SOURCE: “Romance of Self Doubt,” in Yeats-Eliot Review, Vol. 13, No. 1-2, Summer, 1994, pp. 1-6.

[In the following essay, Levy views “Prufrock” as an examination of individual insecurities.]

As Donald Childs has pointed out, the central concern of most interpretations of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” has been “the notorious distinction between the ‘you and I’” invoked at the beginning of the poem:¹ “let us go then, you and I. …”² While some critics argue that the “you” is external and refers to an anonymous companion’³ or the author,⁴ or even the reader,⁵ more approach the poem as the expression of an internal conflict between two parts of Prufrock's self. In the most common formulation, the poles of this conflict are defined by the dichotomy between Prufrock's private emotional needs and the inhibition concerning their public expression. Joyce Meeks Jones, for example, cogently emphasizes the conflict between “… the demands of [Prufrock's] own individuality and those of his persona, or social mask.”⁶ A somewhat simplistic version of this view is presented by Angus Calder who reduces the poem to an “evocation of paranoid shyness.”⁷

Other critics apply to philosophy in an attempt to explicate the polarity at a more profound level. John Mayer, citing Eliot's youthful interest in Henri Bergson, interprets the “you” and “I” in terms of the Bergsonian distinction between “a superficial self and a fundamental self,” wherein the former (in Prufrock's case) is preoccupied with self-image while the latter is committed to prophecy and truth.⁸ Similarly, by drawing on Eliot's dissertation concerning F. H. Bradley (completed in 1916, four years after the writing of “Prufrock”), Childs relates the “you” and “I” to the two poles posited by Bradley's epistemological paradox: how can the self as knower be identical with the self that it knows? In this view,” … the self as object (the ‘patient under examination’) is related to experience as object within the whole that is the self as subject”.⁹ The more Prufrock contemplates himself, the more the part which contemplates is alienated from the self-image which it conceives.

Though these analyses obviously offer valuable illumination, they all define Prufrock in terms of a sterile polarity that can never transcend the opposition it sustains. From this perspective, the cohesion of the Prufrockian self depends paradoxically on division or contradiction: Prufrock is made intelligible through reference to antithetical aspects or tendencies which cannot be reconciled. But there is another way to approach “The Love Song.” The conflict rending Prufrock can be understood, not as the exhausting attempt of one psychological tendency to depose its contrary, but as the means by which an invidious mentality or attitude toward life perpetuates itself. The “you and I” invoked in the first line of the poem do not denote two separate people or two antagonistic aspects of a divided psyche, but refer instead to the inner couple constituting the psychological core of Prufrock: self-doubt and self-pity: an “I” undermining his own confidence and a “you” whose sole function as mute auditor is to pity the resulting frustration. Understanding the mentality constituted by these two poles and the way in which the poem expresses it will require us to see how the basic images in “The Love Song” acquire meaning layer by layer.

Michel Foucault begins “The Discourse on Language” with a remark that can provide a helpful introduction to our study: “I would really like to have slipped imperceptibly into this lecture. … At the moment of speaking, I would like to have perceived a nameless voice, long preceding me, leaving me merely to enmesh myself in it, taking up its cadence, and to lodge myself when no one was looking, in its interstices as if it had paused an instant, in suspense to beckon me.”¹⁰ As we shall see. Prufrock's central problem is how to speak without suffering the sudden exposure of beginning—how to communicate, that is, his need for love without leaving the shelter of loneliness: “And how should I begin?” His dearest wish is for an auditor or “you” whose attention is always focussed on Prufrock's private insecurity so that the embarrassing transition to public expression of hidden feelings would never arise. In fact, this need to avoid the vulnerability of beginning is implied in opening line of the poem, where the invitation to go outside obviously presupposes a deliberation of indefinite duration preceding it: “Let us go then, you and I …” (my emphasis). Hence, what appears to be a beginning is only the continuation of a discourse already begun.

Moreover, as the epigraph from Dante's Inferno introducing the poem implies, the vocative mode of the poem sustains another illusion. Though “The Love Song” seems to be addressed to an other, it actually unfolds inside an inviolable privacy. The “you” whom Prufrock as “I” addresses must be someone who seems doomed to the same state of withdrawal as himself, otherwise Prufrock would never confess his loneliness to him or her-anymore than Guido would have consented to answer Dante if he believed his interlocutor could return to the upper world.¹¹ Prufrock is addressing a part of himself whose company he can be assured of only by remaining alone.

The initial image of the “evening” that is “like a patient etherized upon a table” vividly portrays the fear motivating Prufrock's need of loneliness. To go out and risk communication is analogous to entering an operating room where Prufrock is the anesthetized patient and others collectively assume the role of examining surgeon. The only active force belongs to the probing stare of the viewers. The subject examined submits helplessly to an operation: the excision of his own subjectivity: his consciousness of himself as a subject capable of determining his own meaning. For Prufrock, to be seen is to become a pure image, with no significance apart from the awareness that beholds and assesses him: “The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase. …” To be seen is to jeopardize the right of self-definition. It is to risk exchanging his dignity as a subject for the lowly status of an object, ignominiously subservient to another's point of view: “… as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen. …” In these circumstances, Prufrock is not so much an authentic self as a reflection in the mirror of the other's judgment.¹²

But the operation image has a further implication. A patient ordinarily submits to a surgeon for his own good. If this is so, what benefit will exposure bring to Prufrock? Why is the invitation to go outside made in the first place? A preliminary answer is suggested by the very little title of the poem. The purpose of the outing must be to communicate his need for love to someone who can reciprocate it. Indeed, twice in the first part of the poem, Prufrock imagines confessing the agony of his isolation to someone “settling a pillow by her head,” only to have his words rejected or misconstrued: “That is not what I meant at all. / That is not it, at all.” Such indifference would make Prufrock even more negatively self-conscious than before and so, as we shall see, the entire project is eventually abandoned. Hence, the imaginary visit involves a second operation. It removes Prufrock's will to go out and seek love: his will, that is, to seek love outside himself.

These two operations (the excision of self-assurance and the excision of the will to seek love with another) clarify the crucial irony of “The Love Song.” Prufrock doesn't trust love; all that he truly trusts is loneliness. He fears love would remove something from him that he could never replace. This precious possession is not dignity, because he is too wary of humiliation to have any. Nor is it independence, because he already relies on routine: “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons. …” The part of himself that love would take away is self-pity: the tireless awareness that accompanies him wherever he goes, the devoted concern for his own suffering, the silent “you” whom his disconsolate “I” ceaselessly addresses. As the two operations imply but as he himself never recognizes, Prufrock is not committed to finding fulfillment in life, but prefers instead to feel sorry for his own frustration.

This paradox makes sense when we remember the cause of Prufrock's suffering: self-doubt: inveterate uncertainty about his value as person. The only way he can overcome that pain is to increase awareness of it. The more insignificant he feels in the company of others, the more he prefers withdrawal. Loneliness is the only state where he is assured of exclusive attention; for in loneliness there is nothing of more compelling importance than his own sense of deprivation. Everything outside himself seems tediously redundant: “And I have known them all already, known them all. …” In fact, without realizing it, Prufrock exploits loneliness and the shame of rejection in order to make himself feel more certain of love. Doubting his ability to attract the female “you” becomes the means of assuring the devotion of the inner one—the “you” to whom the love song is actually sung. This is the erotization of loneliness. The inner “you” offers everything that the outer one does not. It listens with sympathetic attention, instead of bored indifference. It remains faithfully near him, not inaccessibly at the centre a perilous labyrinth: “Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets … that follow like a tedious argument / Of insidious intent. …”

But, as this image of the journey ironically implies, the “insidious” danger inherent in Prufrock's search for love lurks, not in what others might think of him, but in his way of thinking about approaching them. He is trapped inside a mentality whose secret aim is to prevent him from ever escaping it. Indeed, his apparent location in a windowed room becomes a striking metaphor for this condition: from this perspective, the objects that Prufrock perceives are invested with qualities that suggest sleep even as he attempts to rouse himself into action. The locus classicus for this tendency is found, of course, in the first three lines of the poem where the determination to move (“Let us go then, you and I …”) invokes the image of an etherized patient. A similarly abrupt transition from action to sleep appears in the image of “The yellow smoke” which “… Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap … Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.” Soon time itself seems asleep, unaware of its own inexorable progression or movement: “And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!” By the end of the poem, sleep is Prufrock's metaphorical state, and the movement toward communication that he originally proposed is now connected with a disastrous awakening: “Till human voices wake us, and we drown.”

The associating of a crucial action with the entry into sleep has a celebrated precedent in literature which will help us understand Prufrock's predicament more completely. In Hamlet's “To be or not to be” soliloquy, the act of suicide is associated with falling asleep and must therefore be avoided: “For in that sleep of death what dreams may come … Must give us pause” (3.1.68-70).¹³ The link between “The Love Song” and Hamlet's soliloquy is reinforced by other hints, as many critics have noted.¹⁴ First, Prufrock repeatedly refers to an unnamed, “overwhelming question,” apparently echoing Hamlet's own great utterance: “To be or not to be—that is the question.” Second, Prufrock himself suggests the connection with Hamlet by emphatically denying it: “No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be …”

But what do these links between “The Love Song” and the “To be” soliloquy signify? Unlike Hamlet, Prufrock obviously does choose to enter a state connected with sleep-namely, the self-doubting state of withdrawal and hesitation in which the will for fulfillment in real life is subtly anesthetized. Moreover, just as obviously, this somnolent state of withdrawal is connected with death; for Prufrock compares the attempt to end it with resurrection: “Would it have been worth while … / To say: ‘I am Lazarus, come from the dead, / Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all’ …”

But the link with the soliloquy goes deeper than this. In the soliloquy, Hamlet is caught in a double bind where to act (i.e. to commit suicide) is to become vulnerable to posthumous nightmares but not to act (i.e. to go on living) is to feel disgraced by cowardice: “Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all …” (3.1.85). Thus, as a result of his prudence regarding suicide, the inertness or inability to act which is normally connected with death now seems to paralyse life. Prufrock languishes in a similar dilemma. To act (or to go out) is to risk a kind of death; for, as we saw earlier, it means that Prufrock will lose the sense of his own subjectivity and be transformed into an object helplessly exposed to the other's point of view. But, as we have just noted, not to act (or to remain withdrawn) is to approximate a kind of suicide; for the longer hesitation continues, the more completely the power of decisiveness is put to sleep. Hamlet, of course, eventually struggles beyond the conflict expressed in the soliloquy (though in a way we cannot analyze here). Prufrock, however, unwittingly wills his conflict to overwhelm him. His unconscious wish is to be yet not to be. Prufrock wants to live, but without responsibility for his own or anyone else's life. He repudiates any purpose greater than preoccupation with his own fatuity: “At times, indeed, almost ridiculous— / Almost, at times, the Fool.”

The most poignant example of this renunciation of purpose occurs in the mermaid image near the end of the poem: “I have heard the mermaids singing each to each.” In the Odyssey, no man who hears can resist the lure of the mermaids or Sirens, with their “honey-toned”¹⁵ promise of knowledge about human life: “We know all that comes to be on the much nourishing earth.”¹⁶ To plunge after them is to seek more experience of life, regardless of risk or peril.¹⁷ But Prufrock is not even tempted: “I do not think that they will sing to me.” Doubt protects him from the danger of expectation. Imagine Odysseus able to listen to the Sirens without being lashed to the mast, able because he believes himself disqualified from finding any great fulfillment in life, such as that offered by the Sirens.¹⁸

Indeed, the remarkable sea image concluding “The Love Song” contradicts the very notion of purpose; for here Prufrock is not a sailor but an unlikely merman, hiding furtively beneath the waves: “We have lingered in the chambers of the sea.” But in what kind of sea does Prufrock linger? Again, the correspondence between “The Love Song” and Hamlet's “To be” soliloquy will clarify Prufrock's predicament. In the soliloquy, the act of suicide is associated with drowning: ‘Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer / The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, / Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, / And, by opposing, end them’(3.1.59-62). Here, the sea image of hopeless combat suggests that, by letting oneself feel overwhelmed by the sheer multitude of his difficulties and the futility of trying to overcome them, a retaliation of sorts is achieved: suicidal despair becomes an act of triumphant aggression. The cause of suffering can be defeated only if the victim believes his pain can be endured no longer.

Prufrock represents a variation of this mentality. Through immersion in self-doubt and the fear of rejection, he avoids the struggles necessitated by conviction. He lets himself feel overwhelmed by the danger of going out in order to preserve the security of staying in. But paradoxically, the refuge afforded by withdrawal into self-doubt makes the inevitable intrusion of others seem all the more threatening. This duplicity appears in the ambiguity of the water symbol which first suggests safety but ultimately signifies disaster: “Till human voices wake us, and we drown.” Prufrock's metaphorical sleep of death is vexed by the nightmare of reawakening and having to face real life once again.

The catastrophic awakening feared at the end of the poem can be clarified further by the “etherized” sleep indicated at the beginning. While undergoing an operation, there is nothing a patient can do to help himself except remain unconscious. The same need to remain asleep for the purpose of self-preservation applies to the Prufrock's plight in the drowning image just quoted, where to sleep means to inhabit a world of fantasy that at bottom concerns, not the finding of some fulfillment in real life, but the humiliation and pain which would be caused by going out in search of it.¹⁹ The longer Prufrock's fantasy continues, the more reality seems like a hostile element waiting to engulf him. With this outlook, his inevitable tendency is to withdraw deeper into fantasy, and seek security in his own impenetrable loneliness: “I should have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.” The controlling reflex is flight from communication.

With others, Prufrock feels as the helpless prey beleaguered by predators. The part of himself they abuse and attack is his self-image. But as the crab fantasy ironically suggests, the impulse to withdraw from danger quickens something threatening in Prufrock, even though he remains oblivious to the peril it presents. Inside the shell of his loneliness, something in Prufrock thrives as invulnerable predator whom no pain can harm. That predator is his own self-doubt, and Prufrock's sense of self-worth or self-confidence is its prey. Thus, withdrawal is doubly treacherous. On the one hand, it makes the outer world appear even more forbidding as the place where Prufrock is menaced by others. But, on the other hand, withdrawal leaves Prufrock alone with the most predatory tendency in himself: self-doubt. Cut off by withdrawal from the help of others, how can he save himself from it?

We understand more clearly now the cause of Prufrock's distress. He never confronts his self-doubt. He never asks why it exerts such influence over him. That is perhaps the deepest meaning of the “over-whelming question” to which Prufrock frequently refers but never actually poses. Instead, he lets self-doubt convince him that the only question worth asking concerns, not how to gain confidence, but what is the point of having it. We see this tendency in the first section of the poem, as Prufrock ponders making a visit which never actually transpires. The longer his deliberation continues, the less inclined to visit he becomes, until the whole issue is recast as a question in the conditional perfect: “Would it have been worthwhile …?” The use of this tense is very revealing. From the perspective of self-doubt, failure is always a foregone conclusion. The possibility of success in the future is contradicted by the experience of failure in the past: “And I have known the eyes already. …” With this outlook. Prufrock feels better advised to perpetuate his lack of confidence than to risk initiative.

But self-doubt has been a false counsellor. It has advised that insecurity will bring safety, but Prufrock's predicament promises only to get worse. The longer he renounces confidence, the more victimized by his attitude he becomes. We are reminded again of the epigraph which introduces the poem. There Guido is the false counsellor, doomed to burn eternally in Hell for advising Pope Boniface VIII to give mendacious assurances of amnesty to his enemy, the Colonna faction. A similar punishment is visited upon Prufrock for his deceitful self-doubt. Whereas Guido suffers for what he did in life, Prufrock suffers what he didn't do. He is doomed to a tormenting withdrawal from life while still living. Of course, this withdrawal is not to be construed as a psychosis or autism sealing Prufrock inside the solitude of his own mind. His withdrawal is no more literal than the water which symbolizes it. Instead, withdrawal here refers to an attitude or perspective which distances Prufrock from his life, even as he lives it. More precisely, his inner life is a protest against his outer one. He is preoccupied with the events that might have been and with a life that never happened. He gains his identity from fantasies about real life, not from real life itself. He gains his identity, not from who he is, but from who he isn't: he is not Prince Hamlet, he is not the one to whom the mermaids sing, he is not Lazarus risen from the dead.

That is the curse of self-doubt. It makes Prufrock believe in his disqualification from fulfillment in life, while at the same time hiding from him the base motives of his own gullibility. Prufrock cannot see that he succumbs to self-doubt in order to avoid the demands which self-respect would thrust upon him. The “you” or implied auditor in Prufrock never says a word against the “I.” Prufrock's self-respect can no longer refute the insinuations of self-doubt; for, through their prolonged influence, that self-respect has degenerated into self-pity. Hence, Prufrock prefers, not to overcome self-doubt, but to give himself consolation for surrendering to it.

The great irony of the title now becomes more apparent. As a result of self-doubt or insecurity about his worthiness, Prufrock wants the solace of love without losing the security of isolation. He wants to be loved, not for who he is, but for the shame and loneliness he suffers because of it: “Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets / And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes / Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows?” To be loved for who he is would be to invite rejection, since Prufrock's whole sense of identity is founded on belief in his own inadequacy. But to be loved for what he suffers because of this identity is already to transcend its limitations.

Only self-pity can do this for Prufrock. Through it Prufrock is judged, not for his faults, but for the unjust pain he suffers because of them. Self-pity confers a different way of seeing himself: not his flaws to give him his identity but his need for solace because of them. A passage from Eliot's “Preludes,” originally published in the same volume as “The Love Song,” will clarify this transformation: “I am moved by fancies that are curled / Around these images, and cling: / The notion of some infinitely gentle / Infinitely suffering thing.”²⁰ In “The Love Song,” the images of exposure or humiliation conjured up by Prufrock's self-doubt (the “I” speaking) are ultimately intended to move or evoke self-pity (the “you” addressed). At the same time that Prufrock is undermined by self-doubt, he also becomes aware of the pathos of his plight. At bottom, the suffering caused by self-doubt is sacrificial, undergone so that Prufrock might be redeemed from his own imperfections. For through the sheer intensity of this suffering. Prufrock is transformed—at least in the fantasy of his own self-pity—from a figure of contempt to helpless victim, exalted by the pity he inspires.

This transformation proceeds by subtle degrees. Of course, it is already adumbrated in the inaugural image of the etherized patient, helplessly awaiting surgery. That kind of exposure evokes pity, not contempt. As the poem unfolds, the discourse on Prufrock's predicament suggests a helplessness too extreme to warrant scorn. His is a futility that can only be pitied. He has “wept and fasted, wept and prayed” for recognition, but when “the moment of [his] greatness” beckons, he gets stage fright:

And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.

The result of this timidity can only be more tears of self-pity. Even his meager appearance is ultimately not so much a fault as an inducement to pity—as if he were wasting away before the very eyes of those who would judge him: “How his hair is growing thin!” “But how his arms and legs are thin!” Preoccupation with aging changes him from an object of ridicule to an object of pity, almost as if Prufrock were wishing for his own senescence:

I grow old … I grow old …
I shall wear the bottom of my trousers rolled.

The special exemption from the strictures of fashion mentioned in the second line of the couplet, as well as the mental rambling indicated by the dual ellipsis in the line which precedes it, collectively suggest “a deliberate hebetude”²¹ whereby Prufrock feigns his own dotage—a state where criticism for faults is replaced by solicitude for infirmity.²²

The final irony of the poem now begins to emerge. Like Guido, Prufrock is unaware of the fate of his words. He believes that his rationalization will go no farther than the state of withdrawal in which it was rendered. But through the convention of the dramatic monologue, we have privileged access, not just to Prufrock's mind, but also to the unconscious fantasies exploiting what he actually thinks about. We becomes aware, not only of his thoughts, but also of the insidious influence that this way of thinking exerts on his life. The literal substance of any dramatic monologue is the awareness of the persona it creates. But through the very fact of presenting that fictional awareness, the monologue creates another level of awareness which transcends it. This higher level, of course, belongs to us as readers. In the case of “The Love Song,” the gap between Prufrock's awareness of himself and the awareness that we gain of him becomes especially ironic; for the ultimate cause of his suffering is his refusal to understand it.

To understand his suffering would be to admit his own need for pain. It would be to recognize how his plaintive wish for love can be filled only by remaining lonely. But Prufrock doesn't want to know who he is; as we have seen, he prefers the excuse of regretting who he isn't. Indeed, this is the deepest reason for the tormenting difficulty of expressing his identity: “It is impossible to say just what I mean!” Prufrock does not want just to say what he means. He wants his meaning to be changed by the mere act of saying it. Self-doubt so convinces Prufrock of his insignificance or meagerness of meaning that he wants the act of communication to seem magnificently bold. Confession must be seen as a stylistic tour de force, whereby Prufrock is revealed as the epitome of suave candour, casually squeezing his private emotional universe into an epigrammatic pronouncement that astonishes his audience. Uttering the pain of insignificance must transform him into a cynosure. Why should Lazarus rise from the dead if no one will be amazed?

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. … ’

Prufrock's demanding expectations only increase the fear of disappointment, but in a way that seems initially to guarantee success. If he cannot achieve self-confidence through confessing self-doubt, then he will solve the problem of self-doubt by renouncing self-confidence. He will replace self-confidence with self-pity for the lack of it. He will express himself only through the fear of communication. He will soothe the pain of not being understood by stifling or submerging his own identity. Ironically, the drowning that Prufrock predicts in the last line of the poem is happening to him already, as implied by the earlier image of lingering “in the chambers of the sea.” The true cause of the annihilation of identity which Prufrock dreads is not the intrusion of “human voices,” but his own effort to withdraw from them. For in that state, he knows himself only through the need to hide his insecurity from others.

Notes

1. See Donald J. Childs, “Knowledge and Experience in ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,’” ELH 55.3 (1988), p. 687.

2. All quotations from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” are taken from T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems: 1909-1962 (London: Faber, 1963).

3. Childs cites the opinion of James E. Miller, Jr., T. S. Eliot's Personal Wasteland: Exorcism of the Demons (University Park and London: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1977), pp. 52-53, who identifies the “you” as Jean Verdenal, Eliot's friend in Paris during 1910 and 1911.

4. See Grover Smith, “‘Prufrock’ as Key to Eliot's Poetry,” in Approaches to Teaching Eliot's Poetry and Plays, ed. Jewel Spears Brooker (New York: Modern Language Association. 1988), p. 90

5. See Cleanth Brooks, “Teaching ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,’” in Approaches to Teaching Eliot's Poetry and Plays, ed. Jewel Spears Brooker (New York: Modern Language Association, 1988), pp. 79-80.

6. Joyce Meeks Jones, Jungian Psychology in Literary Analysis: A Demonstration Using T. S. Eliot's Poetry (Washington, D.C.: Univ. Press of America, 1979), p. 10. John T. Mayer. T. S. Eliot's Silent Voices (New York and Oxford: Oxford UP. (1989), p. 117, also refers to the conflict between the “public mask and [the] private self.”

7. Angus Calder T. S. Eliot (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1987), p. 28.

8. John Mayer (note 6), pp. 118-125.

9. Childs, p. 694. A different use of Bradley appears in J. Hillis Miller, Poets of Reality: Six Twentieth-Century Writers (Cambridge: Harvard, 1965), p. 139. Here, Prufrock's isolation is linked to the Bradleyan notion of selves as “finite centres,” each enclosed in its own “incommunicable experience.”

10. Michael Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge & the Discourse on Language. Trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (Harper: New York, 1972), p. 215.

11. Inferno. 27.61-6.

12. With different results, other critics have also connected Prufrock with the etherized patient. See Childs, P. 689; and Jewel Spears Brooker. “Substitutes for Christianity in the Poetry of T. S. Eliot,” The Southern Review 21 (1985), p. 908.

13. All quotations from Hamlet pertain to William Shakespeare: The complete Works, ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Clarendon: Oxford. 1986).

14. Prufrock's connection with Hamlet has received much attention. After summarizing prevailing opinions. Peter J. Dyson, “Word Heard: Prufrock Asks His Question,” Yeats Eliot Review 5.2 (1978), pp. 33-35 suggests that Prufrock answers Hamlet's famous question negatively: Prufrock was not meant to be. In contrast, Robert F. Fleissner, “Prufrock Not the Polonius Type.” Research Studies 43 (1975), p. 262 argues that it is “ludicrous to try to relate the poem … to Shakespeare's play because the texts are so different.” Eugene Hollahan, “A Structural Dantean Parallel in Eliot's ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,’” American Literature 42 (1970), pp 91-93 connects Prufrock's disclaimer with the Inferno 2.32 where Dante states, “I'm not Aeneas and I am not St. Paul.” Robert H. Canary, T. S. Eliot: The Poet and His Critics (American Library: Chicago, 1982), p. 90 replies that “Prufrock is not Dante either, nor was meant to be.”

15. The Odyssey, 12.187, trans. Albert Cook (New York: Norton, 1974), p. 166.

16. The Odyssey, 12.191.

17. In the context of this ironic allusion to the Odyssey, it is interesting to note that, like the Love Song, the final voyage of Odysseus (from Scheria to Ithaca) begins in the evening: “So was Odysseus glad when the sun's light went down” (The Odyssey, 13. 35).

18. The relation of the mermaid image to the Odyssey has been often noted. See, for example, George Williamson, A Reader's Guide to T. S. Eliot: A Poem-By-Poem Analysis, 2nd ed. (New York, Noonday, 1966), p. 65. A linking of the mermaid motif with the work of Charles Lamb and Bryan Waller Procter is developed by Joseph E. Riehl, “Procter, Lamb and Eliot: Mermaids Calling Each to Each.” Charles Lamb Bulletin 58 (1987), pp. 47-54. A rather unlikely connection between the mermaids and the nine Muses in Hesiod's Theogony is suggested by Cleanth Brooks, “Teaching ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’,” in Approaches to Teaching Eliot's Poetry and Plays, ed. Jewel Spears Brooker (New York: Modern Language Association, 1988), p. 86.

19. In his first essay on Hamlet (1919), Eliot himself links sleep with the fantasy of escaping something feared in the real world: “The intense feeling, ecstatic or terrible, without an object or exceeding its object, is something which every person of sensibility has known. …” He adds that “… the ordinary person puts these feelings to sleep, or trims down his feelings to fit the business world …” [my emphasis]. See T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays. 3rd ed. (London: Faber, 1951), p. 146.

20. See T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems: 1909-1962, pp. 24-25.

21. The phrase comes from Eliot's “East Coker,” II.

22. Many critics argue that the rolled-up trousers pertain either to a new fashion or to the fashion of youth. See, for examples, John Virtue, “Eliot's ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’” Explicator 13.2 (1954): item 10 and B.C. Southam, A Guide to the Selected Poems of T. S. Eliot (New York: Harcourt, 1968), p. 35. In contrast, Leon Waldoff, “Prufrock's Defenses and Our Responses, American Imago, 26 (1969), p. 189 connects the rolled-up trousers with Prufrock's effort to make himself “physically ridiculous.” Hugh Kenner, The Invisible Poet: T. S. Eliot (New York: Obolensky, 1959), p. 6 argues that any attempt to define Prufrock's specific meaning fails “to exhaust” the “poetic effect” of the image.