formality of
‘J. Alfred Prufrock’.

‘Let us go’, Prufrock repeats, and again, ‘Let us go’; but the movements of the poetry have already established
by the end of the first verse that we are occupying a consciousness (Prufrock`s) that is destined to go
nowhere very much. And in fact the epigraph to the poem, which comes from Dante’s Divine Comedy, has
already introduced the idea of going nowhere as a key theme in the poem’s orchestration. (It is from Canto 27
of the Inferno.) In the passage, Dante, who is touring Hell, has begun to converse with one of the inhabitants,
Guido da Montefeltro, who is initially reluctant to respond; but on the reasonable assumption that Dante must
be in Hell for all eternity too, he begins to speak:

“If I thought my answer were to one who ever could return to the world, this flame should shake no more; but
since none ever did return alive from this depth, if what I hear be true, without fear of infamy I answer thee.” -
epigraph

For Eliot to begin his poem with a voice from the depths of Hell is to create another of the poem’s formative
juxtapositions, and invites the reader to make out a connection: the world of the poem is nothing to do with
medieval Catholicism, but rather genteel New England society – a place of tea cups and coffee spoons, collar
pins and neckties, musical soirées and perfumed evening dresses – but conceivably another version of Hell for
all that. The inescapability of social conventions and the stifling prescriptions of polite decorum constitute a
new kind of infernal entrapment.
Prufrock and the women

‘They’ are probably women: Prufrock’s anxieties revolve partly around the imponderabilities of time, but
chiefly around a fear of women, and a fretfulness about the humiliations of social encounter that rises here and
there to a kind of suppressed hysteria: ‘When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall …’. In a Browning
monologue there is usually an implied interlocutor (whom, of course, we do not hear) with whom the speaker is
interacting in one way or another; but just to whom Prufrock is addressing himself is not so clear. The ‘you’
addressed in the first line seems to evaporate quite soon, as though he (is it a ‘he’?) never were in real life; and
the ‘you’ of ‘you and me’ that comes later – ‘here beside you and me’ and ‘some talk of you and me’ – does not
feel like the same addressee, or indeed an addressee who is really present at all. Prufrock is talking to a ‘you’
inside his own mind, and she is a part of some back-story to the poem’s frustrated erotic life which is kept
almost entirely under wraps. The poem has moments of rich sexual response and, as though not knowing what
to do with them, they no sooner arise than they are diverted into the sidelines of a bracket or an aside: ‘Arms
that are braceleted and white and bare / (But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!)’ The closest we
come to disclosure is the studiedly neutral double reference to ‘one’: ‘one, settling a pillow by her head’, and
again, ‘one settling a pillow, or throwing off a shawl’. In his portrait of this ‘one’, she appears unimpressed by
his efforts to ‘say just what I mean’; but he is using her imagined indifference as a reason for abandoning an
effort in the first place.

The poem comes to a close with Prufrock lapsing gratefully back into a lovely fantasy of ‘sea-girls’ singing
their mermaid songs in the deeps: Prufrock eavesdrops upon them, momentarily at ease, it would seem, now
that the fulfilment of his desire is completely out of the question. But the last line conveys that there is no
escape from the poised chat over the tea cups: ‘Till human voices wake us, and we drown.’ The poem does not
mock Prufrock’s dreamy romanticism, which it voices very beautifully; and while it could hardly be called a
resolute ending, it is the right one. The poem ‘does not “go off at the end”’, protested Ezra Pound, Eliot’s friend
and early champion, to an editor who had wanted something more: ‘It is a portrait of failure, or of a character
who fails, and it would be false art to make it end on a note of triumph.’

The poem can be interpreted as a parody of a love song; it flows then stumbles and hesitates its way through the
life of a middle-aged male who can't decide where he stands in the world. Even at the poem`s conclusion we are
not sure whether he will venture out to find the love of his life? Is he bold enough to visit her at the room
where the women come and go/Talking of Michelangelo.
But Prufrock, the tentative male, envisages being ridiculed for having a bald patch. Time is running out, or is it?
Note the reference to the Andrew Marvell poem To His Coy Mistress in line 23 and Shakespeare's play Twelfth
Night in line 52 and Prince Hamlet in line 111.
Eliot also used French poet Jules LaForgue as inspiration for his repeated women who come and go talking of
Michelangelo. "Dans la piece les femmes vont et viennent / En parlant des maîtres de Sienne." LaForgue was
one of the innovators of the interior monologue and Eliot certainly exploited this technique to the full in
Prufrock.
There are fragments of images, gloomy cityscapes, reflective inner thoughts and an uneasy questioning self that
is the anti-hero Prufrock. He is both ditherer and dreamer, a split personality who procrastinates, who is caught
between fantasy and reality.
Prufrock is lacking in self esteem and perhaps loathes himself. How do we know this? Well, note the imagery in
lines 57- 61 when he compares himself to an insectpinned and wriggling on the wall, and again in lines 73/74 in
which he sees himself as a lowly crustacean on the sea floor.
The questions continue as the narrative progresses, an echo of the scene from Dante - will Prufrock have the
courage to act, will he have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?  He makes us think that he has
sacrificed much to get to this point in his life. He has fasted, prayed, wept, afraid for the future.
But how much of this is fiction dreamt up by a forlorn man past his best, who is constantly frustrated because It
is impossible to say just what I mean! 
Is this the outcome of Prufrock's fear of rejection? He cannot bring himself to commit to his vision - poetic,
religious, amorous - he cannot even eat a peach due to a deep seated angst.
In the end he succumbs to harsh reality whilst fantasising about the mermaids who sing to each other but who
will never sing to him. Prufrock just can't snap out of this self-imposed existential mindset. What is it he needs?
Love, drugs, therapy?
Eliot's poem is full of metaphor and simile, simple rhyme and complex rhythms. By portraying Prufrock as an
anxious, neurotic individual he invites us to use his work of art as a mirror. Read it out loud, slowly, and its
intelligence and music will emerge.
No matter what sort of life we lead we might question, dare and invite others to share, before time and fate take
their toll. So you want to know how to change the universe? Sink your teeth into a juicy peach.

The balding Prufrock finds in an appointment for tea with some fashionable ladies the occasion for existential
suffering. On his way to this social event, he continually postpones asking the “overwhelming question,”
presumably some sort of proposal to the lady who will be entertaining him. Instead, he asks himself a series of
questions that, while not the overwhelming question itself, do reflect his deepening anxiety: “Do I dare / Disturb
the universe?”; “So how should I presume?”; “And how should I begin?” Convinced that he already knows
what suffering awaits him—“For I have known them all already, known them all”—he decides that, although as
indecisive as Shakespeare’s Hamlet, he has none of Hamlet’s greatness. He will not ask the overwhelming
question, for fear that she will answer “That is not what I meant at all / That is not it at all.” Instead, he accepts
the onslaught of old age and decides that no romance awaits him.