Love Song and Poem

New Criticism and Eliot's Prufrock Eliot's use of tone, imagery and symbol in "Prufrock" allows him to create a poem that does two things at once: on the one hand it mocks modern culture and on the other hand it impresses upon the reader the fact that it is okay to reject all of this and search for the deeper somethingness -- that higher question that no one seems to want to ask.

This paper will show how the poem uses irony, tone, image and symbol to convey a sense of the emptiness of modern culture to the reader using a seductive, fun, hypnotic way with words. The tone of Eliot's "Prufrock" is overwhelmingly ironic: the poem plays up the tone of triviality while simultaneously skewering the triviality of the characters it describes.

The poem lures the reader to the precipice of sanity -- pointing out the insanity and utter emptiness of modern culture and prompting the reader to ask a profound question -- but just when that is about to happen, the narrator dismisses the question with, "Oh do not ask, 'What is it?' / Let us go and make our visit." This attitude is reflective of the type of non-thinking, non-critical attitude of the people who go to see the Michelangelo at the art museum.

They are interested only in the experience of going to see it -- they are socializing, not really critically looking at the art and connecting the art to culture or culture to meaning or meaning to belief/principles. They are wandering, free floating, as though cut off from all moorings.

They are like the streets described in the first stanza -- "tedious" and "insidious" because they both distract from the all-important underlying question being presented the reader in this mocking manner and because their aim is to kill the soul of the reader and prevent the question from ever being asked. What is the question? The question is connected to the next world -- the afterlife -- that which Lazarus saw and knew and could speak of since he was brought back from the dead.

Indeed, the reference to Lazarus indicates that the question is religious in nature and most likely has to do with Christ (was He real? Does it matter?), especially since Michelangelo is the representative of the Renaissance Christianity with his beautiful works of art. The people are passing by and seeing the Michelangelo but only chattering about it superficially. There is no depth, no understanding, no real exchange of meaning going on. The important question is not asked.

As McNamara puts it, "the tone surrounds these aimless, ethereal women, speaking of an intensely physical artist, with an aura of seemingly undeserved grandeur" (360). Things, put simply, do not match: everything is in discord -- yet the narrator wants to gloss over all this even while admitting it to be so. The important question is also linked to humanity.

Why should "human voices wake us" and cause us to drown? The answer is simple: we, like Prufrock, are floating in a sea of nothingness, of ritualistic empty actions that betray our superficiality. Humanity is linked to that which Lazarus saw -- that which the narrator does not want us to think about.

The narrator is like Lewis's Screwtape, taunting us and making us feel stupid for even thinking in that direction in the first place, for even thinking that there need be any more to life than what the women are discussing, the saucers, the tea at time, the trousers rolled so that the bottoms do not become stained.

The sheer, empty materialism of life is to be accepted -- that is the argument of the poem's narrator -- but, of course, what comes through is an underlying, shrieking scream of, "NO!" that is not all there is to life. Clearly there is something more and that something more is deliberately not explicitly stated because the poem is not about that but about how we are prevented from getting to that.

And by pointing out, using ironic juxtapositions -- like "When the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherized upon a table" -- the poem makes it known to the reader that even though the poem is going to mock one for trying, the point really is to show us that this emptiness is not all right. Modern life is like a drugged up, passed out person who is unresponsive to any and all indicators of beauty, personality, belief, and deeper feelings.

Prufrock himself is okay imaging himself, as Charles Altieri points out, as a crab or lobster: he accepts his inevitable humiliation with a shrug. Indeed, the symbol is fitting because, as Gerald Smith shows, "the ragged claw is the symbol of Prufrock's tentative, at-a-distance sexual desire, easily frustrated and often disappointed" (35). Prufrock's love song after all that is a death song. In conclusion, the narrator of the poem is hypnotic, continually using the same rhythmic expressions over and over again to hypnotize the reader and make him feel that "growing.