[In the following essay, Campo discusses the sources for “Prufrock”'s Lazarus imagery.]

While Helen Gardner has warned that T. S. Eliot's poetry features “a deep ambiguity which is not the critic's business to remove,”¹ determining which Lazarus Eliot is referring to in his “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” should lead to a fuller appreciation of the poem, not a diminution of Eliot's work. The reference to Lazarus appears in line 94 of the poem; the stanza in which it appears reads as follows:

And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
To say: ‘I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all’—
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
          Should say: ‘That is not what I meant at all.
          That is not it, at all.’(2)

Two Lazaruses are mentioned in the Bible. One, whose story is told in John 11: 1-44, is perhaps the more “famous” Lazarus, the brother of Mary and Martha, whom Jesus brought back to life. The other Lazarus is the beggar associated with the rich man Dives, in the parable told in Luke 16: 19-31.³ When they died, Lazarus went to heaven, the rich man, Dives, to hell. Dives wanted to warn his five brothers about the torments of hell, and asked Abraham if Lazarus could be sent back to tell them, reasoning that, “if one went unto them from the dead, they will repent” (v. 30). But Abraham refused: “if they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead” (v. 31).

It seems as though editors of modern anthologies, especially those which have become standard texts in many American universities, have uniformly accepted the Lazarus from John to be the one referred to in Eliot's poem. Oxford's Modern British Literature lists only the scripture reference to John 11 in a footnote to line 94.⁴The Oxford Anthology of English Poetry's footnote, referring to Lazarus, states: “Brought back to life by Jesus in the miracle recorded by John 11.”⁵The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces adds, “The story of Lazarus, raised from the dead, is told in John 11: 1-44.”⁶ Macmillan's Literature of the Western World mundanely notes, “Lazarus was raised from the dead by Jesus,”⁷ with the reference to John's gospel duly noted. McGraw Hill's Literature laconically comments that, “Jesus raised him from the dead. See John 11:1-44.”⁸

The epigram to the poem, a quotation from Dante's Inferno, is one of several indications that suggest Eliot was referring to the Lazarus mentioned in Luke's—not John's—gospel. Eloise Knapp Hay translates Dante's original as:

If I believed that my answer were given to one who would return to the world, this flame would stand without moving. But because no one ever returned alive from this depth, if I have heard the truth, I answer you without fear of infamy.⁹

These words are spoken by Count Guido da Montefeltro, who has been punished in a single prison of flame in the Eighth Chasm of Hell with other false counselors. The line “one who would return to the world” refers not only to Dante and the possibility that Prufrock is damned to eternal hell, but recalls Lazarus as well. Luke's Lazarus relates more specifically to the epigram because his existence after death is clearly described (a la Dante), while the Lazarus of John's gospel was resurrected without any account of the four days that he lay in the tomb before Jesus' arrival.

The Lazarus of Luke's account is Eliot's likely reference for other reasons. First, the message from Luke's Lazarus is hoped to bring saving knowledge, yet is said to have no effect, which is consistent with the poem's depiction of Prufrock's ineffectual life countered by his lofty aspirations. Prufrock persistently questions “what if,” or as in the stanza in which the Lazarus reference appears, “Would it have been worthwhile.” The illustration from Luke answers “no,” it would not have been worthwhile, which is consistent with everything else in Prufrock's futile life, he would have failed—as Luke's Lazarus would have failed. Eliot's use of a dash to conclude Lazarus/Prufrock's imagined words (ln. 95) may suggest that Prufrock realized the negative implications of “coming back to tell” as Luke's Lazarus, which might explain the abrupt end of the thought. Prufrock envisioning a triumphant, prophetic return to “tell all,” coupled with the realization that Abraham pronounced Lazarus' return as futile, also heightens the pervasive irony of the poem. Secondly, the phrase “from the dead” appears twice in Luke's version, once in the poem, but not in John. And while editors and critics are quick to refer their readers to the Lazarus that was “raised,” that word never appears in the poem. Thirdly, Luke's Lazarus was specifically asked to return and tell, while John's version said nothing of his experience. Finally, Luke's version parallels Prufrock's persona more directly than John's. Luke's Lazarus is identified as a “beggar,” who was “desiring to be fed with the crumbs which fell from the rich man's table” (v. 21). Prufrock, like this Lazarus, desired to be part of a world from which he was a pariah: the world of “tea and cakes and ices” (ln. 89) which rejected him continually. If Prufrock is, as he says, “no prophet” (ln. 93), he undoubtedly does not see himself as Jesus' friend, which, of course, John's Lazarus was.

Scholars are rather divided on the identity of Prufrock's Lazarus. Lyndall Gordon suggests that John's version is the correct reference, writing that Eliot's mother Charlotte “was devoted” to this figure, and as evidence, she cites Charlotte's poem, “The Raising of Lazarus,” which “dramatizes Lazarus's emergence from his tomb.”¹⁰ Gordon makes no mention of Luke's account of Lazarus. A.D. Moody comments that “there are intimations of an order of things vaster than this world conceives” in the poem, and that “these intimations reach their climax in the allusion to Marvell and the association with Lazarus (Luke xvi, 19-31).”¹¹ Moody makes no further comment on Lazarus, and, extraordinarily, does not mention John's version. Hay makes reference to both accounts when she writes that the poem's mention of Lazarus is: “Alluding to the gospels of John and Luke, especially the latter where Jesus [sic] says that even if the dead were to return the people would not believe” (19). Angus Calder writes that Prufrock “wants to impress one of the ladies (any one?) by knowledge of secrets as profound as those which the Biblical Lazarus brought back from the dead.”¹² We are left to guess which Lazarus Calder is referring to, as no specific reference is included. Hugh Kenner is equally indeterminate, writing, “Lazarus, back from the far side of death.”¹³ Gertrude Patterson follows this ambiguous pattern with, “Lazarus denotes one raised from the dead. By self-identification with Lazarus, Prufrock recognizes himself—that is his social self—and his companions as spiritually ‘dead.’”¹⁴ David Spurr mentions Lazarus only fleetingly with, “In a poem so obsessed with problems in speech and definition, to have failed with words is to have lost the war on the inarticulate: the speaker as a heroic Lazarus or Prince Hamlet is suddenly reduced to the stature of an attendant lord.”¹⁵

The increasing tendency of writers like Calder and Patterson (to speak of Lazarus as though only John's version exists), has probably led to the teaching texts like Oxford and Norton to include only the John 11 reference as a footnote. In addition, anthologies often cross-reference such footnotes, which further explains the dominance of John's version. Although some scholars point to the “other” Lazarus, most fail to mention Luke's account. Luke's Lazarus is far more consistent with the tone and imagery of “Prufrock” than John's, and it is difficult to imagine how any serious scholar could justify John's account over Luke's. If only one Biblical reference is included as a gloss to the poem, it should be the one in Luke, not John. At the very least, footnotes explicating line 94 in “Prufrock” should include Luke's and John's account of Lazarus, giving interested readers the benefit of both sources, thereby ensuring the ambiguity that, as Gardner has noted, enriches Eliot's poetry.

Notes

1. Helen Gardner, The Art of T. S. Eliot (New York: Dutton, 1950) 57.

2. This quotation and all subsequent quotations from Prufrock are taken from T..S. Eliot's Collected Poems: 1909-1935 (New York: Harcourt,1936), and are cited parenthetically in this article.

3. All biblical references are taken from The King James Version of the Bible (Edinburgh: William Collins Sons, 1955).

4. Modern British Literature, eds. Frank Kermode and John Hollander. (London: Oxford UP, 1973) 467.

5. The Oxford Anthology of English Poetry, eds. Ronald Lowry and Edmund Thorp. (New York: Oxford UP, 1956) 1270.

6. The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces, eds. Maynard Mack, et al. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1992) 1739.

7. Literature of the Western World, Volume II, eds. Brian Wilkie and James Hurt (New York: Macmillan, 1992) 2044.

8. Literature: Reading Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and the Essay, ed. Robert DiYanni, (New York: McGraw-Hill Inc., 1990) 717.

9. Eloise Knapp Hay, T. S. Eliot's Negative Way (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1982) 18.

10. Lyndall Gordon, Eliot's Early Years (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977) 46.

11. A.D. Moody, Thomas Stearns Eliot: Poet (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1979) 35.

12. Angus Calder, T. S. Eliot (New Jersey: Humanities, 1987) 30.

13. Hung Kenner, The Invisible Poet: T. S. Eliot (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1959) 32.

14. Gertrude Patterson, T. S. Eliot: poems in the making (New York: Manchester UP, 1971) 114.

15. David Spurr, Conflicts in Consciousness: T. S. Eliot's Poetry and Criticism (Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1984) 9.