As Ramazani’s warned readers in his headnote on T.S Elliot, it is evident that The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock is one situated in beautiful and detailed imagery, but laced with a negative and pessimistic perception of reality. Ramazani explaines that “love pervades all of [Elliot’s] work,” yet the subject is confronted by “a sense of utter, painful sincerity” (462). Elliot’s ode kicks off with one of many allusions to other writers’ acclaimed works as he quotes Danté’s Inferno, setting a dark and illustrious tone. His lyrical syntax provides for what may be discerned as a prettily-put train of thought, evoking a sense of reality while maintaining a lingering, lazy, and otherwise discombobulated arrangement of impulses that seem to come to the speakers mind as a negative after thought to a life that has since gone by.
The poem’s primary images are dark and dingy, and the lend to the idea that there lies in life something from which one may wish to escape. He describes unsettling and undesirable “half-deserted streets” and “restless nights in one-night cheap hotels,” and the reader may acknowledge his initial claim, “Let us go and make our visit” as a call to action which the speaker could take to improve his existing life. However, it seems that routinely, from stanza to stanza, the speaker evades this preliminary agency, as he seems consumed wholly by “yellow fog,” and “yellow smoke” which creeps its way into his reality to a point of no escape. This conveys a sense of being stuck or paralyzed, and it becomes evident that the speaker does not end up possessing the agency to relinquish his fate because he lives life as if there will always be time for him to improve or change.
He insists that “indeed there will be time” to do the things which may save him from the doldrums of his negativity, yet he exerts more effort acknowledging the time than actually putting it to use. He insists there will be “time to murder and create;” to put to rest the things he wishes to exile from his life and create things to put in their place, yet ironically, as shows in his nature, he writes that there will be “time yet for a hundred indecisions,” ones which evidently end up inhibiting him from moving forward. He seems to rationalize his idleness by wondering if there is an ordained fate for him, one chosen which may come naturally, “do[es] [he] dare/ Disturb the universe?”
He seems to move on from describing the time he does have as he explains how he has spent time’s past as he writes, “for I have known them all already, known them all-” While he has tried to maintain control “measur[ing] out [his] life in coffee spoons” he knows that time will catch up to him, and his efforts may be met “with a dying fall.” His pessimism continues as the reader realizes that he has squandered his time, and he has grown old into a being whom has lived past his moment of prime. He recounts watching as time passed before him: “I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,” and he seems disillusioned by his reality because he now must exist knowing he wasted precious time that could have been used to make a difference, yet he questions himself when he wonders “would it have been worth while” to take action after all.
The poem seemingly concludes with a speaker who has no identity with which to comply, and he seems stuck in meaningless routines and conventions which may have prohibited him from truly living. Yet he is now old, and as he writes “I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each./ I do not think that they will sing to me” the reader realizes he is aware that not even a man-eating siren mermaid would be interested in devouring him. This indicates the fundamental tone of negativity and doom, and what started as a love song to the possibilities of time ends with no hope, as time spend justifying wasted time only lends itself to a negative end.
Great close reading here, though you didn’t categorize it–please go back and do so. YOu articulate very nicely the way in which Eliot “evades [the] preliminary agency” with which the poem begins before presenting us with the night-as-an unconscious patient (nice echo of Hardy’s thrush here, with the image of landscape-as-corpse). I also like your point that Eliot insists that “indeed there will be time” to do the things which may save him from the doldrums of his negativity, yet he exerts more effort acknowledging the time than actually putting it to use.” It is that rhetorical energy–stifling, ironic, yet deeply affecting at times–that drives the poem. If Eliot is the representative modern individual here, it shows the modern individual is out of place: more at home scuttling like a ragged claw along the recesses of the mind than emerging into the world itself where, we learn in the poem’s final lines, the poem is drowned in and by humanity.