J alfred prufrock5/17/2023 ![]() To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet There will be time to murder and create, And time for all the works and days of hands That lift and drop a question on your plate (Lines 26-29). Not only is he afraid to confront the woman talking of Michelangelo (whose most famous sculpture, David, is the epitome of masculine beauty, a daunting prospect for the flaccid Prufrock), he seems intimidated by the social posturing he must engage in: There will be time, there will be time. Prufrock’s anxiety is rooted in the social world. Everyone has a downing of light brown hair on their arms, so why should it matter? Only because Prufrock is made out to be a somewhat pathetic individual, who is affected by such petty things. On to explain how he is put off by the fact that in the lamplight they are “downed with light brown hair! ” (Line 64). This is a feeling is reinforced when he describes how beautiful these women he mixes with are – describing their arms as “braceleted and white and bare”(line 63). I felt that I was made to feel sorry for this man who is so pathetic that he spends his whole life scared of petty things, but also somewhat irritated by him. To me it seems that he not only finds this unpleasant but also difficult. He is forced to “spit out the butt-ends” of his “days and ways” (Line 60). After these terrifying women have summed him up, they attempt to engage him in conversation, which is also a struggle for him. He feels as if he were an insect “sprawling on a pin” (Line 57). ” Which means, people are staring at him summing him up, and seeing that he is a boring, ugly man. He is terrified of the eyes of these women he is with – “The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase (Line 56). And all through these long, dull periods of time he is in constant fear of seeming a fool – so much so that he does seem one. Eliot describes how Prufrock recalls numerous ghastly coffee mornings – “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons (Line 51),” suggesting again that his life is somewhat pointless, and also boring, which he dislikes.Īnother point is that coffee spoons are pretty small if you measured your life with them it would take a very long and dull amount of time and effort. He writes without an obvious verse structure, because the poem is written from the viewpoint of the character. ![]() I think that Eliot leads the reader through each of these revisions. It also shows Prufrock’s endless worrying not only about future events (the “visions”) but also about past experiences (the “revisions”). This says two things about the character first he seems to have a lot of time, implying that perhaps he is an upper-class man who does very little with his life, and as a consequence is a bit of a bore. It seems he has time for a hundred hesitancies, and a hundred visions and revisions. Eliot makes Prufrock out to be the kind of man that always worries. ![]() The poem is carefully composed to be perhaps a little pessimistic, it is written as if by Prufrock himself, and yet still does not really allow us to indulge in a shimmer of hope for this desolate man. Scuttling across the floor of silent seas” (Lines 73-74). He feels of so little account that at one point he comments, “I should have been a pair of ragged claws. In the poem, Prufrock sees himself with an ironic eye, as some kind of universal “fool” (line 119), a sad lonely ageing pathetic figure. Alfred Prufrock, a man whose name even makes him sound like a wimp and a fool. It tells the sad, lonely story of the dull and useless life of J. Alfred Prufrock is a delightfully written and somewhat disturbing poem by the American poet T.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |