“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is a pre-war short poem written by T.S. Eliot that was published in 1915 under the simpler title “Prufrock”. It opens with an excerpt from Canto 27 of Dante’s Inferno, which is left in the original Italian. (SyntheticChild) It translates to Dante speaking about how no one has ever returned from the pits of hell, so he doesn’t have to fear dying in infamy. After the excerpt the narrator starts describing a dark and dirty city covered in smog and a thick yellow smoke. It moves on to the reader being told about many menial things the man has done with his life and he mentions a very important question that he needs to ask the reader, but we never hear the actual question. Towards the middle of the poem it becomes clear that the poem is about a man looking back at his life. He mentions his aging and his wish to go back, but decides he shouldn’t. The end of the poem is very cryptic, but I think it actually means the narrator of the poem is dead or dying as he is writing the poem. This really resets the tone of the poem, because it leaves no hope for the writer to change his habits of lackluster living. By looking at T.S. Eliot’s use of symbolism and point of view we can see his distaste for the lackluster life he lived, which explains the morbid tone of all the random acts described.

Through looking at symbolism we can see that in simpler terms the narrator thinks with the idea “You live to perform a plethora of pointless acts, then you die without finding out what is important in life.” Through the symbolism of the women coming and going we can venture a guess that the man speaking never found love in his life. “In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo.” is repeated twice in the poem. Michelangelo was an early renaissance painter and sculptor who focused on two aspects in almost all of his pieces, God and devotion to something greater than life. This greater than life thing that he keeps hearing about from all these women is love. He is noncommittal his whole life, treating the women as secondary, because just like the question that he never asks the reader, he cannot spit focus on the most important things. The question is important to him now, but he avoids it; love was important to his life, but he avoids it because it’s not as easy as sticking with his routine. The reader can see the narrator’s blatant distaste for a routine in the line “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;/ I know the voices dying with a dying fall /Beneath the music from a farther room.”(Eliot) These three lines show how much he hates that he lived his life through the same boring, mundane activities everyday by calling back to the use of “The Divine Comedy”. In this story Dante has to fight down through the layers of hell to save a woman, then climb through purgatory and into heaven to save her. The rooms that Eliot refers to directly relate to layers of hell. He says the voices of routine come from a farther room, which means it comes from a deeper layer of hell as described in the poem “The Divine Comedy”

T.S. Eliot decides to write this poem in the second person because it sucks the reader into the same morbid world of the writer. We are forced to accept the brutish views that the depressed old man writing has on the reality of life and death. Point of view also helps the reader understand the passage of time in the poem. Although the monologue was all written at one point there is a clear progression from the beginning of the main character’s life and the end, from which the piece is being written. It seems commonsensical but, without writing this in the second person and continually using the word “you” to pull the reader back into the narrator‘s world the piece would not capture the reader to this extent. The message behind the writing is positive; live your life to the fullest before it is too late, but the tone being so morbid is very off putting to the reader. The second person can keep the reader involved while the tone does just the opposite. This push and pull turns to a neutral, smooth reading experience.

The major themes of this poem, the passage of life and regret, are very well highlighted by symbolism and point of view. This poem could seem like a bunch of cryptic fragments of full thoughts at times, but once the reader can spot the very intentional use of different symbolic references the main idea can be pieced together. Once the main idea is understood each of these fragments seems to make a lot more sense. Reading short poems three or four times before hypothesizing meaning should be common practice, because it is common for tone to develop and shift in the middle of the prose. With all the symbolic meanings in this poem, looking at the beginning of the poem with the tone of the end can completely change how something is perceived. For instance, by only reading the title and the first stanza I thought this was going to be a piece about the pain and pleasures of love written to the narrator’s romantic interest. Instead it turned out to be a story about the lack of love in a wasted life. 

  