I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

from T.S. Eliot – The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock on Rap Genius

Ragged claws, floors of silent seas: the speaker is likening himself to a bottom-dwelling crab. Crabs scuttle horizontally and never forward, much as the speaker moves horizontally in thought but never forward in his actions. The image also conveys the speaker’s feeling of pathetic aloneness and apartness, as well as his immersion in the deep seas of fantasy (compare the final lines of the poem).

This may also be an allusion to Hamlet’s quip to Polonius (Hamlet Act 2, Scene 2): “Yourself, sir, should be old as I am, if like a crab you could go backward.” Prufrock is complaining about being old, even though he’s not.

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