Resumo de The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock is a love song in true modernist style. Considering that "disillusionment" is the catch key of the modern movement, Love Song is certainly in keeping with the tone of the time.The poem begins with a stanza in Italian from Dante's Inferno in which a man sent to hell for dispensing wicked advice agrees to speak with Dante because no one will ever hear the tale anyway, since no one can return from hell. The many readers who simply skip this introduction are missing a key to the poem's interpretation. From it, we might surmise that the narrator (Alfred Prufrock) takes a similarly fatalistic view of his own speech: the Love Song itself.The poem opens with Prufrock's description of the most desolate parts of the city, including sleazy motels and dark, labyrinthine streets. He uses images that invoke hopelessness and tedium and that imply a confusion about or an avoidance of meaning. We are first introduced to a continuing theme here at the end of the first stanza: the question. Prufrock mentions it at the end of every movement of the poem without indicating clearly what it is, though there are hints, as we shall see; he seems anxious about the idea of asking it and hopeless as to its answer. In fact, the entire poem can read as a kind of jusitification for his not asking it.The greatest of these justifications seems to be Prufrock's own sense of impotence and insignificance, his sense that he is powerless to affect change or create an impression. His references to his appearance are derogatory, he is bald and thin and unimpressive, and to his part in life as periferal, as though he exists only as a part of the scenery. He cannot act because he does not feel able to do so. This immobility seems to stem not merely from a sense of insignificance, but also to a feeling of being entirely misunderstood. Prufrock makes it clear that he feels immobilized not merely by his own inadequacy but by the fact that those around him have already weighed him in the balance, as it were, and found him wanting. It is partially their misunderstanding of him that has crippled him. He describes how helpless their judgment of him has made him by comparing himself to an insect labelled and pinned to a card. He sees the effort of trying to explain himself to those who already think they know him as an impossible task. He cannot act because he feels that nothing would happen if he did.But what is "the question" he avoids with so much melancholy? He does not tell us, but based on hints in the poem, one can draw a conlcusion. Mentioned in conjunction with "the question" is a woman, or peices of her at least: eyes, arms, skirts, perfume. He wonders if it would be "worthwhile" to ask the question, if it is worth losing all of the everyday things he is able now to share with this woman should it go badly. His greatest fear, however, does not seem to be rejection but something worse: marginalization. What if he is not even in a position to be rejected? If so, even the part he thought he was playing, he was not playing, and he is faced with the cruel irony that he is inactive even in action. And so he does not ask the question, whatever it may be. Instead, he visualizes his inglorious old age as a walk down the beach. We are given a mystical, romantic image of mermaids singing in a cave followed by the wistful statement by Prufrock that he doesn't believe they will sing to him, indicating that great romance exists only in fantasy; it cannot survive reality. Reality is an old man in frumpy clothes walking alone on the sand, leaving no foot-prints.

Resumos Relacionados