24 pages • 48 minutes read
T. S. EliotThe Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1915A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The City
The poem opens with urban imagery of “half-deserted streets” (Line 4), “One-night cheap hotels” (Line 6) and “sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells” (Line 7), establishing Prufrock’s hopelessness and despair. The landscape of his mind is grimy, seedy, and anxiety-inducing; the city through which he progresses through as he relays his monologue represents the loneliness and meaninglessness he feels in life. The city is devoid of other people and populated with impermanent or transitory items: The hotel suggests a string of shallow, one-night encounters, and the cheaply made sawdust restaurants will not last. Later, Prufrock returns to this imagery, noting the smoke-filled “narrow streets” (Line 70) with “lonely men […] leaning out of windows” (Lines 72). As he progresses through the poem, the city landscape does not change, suggesting that Prufrock is trapped and doomed to suffer in this world.
Fog
The yellow fog, or smoke, represents the onslaught of the new, modern era, and the dangers that accompany it. By presenting the fog as a cat, a creature that “rubs its back [… and] muzzle on the window-panes / lick[s] its tongue into the corners of the evening” (Lines 15-17), Eliot notes the way in which the trappings of modernity have been integrated into Prufrock’s world. While the fog is a sickly yellow color, suggesting danger, its cat-like behavior conversely implies a certain level of comfort and security as it “curl[s] once about the house, and [falls] asleep” (Line 22). The influence of the modern world is insidious, taking on the appearance of domestic innocence, while still bringing the capacity to suffocate. The fog is pervasive, invasive, and unsettling, marked by its interaction with grimy things: pools that stand in drains and chimney soot.
Ocean Imagery
Eliot introduces ocean imagery when Prufrock declares “I should have been a pair of ragged claws / scuttling across the floors of silent seas” (Lines 73-74) in the wake of his first admission that he is unable to form a sexual relationship with his love interest. The comparison to a bottom-dwelling ocean animal represents Prufrock’s poor self-esteem and emphasizes despair at his inability to communicate; he thinks it better to have always been in the “silent sea[]” (Line 74) than to realize he is incapable of understanding the woman. The use of the verb “scuttle” adds to Prufrock’s embarrassed tone, highlighting his desire to awkwardly but quickly escape human interactions and hide.
In the final stanzas, Eliot returns to the ocean imagery, as Prufrock imagines mermaids singing on the beach, and his final death in the “chambers of the sea” (Line 129). As with the previous female figures in the poem, Prufrock perceives the mermaids as indifferent to him, and while they represent a beautiful, mystical world at odds with the terrifying one he occupies, he cannot access this beauty. Because their world is apart from humans, Prufrock desires it as a means of escape; these lines also offer the closest interaction he can imagine with a female figure (the "sea-girls" (Line 130) who surround him in their “chambers of the sea” (Line 129)). The moment, however, cannot last, and this alternate world results in Prufrock’s drowning.
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By T. S. Eliot
