(They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”) T.S. Eliot – The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
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The parenthetical line here, along with this one, further demonstrates Prufrock’s self-consciousness and lack of self-confidence. It begins Prufrock’s preoccupation with what others think of him. He is typified by this. It mitigates the enjoyment he can glean from life.
Compare Nick Carraway’s anxiety in The Great Gatsby, a novel well-stocked with references to Eliot’s poetry:
Thirty—the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair.
Additionally, Eliot juxtaposes the lofty, oft-repeated, ‘Do I dare’ with the ridiculous ‘bald spot’. This technique creates a dramatic contrast between the ‘overwhelming’ question and the mundanity of Prufrock’s (and our) everyday lives.
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference. Robert Frost – The Road Not Taken
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These famous final lines are often quoted as presenting a stark choice between originality and conformity, boldness and timidity. As the poem’s context makes clear, though, the situation isn’t that simple: the paths are “really about the same,” with one only slightly less traveled than the other. There’s risk and opportunity cost involved in taking either.
However, although the paths were similar, he imagines himself later telling people that he made a monumental decision. (By taking the perceived “less traveled” path, he believes he’s committed himself to more risk — but also more potential reward.) The poem is in part about randomness and the meaning we attempt to force onto our lives in our desire to see ourselves as masters of our fate.
In the last line of the poem, “And that has made all the difference,” does the narrator mean this in a positive way, or negative? Was it a good difference, or not so good?
Finally, if this poem is read aloud in performance, the last line sounds colloquial; everyday speech. It seems to be addressed personally and teasingly to the reader/listener, as if deliberately provoking a misinterpretation.
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Coleridge’s masterpiece, “Kubla Khan,” came to him in an opium dream after he passed out reading Samuel Purchas’s Pilgrimage. He claimed that its fragmentary nature (its subtitle is “Or, a Vision in a Dream. A Fragment.”) was due to a sudden interruption from a visitor as he was transcribing his vision:
On awakening [the author] appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved. At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock, and detained by him above an hour, and on his return to his room, found, to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast, but, alas! without the after restoration of the latter!"
The visitor may have been a tall tale on the poet’s part, or he may have been Coleridge’s opium dealer. Either way, “Khan” is a testament to the poet’s talent: who else besides Coleridge and Afroman could write their masterwork while stoned beyond comprehension?
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T. S. Eliot’s self-described “drama of literary anguish” portrays the social and sexual frustration of a man obsessed with his own inadequacy. Begun in 1910 (when he was 22) and published in 1915, “Prufrock” was Eliot’s breakout masterpiece and almost certainly an expression of his own anxieties: he reported that he was still a virgin at age 26. More than that, the poem reflects a search for authenticity, connection, and the courage to take control of one’s path in life. Arguably, it’s a poem about existentialism and the conundrum of our fate.
No definitive source for the title character’s name has been identified, although there was a Prufrock-Litton furniture store in St. Louis, Missouri at the time Eliot lived there. Comic and fussy-sounding, “Prufrock” seems to combine echoes of “prudishness” and the “frock” of a priest (suggesting primness, religiosity, or abstinence). A “frock” is also a type of dress. The poem’s claim to be a “love song” is ironic. It contains no mention or evidence of love, and “the women” it describes are distant, seemingly pretentious figures—reflections of Prufrock’s repressed sexual desire and of his failure to assert his authentic self.
The poem has had a major impact on subsequent literature and pop culture, from Nick Carraway’s anxieties about aging in The Great Gatsby to the Eliot quotations peppering Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now to the 1995 Crash Test Dummies hit “Afternoons & Coffeespoons,” all the way to John Green’s YA bestseller The Fault in Our Stars, in which Hazel Grace quotes the first and last stanzas. In 2015 one writer for The Atlantic even credited the poem with inventing the hipster.
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The lyrical repetition is emblematic of the speaker’s indecision.
The line alludes to Ecclesiastes 3:1-8: “A time to be born, and a time to die,” etc. It could also refer to the first line of Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress,” in which the shepherd says, “Had we but world enough and time…” and goes on to say that then he and the girl he wants could talk endlessly about whether to make love, but life is fleeting: “The grave’s a fine and private place / But none I think do there embrace.” Lonely Prufrock, though, has the time.
Another relevant passage from the same poem:
On a different topic, Eliot also uses verbs such as “slides” which add an almost snake-like quality to what the smoke is doing along the streets. Perhaps this is a biblical illusion to the serpent who tempts Adam and Eve.
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Perhaps the “vegetable love” passage speaks more directly to Prufrock’s condition, his inability to decide?
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I also wonder how the “vegetable love” passage is relevant. It could be, but it isn’t self-evident.
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I agree that the line could refer to the opening lines of Marvell’s poem, but I think the reference is used to distinguish the vast differences between Marvell’s speaker and the situation of Eliot’s protagonist. Marvell’s speaker is using a common “carpe diem” motif to urge his lover to stop the coyness and take advantage of the time they have to consummate their love. By contrast, Eliot’s speaker is plagued by indecision and too much time, leading to a kind of anxious paralysis.