another thing: i.e., another matter altogether.

But they would: So long as they could.

Sometimes hunters contribute to tearing down the stones in a wall, when they’re chasing rabbits that have taken refuge in the niches of the stones.

This factor is human-caused and therefore easily explicable. The gaps the speaker’s really interested in are the mysterious ones nature makes.

The seemingly casual, digressive syntax of this passage is classic Frost, and helps make the voice sound natural.

Stone walls (fences) tumble down over time. The ground freezes, and thawing causes even the biggest stones to fall. The holes can become wide enough for two people to pass through side by side.

Frost suggests there is some natural force tearing down walls, because walls aren’t natural or perhaps even necessary. Is there a subtle joke here on the poet’s name? “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” How is this wall destroyed? By winter frost. So, frost (Frost) doesn’t love a wall…right? He is clearly regretting its existence.

According to critic Frank Letricchia:

…the speaker is not a country primitive who is easily spooked by the normal processes of nature. He knows very well what it is “that doesn’t love a wall” (frost, of course). His fun lies in not naming it.

Indeed, we seem to learn later in the poem that the speaker himself “doesn’t love a wall”–or at least questions its necessity.

The poem starts with a trochee, a stressed-unstressed syllable pair that disrupts the usual flow of iambic pentameter. The meter, like the wall, is broken up.

At first glance we have a literal meaning–on a farm, wheelbarrows are very important. Sure. We can all agree there. But what’s more important is the figurative meaning, which remains a little mysterious; we never know just how much depends on the wheelbarrow, or just what the author has in mind. Agriculture? Human sustenance? The moral values inherent in simple tools and honest labor? The American land itself, the nation as a whole?

Or is the red wheelbarrow secretly plugging a hole in the space-time continuum that would otherwise destroy us all?

Also notice the wheelbarrow-like shape of these couplets, which English teachers have loved pointing out since 1923.

Prufrock’s concern here is a very real consideration for many people. For example:

• Would you be embarrassed to eat heavily sauced chicken wings on a first date?

• Would you be embarrassed to eat messy BBQ ribs on a job interview that included a lunch?

• Would the risk of cracking a tooth scare you away from eating pitted fruit?

Prufrock’s getting on in age; he doesn’t want to lose a tooth, or eat the “wrong” thing as part of his diet, or be seen with delicious peach juices running down his chin: in other words, he’s going crazy troubling himself with mundane concerns. The line also functions more subtly as a metaphor for the girl he desires, who appears to be a younger woman. Think of the peach as a kind of stand-in for Eve’s apple. (And if you’re seeing some sexual innuendo in the line, you’re not wrong.)

The peach is also a metaphor for taking a bite out of life, as if taking the bite will justify his existence and renew his vitality. The fruit is juicy as hell and drips all over. It’s real; sweet and sour, hard and soft, smooth and fuzzy, ripe and unripe. It’s delicious, but you can’t let it rot.

Hamlet, to whom Prufrock feels inferior, contemplates things like murder and the secrets of the universe. Prufrock, though equally fraught with existential malaise, is more pathetic, as his contemplative nature lacks any of the dramatic interest of Hamlet’s. The simple act of eating a peach is something that consumes his conscience in bitter inner debate.

In the end, too, unlike Prufrock, Hamlet actually did something. Though it took the prospect of his own death to spur him into action, he got decisive and killed his uncle Claudius. Prufrock sees himself as a coward who will never find the courage to act no matter what.

Peaches, apart from juicy and invigorating, are seen in traditional Chinese folklore as symbols of life and immortality. Called 仙桃, “xiāntáo” , they were consumed by the immortals in order to prolong their lives indefinitely. Eliot was havily interested in Eastern culture and myth where, he believed, the spiritual salvation will eventually come for the stale Western ideas (remember the chanting from the Upanishad in the final verses of The Waste Land).

He might be wondering not only if he dares eat something that drips and stains in public but also, ultimately, if he dares to live, as opposed to just keeping his listless existence.

The Fool or Clown is a stock character in Shakespearean plays. He is sometimes a bumbling rube who talks above his level of understanding (the kind of figure Prufrock seems to have in mind here), but sometimes, as in King Lear and Twelfth Night, he is actually the wisest person in the play. There is no Fool per se in Hamlet: the closest equivalent would be the gravediggers in Act V, so there may be overtones here of mortality or “digging one’s own grave.”

These lines might also evoke Polonius, the advisor to the King in Hamlet, who is ridiculously verbose and long-winded. And a bit obtuse (“O, I am slain!”).

More distantly, the Fool here might recall the Fool in the tarot deck–in keeping with Prufrock’s sense that he is fated to play a humble part. Eliot’s interest in the tarot is famously evidenced in the opening section of The Waste Land. The tarot card also represents a person at a transition point in life. The common representation is a traveler near a precipice, and the interpretation is that he is about to take a chance, whereby he may fly or fall. In the context here, Eliot may be saying that he almost allowed himself to approach a life-changing decision. Almost.

Rhetorically, these lines are an example of the figure chiasmus, with the inverted repetition of “At time” and “almost” as “almost, at times.” The figure has the effect of calling the statement into question: were the times when he was “ridiculous” also the times when he was “the Fool”? This helps to accentuate the several senses of “Fool” (Shakespearean/tarot/social-misfit) at play in the passage.

On the Rider-Waite tarot deck (and other depictions) the Fool is shown to hold his head high above the world, carrying a light burden, not noticing that he wanders toward the edge of a precipice. Though it cannot be said that Prufrock holds his head high in his “current” state, he may have once lived in luxury as such. However, now he finds himself fallen and miserable, and his “burden” is more of a trouble, or at least a reminder of trouble.

Now that I’ve wasted plenty of time eating, drinking, and contemplating, should I make my move on this woman?

“Crisis” here means something more like “turning point” or “dramatic climax” than “disaster” (although disaster may be implied as a secondary meaning). At the time Eliot was writing, “reaching one’s crisis” was also a popular euphemism for having an orgasm.

The ices/crisis rhyme is a telling one: coming on to this woman and forcing her to make a decision would “break the ice” between them.

In a 2015 Vanity Fair article on “Prufrock,” Monica Lewinsky named this line as one that had been particularly meaningful to her.

These women, and his success or failure with them, are of cosmic importance to Prufrock. To dare to confess his desires to one would change his whole life. And yet he’s thinking of doing it anyway…

2009 National Poetry Month poster. Design: Paul Sahre

Of course, ‘Disturb the universe’ is hyprebolic, a crass, laughable exaggeration.

Rapper Chuck D borrowed these lines for the title of a 1996 song.