[In the following excerpt, Schneider discusses the role of “Prufrock” in Eliot's transformation from skeptic to religious believer.]

The transformation of T. S. Eliot from skeptic to religious believer was a public event and to the literary world quite a spectacular one. Criticism has been busy with it ever since, following often at considerable length—now and then at considerable distance too—the course of his journey from a view of the Church as Hippopotamus “wrapt in the old miasmal mist” to a Christian faith that “all shall be well, and / All manner of thing shall be well.” The substance of his later belief he made explicit in his writing, and the change has been welcomed, denounced, scoffed at, and analyzed from many angles, with or without sympathy. Interesting as much of this subsequent discussion is, one element has been largely ignored that seems to me of even greater interest and certainly of equal importance to the reader of Eliot's poetry. It is his preoccupation, which appears markedly in the poems, with the process itself of subjective change. A concern, that is, not only with what one may change from or to but with change itself: how possible it is, how easy, how subject to the will; what the experience may be like of attempting to transform wish into will, will into belief and then dedication. Thinking of these questions, one realizes that the subject has not often been touched by other poets. Among the Victorian “poets of doubt” we do not find quite this; and one has only to think of Donne or Hopkins to realize how special the theme is in Eliot. “Batter my heart,” Donne will say; and Hopkins, “Thou heardst me truer than tongue confess / Thy terror.” But when Eliot says, “I rejoice, having to construct something upon which to rejoice,” though the mode of the paradox may remind one of Donne, the meaning does not. Here God does not, either, as in Hopkins, seize possession of man's self and will; in Eliot the “rejoicing,” such as it is, is willed within the human self. Change as process I am inclined to believe may have engaged Eliot at a deeper level even than did its content or result, that is, than the actual Christian view of life arrived at, in saying which I do not in the least belittle the importance or reality of his Christian commitment. The problem of change, at any rate, is consciously and intimately followed through a succession of major poems beginning, unpromisingly it might be thought, with “Prufrock.” There the question is first posed.

“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is many things, and it should not be distorted merely to prove a point. Yet at its most abstract level it does ask a central question, “Is inner change possible?” and answers No, not anyhow for Prufrock or his kind. Within the poem, the answer is final though ultimately it was not so for Eliot. In dramatic terms Prufrock's question is of course not nearly so broad, and his individual case is too sharply presented to be felt as the mere shell for a nut of abstraction. The poem is therefore not primarily a symbolic representation of this or any theme; on the contrary, it reads as though it has sprung directly from a wish to set down as precisely as possible what it feels like to be Prufrock; but as this does not feel comfortable, the question of possible change is inherent in the subject.

Prufrock speaks at a moment of decision. “Let us go and make our visit,” he says, and the Browningesque immediacy of time and place, given a new dimension by the foreshadowing image of the sky “like a patient etherized,”¹ leads to the central question: Shall he or dare he propose to a woman? The answer being no, the title is ironic: he will never sing his love song, nor will the mermaids ever sing to him. The rise and fall of the merest possibility of action, dramatized through imagery and the changing moods and tenses of verbs, provide the structure of the soliloquy from the initial “let us go” through the hesitations: “there will be time … time to turn back … Do I dare disturb the universe? … And how should I begin? Shall I say …” With the shift in these last words to a future indicative verb a little more than halfway through the poem, Prufrock having now brought himself to contemplate action not as reverie but as actual possibility, the question of whether advances for a moment to the question of how: “Shall” he say he does not wish to spend a lonely life looking on at others’ lives from a window-ledge, an empty room behind him? His vacillations of will have moved cautiously toward this possible if still somewhat meager affirmation, the subjunctive should I giving way to the more vivid future, shall I. But the will's approach to action generates its own reversal and flight in the automatic reaction expressed through the grotesque central image of the poem, which embodies Prufrock's recognition of what essentially he is:

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas—

a subhuman crustacean, doubly dehumanized by the synecdoche of claws even beyond its identity as crab or lobster, and moving, a cold solitary being, in armored solitude on the sea floor.²

From this point on, contemplation of change does not again enter the world of possibility in indicative verbs. Prufrock thinks in subjunctives and then in contrary-to-fact constructions: “Should I … have the strength …? … in short, I was afraid”; and then, “would it have been worth it after all …?” The question of possible action now answered negatively and for good (the answer is conveyed entirely by the moods and tenses of verbs), Prufrock turns to contemplate the twilight existence that such a man as he may look forward to: more of the teas, the white flannel trousers de rigueur for resort wear, the thinning hair (never thick), the care of digestion (in 1910 peaches were indigestible, to be eaten with caution). But love is not for him. He knows its lure, at a distance only, and with its back turned, for the mermaids are “riding seaward.” Below, in the chambers of his silent sea, he may still dream of “sea-girls” wreathing him but they are dreams; the reality of a human relationship he cannot stand: “human voices wake us, and we drown.”

The “Love Song” is more than a retreat from love, however; it is the portrait of a man in Hell, though until this truth is clearly realized, the hell appears to be merely the trivial one of the self-conscious individual in a sterile society. Prufrock does not analyze himself, and we are not led into peripheral guessing in Freudian or other terms about what may be wrong with him; we simply come to know directly what it feels like to be Prufrock. (The phrase is Eliot's in another context.)³ By certain critics the poem has been read, with a quite different emphasis, as an ironic picture of society presided over by ennui. Certainly trivialities abound: proper neckties, “artistic” small talk, and the rest. That is the kind of society in which Prufrock moves, and obviously there is boredom in the empty fullness of its life. Moreover, it suits Eliot's purpose to set the scene superficially on this level. But within the poem the most individually significant images are of a different order; they are violent metaphors which would be out of place if ennui alone were the theme. The social images are lightly ironic, but these extreme ones are not; they form a pattern of which the two main components are objective correlatives for a self-divided state and a state of paralysis or stagnation. Self-consciousness is a split state: descending a staircase, the painfully self-conscious man is both himself descending and those above observing his thin hair; and it is this double or split consciousness that is the center of his discomfort; he is simply not all in one piece. Acute self-consciousness, furthermore, through this division of the self, paralyzes the will and the power to act and feel, produces “the partial anaesthesia of suffering without feeling” of which Eliot speaks, in a different context, in the opening scene of The Family Reunion.

Perhaps never again did Eliot find an epigraph quite so happily suited to his use as the passage from the Inferno which sets the underlying serious tone for “Prufrock” and conveys more than one level of its meaning: “S'io credesse che mia risposta …,” lines in which Guido da Montefeltro consents to tell his story to Dante only because he believes that none ever returns to the world of the living from his depth. One in Hell can bear to expose his shame only to another of the damned; Prufrock speaks to, will be understood only by, other Prufrocks (the “you and I” of the opening, perhaps), and, I imagine the epigraph also hints, Eliot himself is speaking to those who know this kind of hell. The poem, I need hardly say, is not in a literal sense autobiographical: for one thing, though it is clear that Prufrock will never marry, the poem was published in the year of Eliot's own first marriage. Nevertheless, friends who knew the young Eliot almost all describe him, retrospectively but convincingly, in Prufrockian terms; and Eliot himself once said of dramatic monologue in general that what we normally hear in it “is the voice of the poet, who has put on the costume and make-up either of some historical character, or of one out of fiction.”⁴ As such a statement can be made only with considerable straining about Browning, who was his ostensible example in the passage where this sentence occurs, I suppose it to be one of the many indirect clues to his own poetry planted with evident deliberation throughout his prose. “What every poet starts from,” he also once said, “is his own emotions,” and, writing of Dante, he asserted that the Vita nuova “could only have been written around a personal experience,”⁵ a statement that, under the circumstances, must be equally applicable to Prufrock; Prufrock was Eliot, though Eliot was much more than Prufrock. We miss the whole tone of the poem, however, if we read it as social satire only. Eliot was not either the dedicated apostle in theory, or the great exemplar in practice, of complete “depersonalization” in poetry that one influential early essay of his for a time led readers to suppose.

Within the poem, then, are two distinct orders of imagery: there are the limited and literal details of Prufrock's daily concern, the neatly combed hair or the stylish trousers with cuffs;⁶ but against these stand out sharply the extravagant images to which I have referred—highly imaginative and for the most part violent images—and it is through these latter, which reflect back to the epigraph, that we know we are visiting a kind of hell. The once notorious opening simile is no proper description of any evening sky known to man; the “patient etherized upon a table” indeed extinguishes the sky, leaving only shock, with the residual thought of illness and paralyzed faculties, a thought evoked again, less spectacularly, by the stagnant smoke and soot, which are literal, and the afternoon that “malingers,” which is figurative. Literal and figurative are joined when the trivial self-conscious fear of servants' contempt is universalized into the “eternal Footman's” snicker.

But more violent images convey the extremes of self-shattering consciousness: “the eyes that fix you,” pin you to the wall like a specimen insect impaled, to be stared at in its death agony as it ejects its insides at both ends—“spitting out the butt-ends of my days and ways”; and the other image of exposure, seeing one's own nervous system projected “in patterns on a screen.” Most extravagant of all these images of the agonized split self is that of John the Baptist: Prufrock has “seen” his own head brought in upon a platter. And finally, there is the figure that recalls the epigraph from Dante, occurring just as Prufrock is thinking once more of how it might have been if he had attempted to establish an intimacy: “Would it have been worth while / … To say: ‘I am Lazarus, come from the dead, / Come back to tell you all.’”⁷ She would not understand: “That is not what I meant at all. / That is not it, at all.” What have the dead to communicate that the living could understand?

The doom is real though the tone is dry, kept so by the absence of direct expressions of feeling, by the trivial details of life, by Prufrock's reminding himself that he is no great tragic protagonist (“I am no prophet,” “I am not Prince Hamlet”), and sometimes by undercurrents of other allusion, as when the lady's repeated “That is not what I meant at all” stirs (and very likely was meant to stir) an egregiously inappropriate echo in one's mind of Kipling's “rag and a bone and a hank of hair,” who “never could know / And did not understand,” for “it wasn't the least what the lady meant.” The poem is at once both a highly subjective and a fully dramatic portrait of a man who on the surface is correct, well-dressed, over self-conscious, a trifle pathetic, and a trifle absurd. Prufrock, however, knows he is all this, and the acceptance of this knowledge dignifies him; he is no figure of fun. And there is something of him in most of us.

“The whole of Shakespeare,” Eliot once wrote, “is one poem … united by one significant and developing personality”;⁸ the words characterize his own work more sharply than they do Shakespeare's. His recurrent imagery, of which there is more than in any other writer I can think of, repeated exactly or with variations, and his repeated observations (“Human kind cannot bear very much reality” is the first that comes to mind) may originally have sprung from a narrow range of sensibility but if so he made a virtue of the limitation, deliberately unifying his work by means of these “patterns in his carpet”; the repeated images enrich, rather than impoverish, his work by a concretion of associative values for the reader that carry from one passage to another. And the continuity derived from “one significant and developing personality” which he ascribed to both Shakespeare and Dante was certainly also a deliberate aim of his own work. His Christian commitment is the most obvious unifying factor in the later work, but through the related theme of change as process, the early and the later work are held in a single developing pattern. In the Prufrockian world, change, which there means becoming able and willing to enter into a living human relationship through love, is, as we have seen, impossible; the word love does not even enter after the title, and the hell is felt to be permanent.

Notes

1. Quotations from the poems are from the Collected Poems 1909-1962 (New York: Harcour, 1963). As several other editions are widely used and as the bulk of Eliot's poetry is small, I have not provided page references. Occasional italics have been added in the quotations.

2. I do not think the image represents, as some writers have maintained, the desire for instinctual or predatory animal life; it is merely a stronger poetic equivalent for the commonplace metaphor of a person's retreating into or being drawn “out of his shell.”

3. From an uncollected essay, quoted in Kristian Smidt's Poetry and Belief in the Work of T. S. Eliot (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961), p. 58.

4. The Three Voices of Poetry (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1954), p. 21. The whole passage, pp. 19-24, is of great interest in this connection. Laforgue, of course, provided part of the poet's “make-up” for Prufrock, but the tracing of sources is not my present subject. Laforgue's influence is treated extensively by Hugh Kenner (The Invisible Poet: T. S. Eliot, New York: McDowell, Obolensky, 1959), and by Herbert Howarth (Notes on Some Figures behind T. S. Eliot, London: Chatto and Windus, 1965); and Grover Smith, Jr. (T. S. Eliot's Poetry and Plays, 3rd ed., Chicago, Univ. of Chicago Press, 1961).

5. See his Selected Essays, 3rd ed. (London: Faber and Faber, 1951), pp. 17, 137; also pp. 272-73, where he discussed the Vita nuova as neither strictly truth nor fiction.

6. Referred to at the time as “rolled.” A trivial detail, but one that has led to some comically ingenious interpretations. Robert Llewellyn solved the difficulty some years ago in the Explicator. But notice also (near the end of the Lestrygonians episode in Ulysses) that Blazes Boylan was wearing “Tan shoes. Turnedup trousers.” Boylan, too, dressed well.

7. Either of the two biblical Lazarus stories may be referred to, or the allusion may be composite, both having to do with the return of the dead. See Luke xvi.20-31 and John xi.1-46, xii.1-18.