by Kerry Michael Wood

Created on: April 17, 2008   Last Updated: November 11, 2010

Arguably the best known English poem of the 20th century, "Prufrock" is an interior monologue. Readers eavesdrop on J. Alfred's stream of consciousness, which flows forward, backward, and sideways as musings trigger other associations not logically but psychologically.

The "Love Song" of the title is ironic since the eponymous character is isolated, timid, anti-heroic, middle aged, and unromantic.  A natural tendency is to assume that Prufrock is T. S. Eliot, even though Eliot was 27 years old when the poem was first published. The pronouns of the "Let us go then, you and I" are sometimes interpreted as two different parts of Prufrock's personality: one that urges him to take action and participate in events; the other, a feckless dilettante who fears involvement and rejection. Or perhaps the "you" is the generalized reader.

Images of involvement and action oppose images of paralysis and fear and such is the conflict that defines the thinker whose musings we share. An educated and highly intelligent man, he precedes his monologue with a quotation from Dante's Inferno. Dante, while journeying through hell, encounters Guido da Montefeltro, who is wrapped in flame and suffering eternal torment for sins he committed on earth. He confesses his sins on the assumption that Dante, a fellow prisoner of hell, cannot return to earth with the damning information he is hearing and besmirch Guido's reputation.

Prufrock's "song" is a similar confession of a soul in torment, though Prufrock's sins are errors of omission and inaction rather than of commission. If hesitation, inadequacy, and a lack of self-assertiveness are mortal sins, Prufrock deserves a place in Hell among those who fail to do either good evil; or maybe Eliot considers him a purveyor of false counsel (In Prufrock's case, self-counsel) and deserving of a spot in the 7th ring next to Guido.

The time is evening, and the "you" is invited to make a visit involving traverse of a slum area. In a metaphysical conceit, the evening is compared to "a patient etherized upon a table." The idea of sickness or paralysis is imported along with a suggestion that the world is twilit due not merely to the time of day but to a realm between the brightness of life and the darkness of death. The etherized patient is both modern man and the modern world.

The surgery will be diagnostic and will attempt to answer the "overwhelming question." (And we continue to wonder just what that question is.)  Eventually we enter a

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