Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock Essay: In Depth Analysis

In Depth Analysis of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock The five-line interlude finale on the floors of silent seas forms an encapsulated version of the remainder of the poem, in which the frustrated lying-in to establish purposive discourse leads once again to withdrawal down and inward to a silent world of instinctual being. A return to discovers of dilatation and distracting sensuality provokes a final impulse toward violent imposition of the will--to get the moment to its crisis--which ends, like previous thoughts of disturbing the universe, in ruthless self-mockery. The image of decapitation parodies the theme of disconnected being and provides for at least a negative definition of the self I am no prophet. By this point the tense has quietly shifted from present to past, and the verbalizer offers a serial of prolonged interrogatives on the consequences of action not taken. While its grammatical circumstance (And would it have been worth it) reduces it to the contemplati on of what might have been the language and imagery of this passage enact with renewed intensity the recurring drama of affable conflict Would it have been worth while,To have bitten off the head with a smile,To have squeezed the universe into a ballTo roll it towards some overcome question,To say I am Lazarus, come from the dead,Come back to enunciate you all, I shall tell you all. The infinitives in this passage--to have bitten, to have squeezed, to roll--conform to the poems widespread expend of transitive verbs of direct action in expressing the speakers violent impulse to rubbish the arrays of disorder to execute and create, to disturb the universe, to spit out all the butt-ends, to force the moment. The poems ling... ...hich the author has elected to work, may itself evoke other psychic framework and then, lines of poetry may come into being, not from the original impulse, but from a secondary stimulation of the unconscious headspring. The mental forces at work in E liots description of the poetic process serve as an analogy to the conflicts besetting the speaker in Prufrock. The speaker is a failed poet in terms of his inability to murder existing structures in order to create anew be finds it unsurmountable to say what be wants to say. In the secondary stimulation of the unconscious mind that occurs at this point, he partly abandons and partly resolves the struggle of form and matter the integration of the psyche remains at best incomplete. Works Cited Conflicts in Consciousness T.S. Eliots Poetry and Criticism. Urbana University of Illinois Press, 1984.