A magic lantern was an early image projector developed in the 17th century (or 15th, if you credit Giovanni Fontana, a Venetian engineer who thought he was a magus and created a lantern that projected an image of a demon).

Here Prufrock is wondering if it’s worth it to spill his guts, to put everything he feels “out there” like the projections of the magic lantern. He fears that if he gives voice to his emotions and desires, his innermost self will effectively be on public display. And what’s the point if he’s sure to be rejected?

This seems to me to be a reference to ‘Jane Eyre’. Mr Rochester dresses up as a gipsy fortune teller and says to Jane – “I wonder what thoughts are busy in your heart during all the hours you sit in yonder room with the fine people flitting before you like shapes in a magic-lantern: just as little sympathetic communion passing between you and them as if they were really mere shadows of human forms, and not the actual substance.” (Chapter 14).

The idea of ‘nerves’ also foreshadows the nervous lady in ‘The Waste Land’. Eliot’s first wife, Vivian, suffered mental illness and her condition was beyond his ability to cope with.

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.

Unlike The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, Prufrock has grown tired of his pick-up lines.

The image in the second line is of an insect “pinned” to a backing as was done by old-school natural scientists:

“Formulated” may suggest formalin, which is a preservative often used in preserving insect and animal specimens used for study. The “eyes” are the people looking at Prufrock, viewing him as one would view a particularly interesting species of strange insect–in this case, a live specimen, “wriggling” on the pin. There’s a sadism here which…yeah, I’ve been to some of THOSE parties, lemme tell ya.

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.