Prufrock walks through a dingy part of town, possibly a red-light district.

The one-night cheap hotels and the sawdust restaurants are the “muttering retreats.” ‘Muttering’ suggests shame or secretiveness, and a lack of assertiveness. Prufrock is at one with his surroundings.

The nature of the locations mentioned as “retreats” are hardly an example of a place to rest, relax or seek refuge.

The speaker is seeing cheap versions of love and intimacy in the red light district with all by-the-hour rates on rooms. The mutterings are also the half suppressed moans and scuffling emanating from these by-the-hour-rooms.

They, like Prufrock, “mutter” and stand as a poor substitute for the ideal; a cheap hotel, a crummy restaurant, or an impotent man with only the facade of a meaningful life.

Prufrock uses the image of a patient under ether, a potent anesthetic, to suggest his complacency and impotence. The imagery of sickness here may also suggest the sickened state of language or even youth/manhood in the early 1900s—a time when the old romantic vocabulary of the Victorian Era was being used by politicians to justify ending young men’s lives in war.

After the sing-song rhyme of the first two lines, Eliot’s initial readership were primed for something more pretty-sounding from the rest of the poem. But the next line doesn’t rhyme, and the image he chooses is stark and deathly. The abrupt departure from a regular rhyme scheme and macabre imagery suggest, at the start of the poem, a break with the older, Romantic tradition and poets like Shelley, Keats and Wordsworth.

In the simile “like a patient etherized upon a table,” Eliot has linked two seemingly unrelated and totally unexpected images. (In this he was following in the tradition of the 17th-century writers Samuel Johnson called the Metaphysical poets; in their work, Johnson griped, “The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together.”)

There are multiple interpretive possibilities. The “ether” might evoke Prufrock’s addled mind, unable to think or act decisively. The atmosphere is also misty and fluid, constantly changing, like the indecisive Prufrock. The image of the operating “table” suggests that Prufrock himself is sick, psychologically or spiritually paralyzed, perhaps socially “unconscious” or sexually impotent.

At the time, anesthesia using ether was still rather high-tech (it had been around for over fifty years, but technology moved slower back then).

Ether has also been used since the 19th century as a recreational drug. Eliot would have known this somewhat scandalous history.