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Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”—
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say: “That is not what I meant at all,
That is not it, at all.” T.S. Eliot – The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
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Scuttling across the floors of silent seas. T.S. Eliot – The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
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And miles to go before I sleep. Robert Frost – Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
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What is this?
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Through the fantastical, romantic image of mermaids and beautiful ocean views, Eliot has set us up for anticlimax. Once you wake up to the knowledge that the ideals of romance are a fantasy–in part because you yourself are incapable of achieving them–you die a little inside.
Prufrock is living in a superficial, pretentious society in which he is constantly being judged for his looks, actions, etc. This is the only external identity he knows, but “waking” to it from his own inner life, he essentially “drowns"—his life is empty and meaningless.
Eliot is alluding here to Homer’s Odyssey; the “sea-girls” are the Sirens, whose song is so beautiful that no man can resist it. It causes the sailors to throw themselves into the sea and drown or crash their vessel into the rocks and die.
Prufrock’s waking also mirrors and subtly revises the ending of John Keats’s sonnet “On the Sea,” which urges the reader to sit at the shore as a place of imaginative and spiritual escape:
The voices that “start” (startle) and break the fantasy here are like, but are not really, sea nymphs; in Prufrock’s version, the fantasy is of sea-girls, and the voices that shatter it are explicitly identified as coming from the “human” world.
THE JOHN DONNE REFERENCE IS FAR MORE PRONOUNCED THAN THE JOHN KEATS REFERENCE!!!