The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock : A Beautifully Complicated Masterpiece
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, by T.S. Eliot is a beautifully complicated masterpiece. The poem rises above all standards of poetry and completely blows your mind. The poem consists of twenty stanzas, each telling a different part of the story of J. Alfred Prufrock's life.
Eliot uses many poetic devices to add a hint of magic to the sound of the poem. The diction he uses turns what seems to be a normal poetic work of art into a dream where everything flows together like magic. An example of his diction would be Eliot's powerful use of metaphor in lines 15 - 25 of the poem.
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Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before taking of a toast and tea.
The soft 'i' sound illustrates the lengthiness that time has. Time can be short, but it can be long, also. The soft 'i' sound has a sound that stretches things out. This is also used in lines 47 and 48; "In a minute there is time for decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse."
Another poetic device that Eliot uses frequently is rhyme. It is most powerful in the twelfth stanza;
And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep... tired... or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me,
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment into crisis?
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought up in a platter, I am no prophet---and here's no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.
The rhyme scheme is a-b-b-a-c-c-d-e-e-f-f-d. It emphasizes several aspects of life. The rhyme of 'fingers' and 'malingers' would not be as powerful as it is if it was separated. It suggests that life sort of creeps slowly sometimes, it 'malingers'. The rhyme of 'ices' and
We may never be given a second chance to do something daring ever again so we seize the day! However, people like in J. Alfred Prufrock make the attempt to do but it doesn’t work. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” written by T.S. Elliot, essentially is about a simple man that wishes to ask a question, although the question is never revealed, the reader is taken on journey the with the speaker, only to find that they have spent a lengthy amount of time of their lives without ever asking the question. Even more so, this poem is illustrates the idea that we must confront reality and take advantage or never take the chance. This claim is supported through poetic and rhetoric elements, such as repetition, and symbolism.
Eliot uses allusions and imagery to make several references to characters—both real and fictional—to vicariously show how Prufrock feels. The first allusion is an epigraph from Dante’s Inferno:
The most obvious poetic devise of this poem is the rhyming scheme. Rhyming is when there is close similarity in the final sounds of two or more words or lines of writin.
11. A poet can work its magic on the reader by “choice of images, music of the language, idea content, and cleverness of wordplay” (Foster 17).
The poem also uses end rhyme to add a certain rhythm to the poem as a whole. And the scheme he employs: aabbc, aabd, aabbad. End rhyme, in this poem, serves to effectively pull the reader through to the end of the poem. By pairing it with lines restricted to eight syllables. The narrator creates an almost nursery-rhyme like rhythm. In his third stanza however, his last line, cutting short of eight syllables, stands with an emphatic four syllables. Again, in the last stanza, he utilizes the same technique for the last line of the poem. The narrator’s awareness of rhyme and syllable structure provides the perfect bone structure for his poem’s rhythm.
When reading the title of T.S Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” it is believed we are in store for a poem of romance and hope. A song that will inspire embrace and warmth of the heart, regretfully this is could not be further from the truth. This poem takes us into the depths of J. Alfred Prufrock, someone who holds faltering doubt and as a result may never come to understand real love. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” takes us through Prufrock’s mindset and his self-doubting and self-defeating thoughts. With desolate imagery, a tone that is known through the ages and delicate diction we see a man who is insecure, tentative and completely fearful.
Poetry can sometimes allow one to explore the unknown. However, in some works of poetry, one can realise that some known ideas or values remain relevant to current society. This is certainly applicable to T.S. Eliot’s poems, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and Rhapsody on a Windy Night. Eliot’s manipulation of poetic techniques in both these poems allows the responder to realise that some ideas prevail in both modern and post-modern society. These poems explore the unknown phenomena of the obscurity regarding the purpose and meaning of life. This unknown phenomena causes the persona in both texts to resort to a sense of isolation or alienation. Eliot uses poetic techniques such as metaphors and personification to convey his ideas.
T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is an ironic depiction of a man’s inability to take decisive action in a modern society that is void of meaningful human connection. The poem reinforces its central idea through the techniques of fragmentation, and through the use of Eliot’s commentary about Prufrock’s social world. Using a series of natural images, Eliot uses fragmentation to show Prufrock’s inability to act, as well as his fear of society. Eliot’s commentary about Prufrock’s social world is also evident throughout. At no point in the poem did Prufrock confess his love, even though it is called “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, but through this poem, T.S. Eliot voices his social commentary about the world that
T.S Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock is an examination of human insecurity and folly, embodied in the title's J. Alfred Prufrock. Eliot's story of a man's "overwhelming question", his inability to ask it, and consequently, his mental rejection plays off the poem's many ambiguities, both structural and literal. Eliot uses these uncertainties to develop both the plot of the poem and the character of J. Alfred Prufrock.
4. One of the most demanding aspects of this poem is its allusions, as Eliot expected his readers to be as well educated as he was. Some allusions are fairly accessible. The allusions to Michelangelo—an artist most people are familiar with—in line 14 and again in line 36 help us imagine the women Prufrock is talking about. The function of the less accessible allusions—such as “works and days of hands” (l. 29)—may serve a different purpose. Why might Eliot have included such esoteric allusions? How do they affect your reading of the poem?
Eliot). T. S. Eliot’s “The Love song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” is recognized as one of the most important poems of all time because almost everyone can identify with the insecurity of J. Alfred Prufrock at one time or other, which makes it very realistic.
J. Alfred Prufrock constantly lived in fear, in fear of life and death. T. S. Eliot divided his classic poem into three equally important sections. Each division provided the reader with insight into the mental structure of J. Alfred Prufrock. In actuality, Prufrock maintained a good heart and a worthy instinct, but he never seemed to truly exist. A false shadow hung over his existence. Prufrock never allowed himself to actually live. He had no ambitions that would drive him to succeed. The poem is a silent cry for help from Prufrock. In each section, T. S. Eliot provided his audience with vague attempts to understand J. Alfred Prufrock. Each individual reader can only interpret these
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock is a uniquely styled piece of literature. In this poem Eliot employs a literary method of writing called "stream of consciousness." This is a difficult method to grasp outside of the literary genre to attempt to understand it within the context of the higher language of poetry can further confuse readers.
Eliot uses metaphor to relate accessible, physical entities and concepts to more abstract themes present in the poem. In
T.S. Eliot was an outstanding author and an exemplary representation of the ideas of modernism. "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," despite being one of T.S Eliot's earliest publications, still manages to remain one of the most famous. He uses this poem to not only draw out the psychological aspect of members of modern society, but also to draw out the aspect of the time that he lived in. The speaker of this poem is a modern man who feels alone, isolated, and incapable of making decisive actions for himself. Prufrock desires to speak to a woman about his love for her, but he continuously hesitates while attempting to do so. This poem demonstrates a theme of fragmentation, which is a theme that we can see throughout the entire