this slide discusses the imagery in TS Eliot's the love song of j. alfred prufrock

1. Imagery in T.S. Eliot’s
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Shilpi Kanchan

2. Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965)
•He was an American living in
London.
•He attended Harvard (1906-10,
1911-14), Oxford from 1915-16
• Erza Pound introduced him
“trained himself and modernized
himself on his own”.
•Had a mental collapse brought by
overwork, marital problems, and
general depression.

3. The Waste Land (1922)
The Hollow Men (1925)
Ash Wednesday (1930)
Four Quartets (1945)
Wrote 7 plays. Murder in the
Cathedral (1935) is the
most popular one.
He was awarded the Nobel
Prize in Literature in 1948.
• Eliot became interested
in religion in the later 1920s
and eventually converted to
Anglicanism.
• His poetry from this
point onward shows a
greater religious bent.
• Four Quartets combines a
Christian sensibility with a
deep uncertainty resulting
from the war’s devastation
of Europe. Eliot died
in 1965 in London.

4. 
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
* The masterpiece of his poetic skills, “The Love Song
of J. Alfred Prufrock” remains one of Eliot’s most
intriguing and challenging poems.
* It was published in the Chicago magazine Poetry in
June,1915.
* It is set in a city which is hyper-critical, disturbed and
self-conscious…filled with melancholy.
*

5. The Interior Monologue is used by Eliot in this poem.
This poem is written in free verse, since it doesn't have any set
length or set rhyme scheme. It's kind of just like whatever Eliot
felt like writing. At the same time, it has these half-rhymes and
internal rhymes even though there's no real structure.
It is a psychological profile of a white, middle-aged, middle-class,
late Victorian man suffering from mental depression as a result of
his boring, unimaginative, routine, repressed bourgeois existence.
Prufrock is an effigy representing the cultural decadence and moral
degeneration that Eliot equates with the society of his time.

6. Epigraph
• The epigraph is from Italian poet Dante’s Inferno, a
story of a journey through Hell. These lines have been
spoken by a lost soul, Guido da Montefeltro.
• He tells his story to Dante because he believes that his
story would never reach anyone on earth; therefore he
need not to be ashamed for admitting anything he had
done.
• It’s a “Love Song” that begins with mention of a trip
through Hell.
• The quoted passage from Dante's Inferno suggests that
Prufrock is one of the damned and he speaks only
because he is sure no one will listen.

7. • T.S. Eliot
When the evening is
spread out against the sky,
Like a patient etherized
upon a table.
• William Wordsworth
It is a beauteous evening,
calm and free, The holy
time is quiet as a Nun
Breathless with adoration;

9. When the evening is spread out against the sky, Like a
patient etherized upon a table.
This comparison clearly reveals the psyche of Prufrock. He is
inactive and helpless like a patient. Evening also symbolizes
Twilight which indicates uncertainty and inability to see clearly.

10. Imagery of an Ugly City Life
Cheap Hotel Half-deserted Streets Sawdust Restaurant

11. In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
This allusion highlights the theme
of sexual anxiety. Michelangelo, a
world-renowned painter, sculptor
and poet, serves as a model of the
ideal “Renaissance man”, the male
exemplary for excellence. An
image also associated with
Michelangelo is his sculpture of
David, considered to be the
embodiment of male physical
perfection.

12. • There is a fragmentation in these lines.
• Prufrock faces severe sexual anxiety
after realising the standard for the
perfect male and his own
inadequacy. Unable to compare with
Michelangelo's status as a Renaissance
man or David's standard of physical
perfection, Prufrock turns self-
conscious and develops the feeling of
inferiority in himself.
• Women can speak to one-another, on
the other hand, Prufrock does not dare
to ask a question.

13. The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes

14. •The metaphor of a Cat is apparent. Phrases such as “rubs its back,” “rubs
its muzzle,” “sudden leap,” “curled once about the house,” and others to
clearly point to the metaphor.
•Cats are not very sociable creatures. Eliot essentially compares Prufrock
to the cat in this stanza. Prufrock hesitates while socializing with others
(particularly women), and spends the entire poem trying to bring himself
to talk to just one girl.
• Prufrock refers to “yellow fog” and “yellow smoke,” which means:
Clouded. He cannot act and is paralyzed, blocked by his own thoughts.
•The colour yellow, associated with cowardice, just supports this idea.
•Finally, when looking at the story of the cat as a whole in this stanza,
nothing is accomplished. The cat essentially moves around in the night,
but by the end it just “fell asleep.” In the same way as Prufrock, the cat
did not act in any significant way.

15. Imagery of The SELF
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair-
[They will say: "How his hair is growing thin!"]...
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin-
[They will say: "But how his arms and legs are thin!".
Despite correctness of dress, Prufrock sees himself as
pathetic, self-conscious, and insecure; he feels he is one
of the living dead because of inaction and indecision.

16. The eyes are fixed in a formulated phrase,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall
He feels that everyone is paying
attention on him and with this
thought, he is feeling even more
insecure. He doesn’t like how eyes
seem to “fix” or freeze him, and a
“formulated phrase” means a phrase
that judges, summarize. He’s afraid
of judgments of any kind by other
people. Prufrock is imagining that the
eyes are treating him like a scientist
treats an object of study.

17. I have seen the Eternal footman hold my coat, and
snicker, And in short I was afraid
Prufrock expresses the belief that death itself mocks
him in his old age. Through this passage, Eliot again
displays Prufrock's self-consciousness and fear as he
nears the end of his life. The protagonist's constant
introspection and anxiety about his own death develops
the theme of the mortality and fragility of human life.

18. I have measured out my life with coffee spoons
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways
He has a pessimistic view of life and feels his life is as useless as the used-
up cigarette. It gives a sense of this mundane existence, this unremarkable
life. His life is filled with meaningless gestures and predictable
encounters; his world is agonizingly uninspiring.

19. •
Prufrock is disgusted with the
aimlessness of his contemporary life.
He urges to get freedom from the
society which is actually devoid. He
wants to be a crab which scuttles
across the seas.
Most apparent in these lines is
Prufrock’s desire for insignificance.
The use of the crab, especially,
creates images of futility, of moving
slowly and with great difficulty-
images also associated with the
process of aging and approaching
death.
I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

21. No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor
was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord.
Prufrock is similar to Hamlet as both of
them are indecisive in nature and have the
habit of procrastination, but Prufrock rejects
the role because he is aware of his
inadequacy to perform the heroic task of
setting his world in order. He is happy in
performing the role of a subordinate. He
takes refuge in distancing himself from the
prince and takes refuge in self-mockery.

22. Do I dare to eat a peach?
He imagines himself
growing old, unchanged,
worrying about his health
and the “risks” of eating a
peach. He believes he will
be fragile and would not be
able to eat a peach as his
teeth will be weak by then.
This is an Imagery of an old
man. He has the fear of
aging and death.

23. Mermaids singing each to each

24. He faintly hears the mermaids of romance singing in his
imagination, even though they are not singing to him. In a
final imagined vision, he sees these nymphs of the sea,
free and beautiful, calling him. Reality, however, intrudes
in the form of “human voices,” perhaps those of the art-
chattering women, and he is “drowned” in his empty life.
Then he says that “human voices” wake him—perhaps he
is awakening from a daydream at one of these get
togethers? “And we drown”—he ends his love song with
drowning, death...
Eliot has left an open ending. It is an inconclusive poem.

25. THANK YOU 