Category: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

To say that “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is a typical romantic ode to the wonders of love, as the title may suggest, is quite far from the truth. To the contrary, this poem enters the straggling mind of J. Alfred Prufrock, a man plagued with irresolution, and because of this irresolution will probably never realistically be in love with a woman. “Love Song” is a dive into Prufrock’s inconsistent thought processes, and the foggy workings of his less-than-optimistic mind. Through bleak imagery, a wavering tone that feels timeless, and carefully connoted diction, T.S. Eliot portrays J. Alfred Prufrock as an uneasy, indecisive, and ultimately scared man.

The first few lines of the poem set the scene as to what kind of content Prufrock has to offer. He uses a simile in comparing the evening, “spread out against the sky,” to “a patient etherized upon a table”. It’s a fairly unappealing comparison, and it puts an awkward image in the reader’s mind from the beginning. He goes on to set the scene of a kind of tour through a city-like atmosphere: “Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets…of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels and sawdust restaurants…” . Again, a bleak image is cast into the mind of the reader, reminiscent of a twisted Gotham City where no one would want to be unless accompanied by someone very dear – a someone who Prufrock is not with.

He goes on to make another type of “etherized” comparison later on, which adds to the bleak, uneasy feeling: And I have known the eyes already, known them allThe eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase, And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin, When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall, Then how should I begin To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways? And how should I presume?

This stanza dives into Prufrock’s uneasy nature through the use of carefully connoted diction (e.g., “pin”) that conveys imagery of a bug or animal ready to be dissected. He is describing what happens when he runs into people he may know: they “fix [him] in a formulated phrase,” and then pin him down, and when he is “pinned and wriggling on the wall,” he is then forced to interact with them and make a decision about how to go about saying how his day went. To almost everyone else in the world, this type of interaction is a daily occurrence of life, and usually isn’t conveyed as a feeling of being pinned down. However, Prufrock’s uneasy nature is very similar to that of The Catcher in the Rye‘s Holden Caulfield, in the fact that he really isn’t one for lighthearted social interaction. Instead, every little detail of life, in Prufrock’s eyes, is not considered an idle task, but a high-strung, uneasy chain of decisions.

Throughout the poem, Prufrock seems to jog around in his mind, and is quite abstract with his thoughts. The result is a wavering, fragmented tone that further suggests Prufrock’s indecisiveness and digressive habits. One of the subtle ways that Eliot adds to this wavering tone is the fact that no definite rhyme scheme is used throughout “Love Song.” For example, one stanza includes mostly rhyming words, ending lines with words such as “dare,” “stair,” and “hair,” and then “thin,” “chin,” and “pin.” But the next couple of lines in the stanza may have no rhyme pattern at all, and the same goes for the next stanza; it’s totally fragmented. This wavering rhyme scheme cleverly adds to the notion of an indecisive Prufrock.

Besides the wavering rhyme scheme, the overall tone suggests that Prufrock is very uneasy and indecisive. Prufrock really does continually ask questions, always questioning things. This may seem normal, but considering the subject matter and the uneasy feeling connoted with them, this mode of thought does not come off as entirely healthy. There are close to 20 stanzas in “Love Song”, and in almost all of them, Prufrock is questioning something. Whether the subject matter consists of whether he should “disturb the universe” or not, or how he should deal with people who ask him how his day is, he is constantly questioning everything. He almost mockingly asserts his indecisive manners by saying “Do I dare disturb the universe? In a minute there is time for decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse”. Essentially, he is declaring that he can make a decision now, with only a minute left, but since in one minute there will be no time anyway, he’s leaving it at that.

This feeling of time passing too rapidly is present throughout the poem. More than a couple of times he says, “And indeed there will be time,” or a variation of this line, which not only adds to his irresolute manner, but also reiterates the fact that he often trails off and picks up another topic on a whim – again, recalling Holden Caulfield’s digressive tendencies. Prufrock even directly refers to this tendency when he analyzes a woman’s arm in the lamplight; he says, “It is perfume from a dress that makes me so digress?”. He mentions, too, his awareness of the passage of time and of the fact that he is growing old by confirming that he is becoming slightly bald. Ultimately, this realization of mortality makes him afraid: “And in short, I was afraid”.

Towards the end of the poem, the tone of “Love Song” seems to waver more and more, and Prufrock becomes even more of a shaky, uneasy, scared figure. Starting from line 120, he begins to trail off: “I grow old…I grow old…”, filling the reader’s mind with an image of a man who sits silently, the world passing him by while he ponders questions without answers. The final stanza, solidifies the elusive nature of Prufrock’s thoughts: We have lingered in the chambers of the sea By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

Through Eliot’s use of bleak imagery, a wavering tone, and carefully connoted diction, Prufrock is portrayed as a highly uneasy, indecisive, and scared man. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is not a true love song, but instead a plunge into the shades-ofgrey world of J. Alfred Prufrock, and ultimately the grave flaws of a fragmented mind.

T. S. Eliot’s notoriously opaque “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” can be interpreted only by acknowledging that the speaker’s thought process is not consistent throughout but an ongoing process. On first reading, the poems stanzas seem to belong to separate plots or lines of thought, but unity can be perceived if we think of the structure of the poem as reflective of the developing mental state of the speaker, with certain longer stanzas representing the processing of an attitude and other shorter groups of lines portraying an epiphanous or especially problematic moment precipitating a shift in the attitude of the speaker. The progress of the speaker’s attitude looks as follows: the speaker first believes it is useless to inquire into meaning, he then ponders whether he might create meaning by doing something great, he decides it is too late for him to do anything great, he wonders whether it might have been worthwhile to do something meaningful, and finally he decides there was no meaning to be found after all.

The first indication of the speaker’s attitude comes early when he compares the evening to “a patient etherised upon a table” (3) and attributes “insidious intent” to “Streets that follow like a tedious argument.” The apparent attitude here is that of aimlessness and cynicism, two attitudes that lead the speaker to “…an overwhelming question.” The question, “’What is it?’”, probably refers to the most overwhelming question of all, the question of where meaning can be found in mundane existence, popularly phrased as “What is the meaning of life?” and often put to a lonely sage on a mountaintop. The end of the first stanza gives a preview of what the speaker’s ultimate decision will be in that he represses the question choosing instead to distract himself by making some kind of “visit.” The visits the speaker has mentioned thus far were to “one-night cheap hotels” and “sawdust restaurants”, places where he can find entertainment to distract himself, amusement, in the etymological sense of the word, if you will. This is an interesting twist on the age-old question of what is it; instead of giving an answer or even saying it is impossible to answer, the speaker seems to imply that it is not productive to ask or even, as he will later state, that it is dangerous to consider.

The refrain, “In the room the women come and go/ Talking of Michelangelo”, perhaps indicates a moment of cynicism that captures the essence of Prufrock’s problem. He is extending his assessment of the monotony of everyday life and social calls to things that those around him consider important. The poem places these two lines in their own stanza to highlight the speaker’s attitude toward them. A sense of general disdain seems to come through as the speaker realizes the aimlessness of inane conversation and socialization, all of it a distraction from questions that have real significance or perhaps the significant question.

A problem of interpretation of literal meaning arises in the third stanza that will continue to be vexing for two whole stanzas. The speaker begins to speak of a yellow fog which might be interpreted as pollution (the poem has alluded to city life several times already), actual fog, or some other unknown phenomena resembling yellow fog. Perhaps the fog is real or perhaps it is not, the real significance to the meaning of the poem is in the ability of any of these manifestations of fog to cloud the mind of the speaker. The fog could be a description of exactly what the speaker decided to do at the end of the first stanza, distract himself from dangerous questions of meaning.

In line twenty-six the theme of time is introduced. The speakers assertion that “there will be time” to consider the question later, indeed “time yet for a hundred indecisions,/ And for a hundred visions and revisions,” follows his description of the yellow fog to show the nature of his self-deception. This will become important towards the end of the poem, when the speaker contemplates his growing old. It is at that point that he decides there is no time left to make a decision.

The stanzas between lines thirty-seven and fifty-four effect an important shift in the poem. The speaker shifts his focus from the futility of asking “…What is it?” to a new question, “…Do I dare?” or “Can I make a decision to ‘Disturb the universe,’ and bring meaning to my own life by doing something out of the ordinary?” The speaker mourns the regularity of his life when he says “[I] Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,/ I have measured out my life in coffee spoons”. After equivocating for the first thirty-six lines, the speaker has now clearly delineated his problem and considered doing something great, something out of the ordinary to break out of a cycle of tedious existence.

In searching for something that can give him meaning, the speaker looks to the companionship of women and decides he has “known the arms already, known them all”, and he has not found meaning in that yet, so he looks to accumulated experience as a source of meaning. He remembers walking “…through narrow streets” and seeing “…lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows”. That the men are lonely and without any apparent purpose causes the speaker to reject his human experience as a source of meaning, and decide there would be as much meaning in being “…a pair of ragged claws [perhaps a crab]/ Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.”

The lines “I am no prophet—and here’s no great matter;/ I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker” signal another change in the speaker’s perspective. He is now resigned to his insignificance. After this point he no longer considers whether he dares “Disturb the universe” but whether it “Would have been worth it, after all”. Whether or not he decides it would have been worthwhile to make the decision to do something great, he obviously believes that the opportunity to make that decision has passed.

Finally, in lines 111 and following, as the speaker grows old or recognizes his age, he decides that it would not have been worthwhile to act on his impulse to do something great. After all, he is not “…Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be”. He believes that his role was that of an insignificant extra, only a spare presence to “swell a progress.” In a series of short stanzas the aged speaker considers one more time whether he might do something out of the ordinary, even something small like part his hair behind before he ultimately rejects his impulses to find or create meaning as folly, comparing his questions of meaning and greatness to the siren song luring man to his death. With that assertion, the speaker has come full circle. As he stated in the very first stanza, the “overwhelming question” of “What is it?” has not been productive for him, and, indeed, it is dangerous.

The first factor of the poem which is striking is the title: the fact that it is a ‘Love Song’ suggest closeness and romance which is then removed by the way in which he signs his name. ‘J. Alfred Prufrock’ appears to be more personal than simply his surname because it is individual to him but at the same time it could be interpreted as somewhat formal due to its fullness. Something else which seems strange at first is the name itself; the ‘fr’ sounds give it a weak, possibly feminine sound which is similar to his personality.

The man himself, Prufrock, is clearly quite eloquent and well educated but has problems with showing emotion and therefore finds relationships difficult. This is shown in the first three lines which being apparently romantically with mention ‘the evening… spread out against the sky’ in the second line but this image is corrupted by his attempt at a simile ‘like a patient etherised upon a table’. This use of a simile suggests education but the manner of it also outlines his lack of romance. Due to the fact that the poem is a ‘love song’ it would appear that Prufrock is referring to his lover when he says ‘Let us go then, you and I’, although he could also be talking directly to the reader.

Despite the impressive build up with the title, the exert in Italian and the first couple of lines, the first verse is largely bathetic due to the disappointment and rapid descent of any idea of love. He speaks about ‘half deserted streets’ which simply suggests it may be late in the day or they are streets which people have no reason to be in. This is followed by the mention of ‘muttering retreats’ and ‘restless nights in one-night cheap hotels’; these two phrases suggest that he may be visiting prostitutes in the back streets of the city which certainly leads the reader to question whether the speaker is trying to woo a lover or deter her. The ‘sawdust restaurants with oyster shells’ are not the sort one would imagine he could take a lover to and yet this seems to be what he is suggesting in the first line ‘let us go’. Throughout this he appears to be nervous or cautious due to his increasing use of plosives in words such as ‘muttering’, ‘tedious’ and ‘night’.

There are two lines before the beginning of the second stanza which are repeated again in the poem ‘In the room the women come and go talking of Michelangelo’. These women are different to the prostitutes he has supposedly been seeing or, in fact, his lover and the fact that they ‘come and go’ show that he has little interest in them. They appear to be the women that he has to spend his time with, as a middleclass man who would be expected to talk to them, possibly at social gatherings or alike where he does not necessarily wish to. They seem to want to show their intelligence and education by ‘talking of Michelangelo’, choosing to talk about this shows that they are cultured although it is really simply small talk.

The second stanza shows less about the speaker’s personality but does show a slightly different side to him. The descriptive first four lines of the stanza give it a comforting feel which is also the closest he gets to writing something with a taste of sensuality in the first two stanzas. The ‘fog that rubs its back’, ‘rubs its muzzle’ and ‘licked its tongue’ suggests animalisation of maybe a bear which seems to be a strange comparison to fog but one which the speaker is clearly happy to carry through three lines. This might suggest a certain stubbornness which could be caused by his anxiety and nervousness. We see this throughout the poem but a strong example would be his need to comfort himself later on in the second stanza. He repeats the phrase ‘there will be time’ in an attempt to reassure himself that he will have time to do all the things he feels he needs to do such as ‘create a face to meet the faces that you meet’. This line is also interesting as it suggests that he believes he is required to put up a front to anyone that he meets and this further implies his cautiousness and lack of social ability.

The speaker feels pressured about his inadequacies because he thinks people are always looking at him or meeting him and judging him, usually because of his appearance. He suggests that his servants ‘who lift and drop a question on your plate’ might be mocking him behind his back. This is why he feels the need to prepare everything with great detail and he spends a long time doing so, the phrase ‘a hundred visions and revisions’ shows this because he is sure that he must get it perfectly right before continuing with anything such as ‘taking toast and tea’. This way of thinking forces him to question himself repeatedly; does he ‘dare’ approach a woman in case she may find some sort of inadequacy?

Overall Prufrock is a very vivid character, one who is critical of himself due to his anxiousness and apparent shortfalls. This leads him, certainly in the first forty lines, to question many things, among which is his ability to have a relationship or perhaps even meet with women.

T.S. Eliot, in his The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, takes the reader through the perils of life as a middle-aged man in modern society. His poem takes the form of a story, a narrative, with a character delivering a strong sense of voice and mood throughout the poem, moving away from the use of a strict rhyme scheme and meter used traditionally in poetry. Eliot uses repetition, in the form of alliteration, rhyming and literal repetition of words and also entire lines, to carefully construct a sense of endlessness, or looping, creating a reading experience that seems to, when considering the theme of the perils and struggles of life, tie in some ways to that of the endless Hell Dante alludes to in the quote from his Inferno before the first lines of the poem.

A dominating feature through the entire poem is the use of repetition, through alliteration, rhyming and repetition of phrases and lines, which plays an integral role in the structure of the poem and the kind of reader experience it creates. Eliot’s use of repetition, in the choice of sounds, as consonants or vowels or rhyming sounds that are repeated, is very specific and meticulous, and all geared to creating that endlessly-looping-time experience, which Dante constantly alludes to while walking through Hell in his Inferno, for his readers. A very obvious repetition is that of the ‘s’ sound, seen dominantly in lines from the very beginning of the poem “…certain half-deserted streets” and “sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells” and even “yellow smoke that slides along the street”. Due to the sliding and slipping nature of the repeated ‘s’ sound, especially in where it is used in the last word before the line break, as in “For the yellow smoke that slides along the street/Rubbing its back upon the window-panes” or “And time yet for a hundred indecisions/ And for a hundred visions and revisions” the reader easily slipped into the rest of the poem.

Although Eliot does not in any way follow the traditional script of rhyming in poetry, his use of rhyme hardly seems haphazard and creates a rhythm very much like that of of traditional rhyme schemes. This can be noticed more clearly when the poem is read aloud rather that read silently. For example, in lines “And indeed there will be time/ For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,/ Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;/ There will be time, there will be time/ To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;” there is no apparent rhyme scheme, in the repetition of “time”, the “eet” sound, and especially the abrupt use of the non-rhyming “window-panes” in the middle, but when read aloud creates a rhythmic effect of rising and falling tempo, especially due to the break given by the non-rhyming word in the sequence (which is used to rhyme in the rest of the stanza similarly). This again, adds to that never ending, looping sense of time in the reading, where instead of breaking from the rhythm, the lack of strict pattern, or just a pattern most readers are used to in traditional rhyming poetry, the reader is drawn back to familiar (in the poem) sounds over and over, and is seen throughout the poem.

The stanzas are also written such that they create for the reader the feel of a monologue which can be performed rather just read. This is made especially clear by the use of the constant media res writing in the beginning of paragraphs and lines. In the same paragraph quoted above, the character starts it with “And indeed there will be time….” Most of the line breaks are also such that they are placed, in not just this stanza but most of the poem, rather abruptly, and in many cases, in the middle of a sentence. While it could be said that this is characteristic of most poetry, for The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, it adds to the tempo of the poem and lines in a way that seems to keep building the graph of intensity and energy for every stanza. This is where it becomes quite clear that the poem is rather heavily reliant on the auditory effect of the words rather than the metaphors or the meanings they allude to. If read aloud and perform, these odd line breaks push the poem towards a theatrical monologue fit to feature in a play rather than a just a poem. This is seen especially in certain abrupt line breaks such as “There will be time, there will be time/ To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet” or the use of the ‘And’ right after a line break to start a line in “And time yet for a hundred indecisions,/ And for a hundred visions and revisions,” or “And I have known the eyes already, known them all— The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase, And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin, When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,”. The use of the seemingly off line breaks keep up the energy and tempo of these stanzas, which, in line of the poem’s dark themes, adds to the effect of the Eliot or Prufrock’s angst or frustration in his theatrical monologue.

Another repeated consonant in the lines quotes above seems to be that of the ‘t’ sound. This sound, in the word ‘time’ that is repeated over and over, seems to be almost keeping rhythm in these lines, for example “And indeed there will be time….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…… That lift and drop a question on your plate; Time for you and time for me…..Before the taking of a toast and tea.” or in the next stanza “And indeed there will be time…..Time to turn back and descend the stair”. These lines are around the theme of time and the ‘t’ sound seems to function to keep time in this paragraph. This could also refer back to the initial quote from Inferno, where Dante seems to be walking through an endless Hell, the ‘t’ sound functioning similar to the ‘s’ sound in trapping the reader into the poem by creating a loop of time through the ticking of the ‘t’ sound.

In the later stanzas, too, Eliot uses repeating consonants and a non-conventional pattern of rhyming to create a rhythm in the poem which creates this endless, spiraling narrative, almost literally when considering the length of the poem as compared to others. In some ways, the repetition of sounds makes for an easier reading of the poem, where the reader can reach the end of the lengthy piece without much trouble but ironically also creates a spiraling trap that the reader cannot easily escape, much like Hell itself. The repetition of the couplet “In the room the women come and go Talking of Michelangelo.” in between the stanzas simply adds to this endless, looping spiral of in the poem.

In conclusion, while he doesn’t use traditional schemes of rhyming, the meticulously crafted repetition of sound and keeping of a certain rhythm and energy in the stanzas through the media res narrative and careful line breaks placed by Eliot sucks the reader into a spiral of the perils of the life of a middle-aged man in modern times through a seemingly endless loop of time that closely mirrors the experience of walking through Dante’s Hell itself. Eliot seems to be sharing the story of Prufrock’s torment to the reader with the knowledge that they cannot escape this, much like one of the damned told Dante of his torment only because he believes Dante cannot escape Hell in the lines quoted before the poem. This effect is heavily reliant on the auditory effect of the repeating sounds rather than the imagery created by the words themselves.

Through history, world war one stays on an essential position of how the modernism transform. People distinguish the world war one as a great war. It is because it brings the majority of changes to society. In the literature’s history of how the battle changes modernism is it brings some pros and cons. The pros give people a different chance to learn about their expression, and it is not like they used to do. The great war has also brought some positive influences such as industrial raising, studying opportunity. On the other hand, the cons show what people lost such as family, etc. Also, war leads people to stay in a harsh environment. However, the cons did not destroy people’s faith. Some people have done some changes due to those cons. Since the poetry was published a year before the WWI began, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” can be an element of showing how people perform in different ways of the literature, and how is the relationship between it and the modernist.

In human’s history, the world war one has redirected the literature significantly, and the great war can also distinguish as an unprecedented event. One of the factors has shown how the world war one transforms the literature. The factor is the great war because it gets people involved. When people see different views, they might think differently. The literature has the same element. People who study in the literature might think differently when they involve in a new world. However, a crucial reason has distinguished why people quickly develop them in the literature field. It is because of the economic boost up. The economic is significantly related to the studying environment. Before the economic boost, people did not have enough sources to see differently. When a country offers a comforting environment to people, they can grow in a different way which means it gives people a chance to think differently. In fact, in the early 19th century people who were involved into the literature, they did not have enough chances to change their view, but in the 20th century has much more chances for people who get involved in thinking differently. According to Stevenson, “these poems indicate how deeply the First World War challenged the kind of friendship between imagination and nature.” Here implies a long-standing pastoral tradition. That is outer beauty matches inner beauty. Skepticism this tradition opened the way for more austere and depressed modernist poetry of the 1920s. The “imagination and nature” implies to modernist poetry often veers from nature to the fractured and restless urban landscape. The poem indicates that any relief from their spiritual emptiness and confusion can only be found in the mythological world beyond the shattered surface of their experience. The first world war is not only the imagination of pastoral, but it is also changed the forms and means in literature. According to Carden-Coyen,” In the struggle to find in the war, modernism continued as a viable language.” The “Viable language” implies how essential is the modernism, and how it makes people think differently. Otherwise, vernacular is also a known way to express people’s expression. It also defines as a plain language. People use it the most in nowadays. Logically, the vernacular has a concrete structure, and it delivers direct meaning to readers. In fact, A poet once described the difference between prose as walking and poetry as dancing, by which he explained that prose is logical, pragmatic, open and clear as its typical concept, while poetry is jumping and aesthetic, typical of implication, which is different from prose in nature. New poetry is the most concise language, often conveying abstract thoughts in concrete images. According to Gillies & Manhood, “Modernism’s revolutionary impulses continued to be privileged in critical circles decades after the population of making it new in 1934”. Moreover, the new poetry is written in vernacular and has no meter. At first sight, it seems to be a branch of prose, but when it comes to reading it, it feels obscure and unintelligible. Poetry is short and full of meaning. Unlike prose, which is straightforward and clear, poetry requires more imagination. If people can carefully analyze the deep meaning of the words used by the author and master the key images in the poem, it will help them to go deep into the poetry, resonate with the author’s heart, and then appreciate the beauty of the new poetry.

Also, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” It reflects the pessimism and disappointment of western intellectuals before the first world war. When Eliot wrote this poem, he was very young, but the work itself was very mature. The speaker in the poem is a young man; the exact age is not revealed in verse. The poem describes him crossing the street at dusk to go to a party. The whole poem is his narration, and the entire poem is written in the first person. Prufrock is a part of young people who are common in modern-day society. They are sensitive at heart, have their ideas and pursuits, and are dissatisfied with the increasingly indifferent industrial cities, but they have no power to break away. In anger and pain, they end up choosing to endure reality in cowardice. It begins with “let us go then, you and I” it defines as a standard form of a love poem, but it is worth noting that although it says, ‘you and me,’ it’s just Prufrock walking down the street. In his imagination, he wants his lover to be with him spiritually and to be less lonely. The ‘you’ ostensibly refers to his lover but is essentially a confidant in his heart. The speaker has also mentioned,” the yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes” It describes the dusk of the city filled with night mist, giving a feeling of loneliness. It Is reminiscent of air pollution caused by industrialization, and the smog is ubiquitous. By saying “and indeed there will be time” implies he kept telling himself, ‘there’s still time to relax but behind the sound reflected his growing nervousness. By saying “To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet” implies the author begins to reveal Prufrock’s inner conflict. It turns out that he didn’t like the party and didn’t want to put on a face in front of people against his will, but he couldn’t help it, so he comforted himself that he still had time to prepare. By saying “In a minute there is time for decisions and revisions’ which a minute will reverse shows how undecided Prufrock is that the decisions he makes in one minute can be reversed in the next minute. While analyzing poetry, readers can understand why Eliot’s poem is relating to modernist. The way he used to perform in the poetry, it is most relevant to the modernist. Poetry is a special way of thinking, or rather, a way of thinking with images. Image is the most favored figure of speech among all figures of speech, and the figure of speech that the poet is good at is also image. This is especially true of imagist poetry and poets in the early 20th century. The image is the artistic realm which the author’s subjective feeling and the objective environment fuses. A series of objects, scenes, events and other objective existence in the objective environment express some special feelings through the collocation and construction of a specific mode, which arouses resonance in readers’ hearts. These objective objects are images. Eliot called them objective counterparts.

In conclusion, World war I broke out in the early 20th century — the rapid material development of society but people’s spiritual confusion loss of traditional ethics and values gradually. The existing social order and relationships of the fragmented, radical social unrest, sharp intensify contradictions, suppressed and distorted humanity. People feel pessimistic about future loss. This becomes The background and theme of ‘The Love Song of j. Alfred Prufrock’. A key factor gives a significant transformation to the modernism, and the factor is the WWI. It changes the way people used to perform in literature. Even though world war not only bring some pros, it also brings some cons. Looking through in the literature’s history the advantages are overweight than disadvantages, so it still stands on an essential position of transforming the modernism. The WWI has a deep relationship with changing the modernism. Since the factor is mainly connecting to the WWI, the battle leads market inside the nation raise for a period of times. Due to the raising people could get plentiful of resources during the period compared to the past. Once the number of people can have educated well], it will affect the way people use to perform significantly, and people can improve the way they use to deliver. In another word, a factor between the 19th and 20th century is the poetry. It gives people a brand-new way of reading and writing. Since poetry can express a different meaning than the title, most authors can draw down more colors for readers to imagine. This has significantly changed the way people used to perform. When readers have a chance to read poetries such as Eliot’s production, they might have to spend some more time to dig out the real meaning, but they could also find the soul of the poetry.

Epigraph means generally the beginning part of a literary text, a short phase (Hornby, 2010,502). An author’s short directions and messages relative to the reader at the beginning of the chapter. The usage of epigraph in literature is widespread with romanticism. It is used for indicating another works, comparisons, and foreshadowing about text’s topic, sometimes it is used to remind something, sometimes to do irony. It can be used to prepare the reader for the text to be read, for the theme, the writer creates a hunch in the reader and increases enthusiasm, so the epigraph is welcome for the reader.

Thomas Stearns Eliot who is an English poet, play-writer and critic writes famous long poems that dives into consciousness. Modernist texts are full of allusions, there is many references to other works. He was greatly influenced by Ezra Pound, symbolic French poets ,and Dante. He studied Indian philosophy at Harvard and gave a thesis on philosophy He uses epigraphs in his poems generally with different functions.

One of his famous poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” begins with an epigraph. In the epigraph T. S. Eliot gives his readers a summary, it gives a sense of foreboding about what it is about. It is taken from Dante’s Divine Comedy(Praz,1936). He calls his work as a comedy which means salvation. Salvation comes from when you realize you are nothing but weaknesses. The character of Dante, Guido da Montefeltro, seeks a way of how should he find eternal heaven. He is eternally punished, he stuck in purgatory. This quote speaks of the eternal flame, fear of being in limbo. In “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” Eliot portrays a modern man through Prufrock, therefore he uses repetitive lines to show us purgatory;

The room where women talk about art is the place of purgatory. Women feel risky and they come back there. Throughout the poem, Prufrock is portrayed as a repetitive, obsessive person who avoids asking big questions so Prufrock lives the same way with Guido in the modern world. It questions the moral values ​​of society. Dante sometimes talks about the corruption of the land like Eliot does. Therefore, this quote gives us reflections of the situations in which he has never been able to escape his mind.

“Gerontion” which is written by T. S. Eliot is a dramatic monologue about an elderly man who lived in the 19th century. Gerontion is an any old man, and in the character of this elderly man, there is a complexity of individuals and humanity (Shrestha,2017). The poem describes Europe during the Second World War. It begins with an epigraph from Shakespeare’s play, Measure for Measure;

“Thou hast nor youth nor age

But as it were an after dinner sleep

Dreaming of both.”

(Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, Act III, scene i, 11. 32)

Shakespeare tells us here that we can enjoy neither youth nor old age, understand the pleasure of that moment, and then we dream of those times. Even with the first line of this quote, Eliot gives clues about poetry, the speaker is an aging man, theme ,and tone of the poem can be understood in the following lines of the epigraph because an old man who has lost his hope of living in this poem and his enthusiasm for rebirth can be seen. The old man symbolizes the decay of western society in this poem So, Eliot uses epigraph with the same function in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”.

“The Hollow Men” is another poem which begins with an epigraph. The beginning line of the epigraph is taken from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the other line is an allusion to Guy Fawkes Day. This day is celebrated in England on November 5th, there are many references to Fawkes, who is against the parliament and arrested in the poem, the second line of this epigraph is a traditional saying by children who raise money for help on this day. In this work, Conrad’ s character Marlow tells his friends the hunter Kurtz, and describes it with the dark sides of humanity to avoid, with aspects such as violence and power, he just like dark souls in Star Wars. From here we can understand that the general tone of the book is rather gloomy and dark. When Marlow talks about Kurtz’s death, he compares it to other people’s perspectives, for Kurtz death is a heroic event like the rest of his life. Whereas the word hallow means blessed, “hallow men” means empty, null person. Like his other works that he shows corruptions, faith, lost soul, Eliot represents his love, his fear against God in this work, Captain Kurtz is a reflection of Eliot’s concerns for society. When talking about the end of the world in poetry, his helplessness is seen that there will be no turning back, eventually death and confrontation with God. So, in order to show his fear, he uses this epigraph.

“La Figlia Che Piange” is one of the most romantic works which includes one line long epigraph of T. S. Eliot. The title of the poem is Italian which means a girl who is weeping, so it can be said that Eliot was also affected by Picasso’s painting. Just like Picasso, Eliot conveys the image of the “weeping girl” in his mind to us in a different way. The epigraph which is taken from Virgil’s Aeneid, actually a question, is asked to the Venus, a Greek goddess. This question about how to call her as virgin is highly romantic, so the romantic mood of the epigraph gives us information about the tone of the poem we will read. The question reflects the poet’s uncertain emotions. Although at first glance this quotation has no relation with poem other than romanticism, it may be easier to relate it as it goes deep into poetry. The poem consists of talking about a girl who has just left a man, and each stanza has a different tone so maybe it can be related to the Dido myth. Even if the speaker suffers, he thinks this separation is the best choice, he can be compared to Aeneas with this determination and coolness. In another word, a girl who is mentioned in the poem has the same qualifications as Dido in the sense of romance and beauty. Eliot wants to reflect this romantic myth in his poetry through this epigraph because The speaker cannot forget the woman and the separation, although this separation seems to be the best way for them, it is a romantic love that he always thinks about what would happen otherwise.

In “Portrait of a Lady” by T. S. Eliot, the epigraph of the poem which is taken from Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta gives the poem the sense of double take, and that is the most understandable epigraph of the T.S. Eliot;

“Thou has committed

Fornication: but that was in another country

And besides, the wench is dead.”

(Marlowe, The Jew of Malta, Act IV, scene i, 11. 4I-43)

The poem of Eliot is in accordance with the Marlowe text which was written in the 16th century. The play of Marlowe is about a Jew named Barabas. Living in Malta, Barabas is a Jew that admires its own wealth and is satisfied with the envy of Christians on the island. Turks coming to the island will bring the end of this wealth and Barabas. Eliot’s play something like repetition because there is also sexual sin, fault between an older lady and the male speaker. At the beginning of the epigraph, there are words like “wench” and “fornication”, but it doesn’t help about making a relationship with these words and “lady”. It prepares us how a “lady” that we will read, creates irony because these are not ladylike qualifications. Lady is confused, she only thinks about understand, she searches for the way of running away from her confusing just like Barabas who tries to away from his guilt. The hero questions how his mood would have happened if the woman died while he is in another nation towards the end of “Portrait of a Lady” (Worthington,1949).

As a result, Eliot, a poet who is appreciated with his important poems in his society and even after today, was influenced by important names just like other poets of his period. Therefore, he commonly uses epigraphs at the beginning of his works to create a hunch, sometimes to make irony, sometimes to summarize poems cleverly.

Work cited

1. Burbidge, James.’. O Quam Te Memorem, Virgo? Interpreting Venus in Aeneid 1.314–417. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2010. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789047444503_005 Web.
2. Gelpi, Albert. A coherent Splendor Cambridge University Press (1987) p. 124
3. Hornby, Albert Sidney, ‘Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary’, 8., Oxford University Press, 2010, pp.502
4. Praz, Mario. ‘T.S Eliot and Dante.’ The Southern Review 2 (1936): 525.
5. Shrestha, Roma. ‘Gerontion by T. S. Eliot: Critical Analysis.’ BachelorandMaster, 6 Oct. 2017, bachelorandmaster.com/britishandamericanpoetry/gerontion-critical-analysis.html.
6. Worthington, Jane. ‘The Epigraphs to the Poetry of TS Eliot.’ American Literature 21.1 (1949): 1-17.