“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is, perhaps, not a traditional love song—Prufrock’s longing runs throughout the poem but is neatly concealed, his despair projected elsewhere. The beginning of the poem begins in an expected manner:
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
And yet the lovely beginning is instantly put to rest by the following comparison: “Like a patient etherised upon a table.” Instantly...
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is, perhaps, not a traditional love song—Prufrock’s longing runs throughout the poem but is neatly concealed, his despair projected elsewhere. The beginning of the poem begins in an expected manner:
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
And yet the lovely beginning is instantly put to rest by the following comparison: “Like a patient etherised upon a table.” Instantly the poem is dampened and expectations subverted. The high-flown language of the opening succumbs to the dreariness of reality, and so too does the reader’s expectations of what is to come. One begins to suspect an unrequited love.
Prufrock takes the unknown woman on a tour of the lonely parts of his city—the red-light district with its brothels and “sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells;” the narrow back-alleys with their “lonely men.” In doing so, he appears to long to let go of his loneliness by sharing it; but his companion exists only in his mind’s eye, and so he finds himself in the gathering with the women who “come and go” once more.
His longing transmutes into despair for the majority of the poem. Prufrock hesitates, revises, loathes, fears; he worries that the women at the party will force him “sprawling on a pin” with their questions and gossip. Reality is not a place in which Prufrock is entirely comfortable, and so he retreats to the depths of his imagination.
Yet even there he denigrates himself, unable to believe that the woman would return his affections; he imagines her insouciantly adjusting a pillow or a shawl as she explains,
That is not what I meant at all.
That is not it, at all.
While love songs might include an element of hesitation, Prufrock’s seems rather excessive: “In a minute there is time for decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.” Triumph is an alien concept to him: the poem provides no vicarious success, ending instead with Prufrock “drowning” as he is woken from his dreams by human voices. It is an important distinction, at this point, to recognize that this is the love song of Prufrock, and not just a typical love song. His hesitating sort of love runs throughout the poem, linking together the disparate elements.