If you read the last post here without hyperlinking to the full text of "The Love Song", you would have been posed perfectly at that time in history before the Modernist Psyche came to the consciousness of society. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock has often been called the first modernist poem in English literature.I first read The Love Song in an elective class taken during the second semester of the second year of Law School, round about the same time when the thought of picking up a novel or reading a poem was finally no longer so painful as it had been since the dashing of a young dream many months before.
T. S. Eliot's Prufrock has become so much a part of the English language that people who have never read the poem are familiar with phrases like "I have measured out my life with coffee spoons" and "I grow old... I grow old.../ I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled" and "Do I dare to eat a peach?" and "In the room the women come and go/Talking of Michaelangleo." (Like we see from B's comment in the last post, these phrases stay with you for life! :) )
The title of the poem, "The Love Song", the grand prologue quoted from Dante, and the romantic opening lines, "Let us go then, you and I,..." are possibly the best example of ironic deflation in the English language. T.S. Eliot starts the poem with great promise of grandeur and romance, but when you read beyond the first lines, the rest of the poem becomes impossibly fragmented, obscure, and difficult to understand. It also has a strangely depressive effect for a poem comprised largely of the most ordinary images of modern life, with a protaganist that was so emacipated ("look how his arms are thin") and pathetic ("Do I dare.. do i dare") as to be comical.
There are very many articles written on this important poem (which if I may note, was not so readily available to us in the class of 1994, since the Internet was only starting to be populated), and any of them would give a reader a good aid to understanding its background. As a full-time frustrated English major, I spent many an hour in the NUS Arts Library (away from the law journals) researching the classical and non-classical allusions in the poem, collecting hints from the professors in tutorials, and while finally getting a Distinction in Lit 203 (largely by focusing on Hamlet in the exam paper), I had to admit that I did not understand the poem.
Since then, over the years, I would come across the poem once every so often, and on several occasions, I would look at individual stanzas and suddenly get the startling sensation of suddenly "seeing the image and understanding it". Recently, I came across it again, and sat down to read the whole poem again in one sitting. It dawned on me then that to understand the poem, one must have grown to become the Modern Person, something that took place only in the last 12 years of my life.
The "you and I" in the opening lines are in fact the same person - Prufrock, in a soliloquoy. How many of us have had these internal monologues, as a result of emotional alienation, not just from those around us, but even with ourselves?
Are there not days when you are just "measuring life out by coffee spoons", or projects, or job appraisals, or movies, or kids?
"Do I dare...disturb the universe?" - Do I dare live a different life, tell someone I love them, or even call up an old friend?
With all the ostensible choices that we have in work and life, none of which does not involve some sacrifice of something else, is there not "time for a hundred visions and revisions"?
Have you felt like an insect "pinned and wriggling on the wall", scrutinized by them all? If I read or write, or introspect, will my friends call me melancholic, can they understand that keeping a smiling face is not all?
"I hear the mermaids singing, each to each
I do not think they will sing to me."
- Will someone notice us in the crowds?
Do we dream to fly, or dance, or sing? - well yes, maybe..
"Till human voices wake us, and we drown."
(Note on the photo: tried to look for a picture of mermaid's tail on Google Images, but decided that i just don't like scaly-looking things. The picture I chose is the end of a guppy's tail- mauve, blue, silvery, - I think that's how I imagine a mermaid's tail to be)
