By T. S. Eliot
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question…
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.
And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
And indeed there will be time
To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair—
[They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”]
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin—
[They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”]
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
For I have known them all already, known them all—
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?
And I have known the eyes already, known them all—
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?
And I have known the arms already, known them all—
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
[But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!]
Is it perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
And should I then presume?
And how should I begin?
. . .
I grow old… I grow old…
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
Originally published in Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) by T. S. Eliot. Public domain.
Analysis
T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915) is one of the foundational poems of modernism — a psychological portrait of paralysis and alienation in an age of spiritual fragmentation.
Through the interior monologue of Prufrock, a timid, self-conscious man adrift in modern society, Eliot dismantles the conventions of romantic poetry and replaces them with the language of doubt, anxiety, and fractured perception. The result is a haunting symphony of introspection, irony, and self-awareness — a “love song” stripped of sentiment and melody, sung instead in the tones of hesitation and alienation.
In Prufrock’s wandering thoughts, the reader encounters not a confession of passion but a map of paralysis: a mind dissecting itself in real time, torn between desire and fear, intellect and inaction. What emerges is the first truly modern psychological landscape in English poetry — fragmented, self-conscious, and painfully human.
Context and Background
Written between 1910 and 1911 and first published in 1915, “Prufrock” marked Eliot’s debut as a major poetic voice.
Composed when the poet was in his early twenties, it captures the intellectual restlessness of prewar Europe and the growing disillusionment with Victorian ideals. Its free-associative style was influenced by French Symbolists such as Jules Laforgue and by the stream-of-consciousness techniques later popularized by James Joyce and Virginia Woolf.
The poem’s epigraph — from Dante’s Inferno — introduces a speaker confessing his secrets only because he believes no one will return to tell them. Prufrock, too, speaks from a psychological underworld.
Form and Structure
The poem unfolds as a dramatic monologue — a modern reimagining of the form used by Robert Browning — yet unlike Browning’s confident narrators, Prufrock’s voice is fragmented, hesitant, and self-contradictory.
The free verse structure allows thought to mimic consciousness itself: looping, repetitive, and interrupted by doubt. Eliot fuses lyric beauty with conversational rhythm, producing a new poetic music that reflects the instability of modern life.
Psychological Portrait
Prufrock is not merely an individual but a modern archetype: the man who thinks too much and acts too little. He is paralyzed by self-awareness, measuring out his life “with coffee spoons.” The trivial details of his existence — neckties, bald spots, polite conversation — become symbols of existential confinement. His question “Do I dare disturb the universe?” expresses both intellectual ambition and crippling insecurity.
In Prufrock’s inner world, every gesture risks humiliation, every thought collapses under analysis. The poem thus dramatizes consciousness as both illumination and imprisonment.
Symbolism and Imagery
Eliot’s imagery blends the mundane and the mythic, fusing the modern city with timeless symbols.
The “yellow fog” is both literal pollution and psychological metaphor — a suffocating haze that obscures meaning and motion. The recurring images of time (“There will be time…”) suggest both endless postponement and the futility of action. The mermaids at the end symbolize unreachable beauty and transcendence, echoing the romantic dreams Prufrock cannot fulfill.
Even the “overwhelming question” remains undefined, embodying the paralysis of thought itself.
Alienation and Modern Life
Prufrock’s social world is one of sterility and repetition — “In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo.” Culture has become performance, conversation empty ritual.
The modern man, trapped between intellect and emotion, becomes alienated not only from others but from his own desires.
Eliot’s London is a spiritual desert disguised as civilization, a landscape of fog, boredom, and self-consciousness.
Sound and Musicality
Eliot’s control of sound gives the poem its hypnotic rhythm. The repetition of phrases like “There will be time” creates a cyclical structure, mirroring Prufrock’s mental loops.
Internal rhyme (“Time to turn back and descend the stair”) and alliteration evoke both harmony and confinement. The musical cadence of Prufrock’s speech makes his anxiety strangely lyrical — a love song that never reaches its beloved.
Mythic and Religious Dimensions
Like much of Eliot’s later work, “Prufrock” intertwines modern experience with classical and biblical echoes. The reference to Dante situates Prufrock’s monologue in a moral limbo, while his vision of mermaids recalls both Homeric sirens and romantic fantasy.
The poem’s conclusion — drowning beneath “human voices” — evokes both death and awakening: a symbolic descent into self-awareness from which there is no return. Eliot’s fusion of myth and psychology anticipates his later masterpiece, “The Waste Land.”
Psychological Symbolism
Every element in “Prufrock” carries psychological weight. The fog becomes repression; the city, a projection of the self’s confusion; time, a symptom of hesitation. The poem’s fragmented structure mirrors the fragmentation of identity in the modern age.
Prufrock’s fear of judgment, his fixation on detail, and his yearning for transcendence reveal the divided self — intellect against instinct, desire against decorum. Eliot’s genius lies in turning introspection into drama, making the inner monologue itself a stage.
Legacy and Influence
Upon publication, “Prufrock” astonished contemporary readers. It shattered poetic convention and opened the way for modernism’s exploration of consciousness. Critics have since read it as both confession and critique — a portrait of the modern intellectual unable to act, speak, or love.
Its influence extends from W. H. Auden to Sylvia Plath and beyond, defining the psychological interiority of twentieth-century poetry. More than a century later, its imagery and rhythms still resonate with the anxieties of selfhood in a fractured world.
Conclusion
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” remains a masterpiece of psychological realism and symbolic complexity. Eliot fuses the intimate with the cosmic, the trivial with the transcendent, revealing the inner life of modern consciousness in all its doubt and desire.
Prufrock’s failure to speak or act becomes the poem’s triumph — a revelation that the deepest drama takes place not in the world, but within the mind itself.