by David Adelman

Created on: May 18, 2009

Dear T.S. Eliot,

Who is J. Alfred Prufrock? What a ridiculous name! No one with a name like that
can be taken seriously. And this J.Alfred character actually has written a love song? I don't like you J.Alfred and yet I fear you as if you have a contagious disease - a sleeping sickness that has drained you of vitality and passion and filled your arteries and veins with indecision and inactivity. You are so afraid to disturb the universe WHY? Do you dare? Do you dare? Dare to do what? What are you afraid of? NO you are not Hamlet. Tormented by evil, No you are not a prophet trying to bring truth to people. No you are not Lazarus rising from the dead to lead people to a spiritual regeneration. You are J. Alfred Prufrock who sits on the fence throughout his life and "refuses to squeeze the universe into a ball/ To roll it toward some overwhelming question.". You refuse to question convention and prefer to be "polite, cautious, and meticulous". You are the living dead.....You surround me . Intellectually, spiritually, emotionally dead You are alienated even from your own alienation. J Alfred - are you us?- Are you really you and I? Does your alter ego represent us? Me?

Now to further analyse your indecisive encryptions and vivid imagery Mr. Prufrock, I shall begin. The poem opens with a stanza written in Italian? and without a translation. Italian is the language of love and passion but I can't believe that this Prufrock character would know Italian.. I would like to know what this stanza means. The poem at first looks as if it is traditional form because the first letter of each line is capitalized but after reading the first stanza , the irregularities stand out. For example, each stanza has a different number of lines. The first stanzas is followed by a rhyming couplet:": In the room the women cone and go/Talking of Michelangelo." This same couplet occurs following another two stanzas. Line 54, line 61, line 68,line 69, line 83, line 97 , line 98, line 103,line 109, line 110.are all indented. Regular sentence structure and punctuation is used. There are two lines which are not capitalized (lines 83 and 103) but these lines continue the sentences. The verses seem to flow into each other giving the poem its own distinctive form.

The first stanza starts off with a rhyming couplet followed by a line which does not rhyme, three rhyming couplets, a line which not rhyme and a couplet. Most of the lines in the poem rhyme. This pattern establishes the

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