The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, Research Paper Example

Much of art of the 20^th and the 21^st centuries has been influenced by urban motives, moods and observations – there is hardly any person in the world who would not be influenced by urbanization tendencies in society, no matter how detached art has always been from the down-to-earth reality. Eliot is also one of the artists who experienced the influence of growing cities, change in values, patterns of communication, environmental changes that left a certain trace on their artistic vision. Eliot’s work is one of genuinely colorful illustrations of how the modern artistic vision took its shape and what motives dominated the artistic activity.

The famous poem of Eliot titled The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock shows many urban motives and moods that overwhelm the author – he is obsessed by speculations on eternity in the context of a usual town with its fog, with its narrow, dusty streets. Eliot realizes how miserable his life is as compared to the eternal natural beauty, the things that were cultivated by Renaissance artists: “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons” (Eliot 51).

His moods about nature, art and beauty are interrupted by earthly observations of the surrounding reality, of the scenes that accompany him in his life:

“The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes

The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes” (Eliot 15-16).

As one can see from the quotation, Eliot describes the yellow fog that cannot be a natural phenomenon but a product of urbanization and pollution. The scenery of the poem is described in a typically urban way:

“Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells” (Eliot 3-8).

The reader can clearly see the transition from the traditional natural scenery to the urban one; at the same time, in suchlike conditions where the author sees cheap hotels, dusty streets and restaurants he also manages to preserve his delicate artistic insight and perception of the great. The author feels sorry about the great things being put aside by more dominant urban thoughts like the ones about getting old: “Time to turn back and descend the stair/ With a bald spot in the middle of my hair” (Eliot 39-40). The thought about hair appears a bit later in the poem: “I have seen my head (grown slightly bold)” (Eliot 82). These thoughts of boldness awaiting the author some years later are accompanied by the state of mind of a lonely person who fails to find understanding of people with who he deals on a daily basis. He cannot find his place in a city and looks for the sense of life:

“Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows?” (Eliot 70-72).

The author feels that he is misunderstood and feels helpless in that state. He tries to communicate some essential messages to the crowd, but sees that people either do not need this, or do not comprehend the elevated meaning of his message. He wants to tear people off from their daily boring lives:

“I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all” (Eliot 94-95).

Eliot is filled with the wish to open the eyes of the common public about the trivial life they lead, about their spiritual ugliness and inability to see farther than their dining rooms. But what is a real torture for the author is his hesitation about whether he in general needs this fight for wisdom and revelations or he should join them in their useless lives:

“And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me…
…To have bitten off the matter with a smile…
…To roll it toward some overwhelming question” (Eliot 87-93).

Thus, as one can see from the analysis of Eliot’s poem, the author is highly obsessed by urban thoughts and states of mind – people in a city are highly concerned with their personal loneliness and inability to communicate with others, with the trivialness of life and earthly pleasures that people enjoy losing the sense of artistic beauty. The fact that the poem was written in 1915, in the intense period of urbanization, speaks for itself. People were unaccustomed to the way of living in a city, to the spiritual incarceration that it brought to the society, and Eliot created a skilful work of art illustrating the personal crisis of the urban inhabitant. 

References

Eliot, T.S. (1915). The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. Retrieved March 4, 2010, from http://people.virginia.edu/~sfr/enam312/prufrock.html