Resumo de The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock

This poem is, I think, Eliot?s ?fanfare for the common man?. Prufrock is the ordinary bloke in the street, and his name itself seems deliberately humdrum to set him apart from the great figures of literature: ?No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be,? he exclaims self-deprecatingly after a rather long passage of philosophising. But although he is no hero, Prufrock is as capable of appreciating beauty and having deep insights into the human condition as any of the exalted ones. He is rather like Leopold Bloom in Ulysses in this respect. Prufrock and greats are connected by their shared humanity.

The poem, as is usual with Eliot, is saturated with literary allusion, from Donne, Dante, Shakespeare and Marvel to Chaucer, Hesiod and the Bible. A reader has to take these allusions on board to get the most out of his poems, though on the surface they are fairly accessible. The same applies to other works. You can enjoy Dante?s Divine Comedy without knowing all the ins-and-outs of Florentine power politics, but if you do pick them up you?ll enjoy it even more and catch nuances of meaning that flesh it out. In Prufrock, you can appreciate the line, ?I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas?, without knowing that it is an allusion to Hamlet (?for you yourself, sir, should be as old as I am, if like a crab you could go backwards?, where Hamlet is simulating madness to the old courtier Polonius). The allusions bring in other flavours and shades of meaning from the works of other writers. Another case in point is:

?And I have known the arms already, known them all ?
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
(But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!)??

To know that this is a reference to the line, ?a bracelet of bright hair about the bone?, in ?The Relique? by John Donne, is to heighten one?s appreciation beyond the immediate one and bring out a much fuller awareness, tying it in with other references to death and the passing of time. The epigraph in Italian at the beginning is from Dante?s Inferno xxvii 61-6, and the lines are spoken by Count Guido da Montefeltra, where he tells Dante that he will speak openly about what he has seen in Hell because he assumes that he, Dante, cannot return to earth to report what he says. This in turn connects with line 94 of Prufrock: ?I am Lazarus, come from the dead, come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all??. In Luke, Lazarus goes to heaven and asks Abraham if the rich man Dives can be sent back from Hell to tell Lazarus?s five brothers what it is like, as a warning to them (Abraham refuses). So there are many crosscurrents and connections in Eliot?s poems that bring out a deeper and fuller appreciation of them, though this can be irritating at times.

Eliot himself was fully aware that he was seen in some quarters as unnecessarily obscure and indeed pretentious, but did not apologise for it. He defended his own perceived obscurity by reference to Dante?s Divine Comedy: ?If you get nothing out of it at first, you probably never will; but if from your first deciphering of it there comes now and then some direct shock of poetic intensity, nothing but laziness can deaden the desire for fuller and fuller knowledge?. And again: ?The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning?.

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