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Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock 'And The Buried Life'

Decent Essays

Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”and Arnold’s “The Buried Life” both address the relationship between a male speaker and women. Both literature pieces revolve around the theme of individual isolation and alienation. Both speakers are faced with an obstacle that they are trying to find an answer too, but can't seem to find it. Prufrock becomes isolated from his feelings, people, and love. In the third line, he describes the patient "etherized" and by doing so he is indicating that the person is deprived of their feelings. In other words, it's a person without emotions. This is indicating that the people he associates himself with, have no feelings. Another line that reveals to us that he has become isolated from his feelings is when …show more content…

We first see him encounter women in the tea party "In the room women come and go/ Talking of Michelangelo"(Eliot 2525). The women that come and go are the women that he might meet at the tea party and what they talk about is Michelangelo, since it is a safe topic to talk about that; it will not offend anyone. We get the image that Prufrock is just watching the women go inside the room and then leave without acknowledging him. The women seem to not pay much attention to him, which can reveal that they do not find him attractive. This uncertainty of his leads him to ponder his life and whether he should ask the question. He ultimately re-evaluates his decision which leads him to question if he should ask or not. We are implicitly revealed that he does not ask the question "No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be"(Eliot 2527). Prince Hamlet asks the big questions and by Prufrock stating that he was not meant to be Hamlet, he is saying that he was not meant to ask the big question. The big question can be "will you marry me?" or "would you like to go on a date with me?" He never tells us that the question is but through the actions of Prufrock when can assume that, that is the question he wanted to ask when he said "Do I dare! Do I …show more content…

In this poem, the speaker faces isolation of the self. We can see this isolation start to develop in the first stanza because the speaker is watching the way people hide their emotions from each other. The speaker thinks that most people hide their inner selves from the world because they are afraid that, if they revealed themselves, they would be ignored or made fun of “be met / With blank indifference, or with blame reproved”(Arnold 1375). This reflects on the way people are made to hide who they are from one another; hiding the same thoughts and feelings that those around them feel but, are also unable to

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