Please concentrate on reading "The Love Song" for Friday's class and The Waste Land for Monday. This post will serve for comments on both poems.As you read these two lengthy, complex poems by T.S. Eliot, note that while the poems initially seem fragmented and disjointed, the two poems are held together by rhymes, sounds, repetitions, repeated themes. You might want to think about the following questions as you post your responses below.
1. How does "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" voice a stream of consciousness? Who is speaking? Who is being addressed?
2. What can you tell about Prufrock as a person? What makes his life trivial or meaningless? What is he afraid of? How do his aliments represent modern consciousness? What does he mean when he asks "Do I dare / Disturb the universe?"
3. How is the city portrayed in "The Love Song"? Does this sense of the city bear any relation to Prufrock's character and his dilemma? What is the picture of modern life given in the poem?
4. What does the song of the mermaids signify? How do you read the ending of the poem?
5. What structures The Waste Land? What is the experience of reading it like--does the poem disorient you? Depress you? Is it mystical? Religious? Explain your responses with specific references to the poem's language.
6. Is there a single voice behind the utterances in The Waste Land? Why? Why not?
7. What meaning(s) do you think The Waste Land offers?
Finally, here are some fun Eliot links to explore:
Bio and information at Poets.org.
His acceptance speech for his Nobel Prize.
Video reading of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." (via YouTube. Useful to listen to as you read.) And a cool animation of the same poem. And another.
Eliot reading The Waste Land (via YouTube). With images of the poem and its many, many revisions.
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock is a poem that both intrigues and somewhat suffocates me. If it had not been for the title of the poem, it would be difficult to understand what is going on. The poem is mostly made up of the disjointed thoughts and observations of the narrator. Through reading this, one is able to get truly get into the head of this strange individual, and with some work one is able to decipher what is going on.
ReplyDeleteThroughout the poem, the narrator gives descriptions of both the outside environment and the inside atmosphere of the café or whatever he is in. He describes the smoke from the factories as staining the windows, obscuring the outside world. The factories loom over the city and their smog smothers the individuals within. This smothering effect is mirrored in both the chaotic and repetitive nature of the poem, and through the description of the café. The narrator feels smothered in his city AND in his place of refuge (the café). But it is not the smoke from the factories which suffocate him, it is the "overwhelming question" that antagonizes and keeps him away from all the individuals whom he observes. The stanza "In the room the women come and go/ Talking of Michelangelo." This led me to believe that his it it the women whom he desires to ask this mysterious question. He sees them come and go, missing opportunity after opportunity and is thus pushed deeper and deeper into himself and his anxieties. In the end of the poem, he talks about the mermaids that he doesn't think "will sing to [him]." He then describes them "riding seaward on the waves." I believe that he is talking about his dreams. He is saying that his dream of love is vanishing before his eyes. He is waiting for that love to come to "sing" to him, and in doing so misses out on asking his "overwhelming question." The poem ends with a depressing stanza: "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." I believe that this is describing the narrator's recognition that his is lost in his dream world, lost in his own personal smog, and that when his dreams have a chance to become reality (confronting one of the girls, i guess?) then he will drown in his own anxieties.
This poem warns me of the dangers of being sole an observer and waiting for life to happen to you. There is a point where everyone must take the first step, ask that "overwhelming question," otherwise one will be forever trapped in the back of the café, and trapped in a thick and depressing smog of existence.
stuart kinley
Sorry to be posting so late. As I am terrible at poems, I am going to try to answer some of the questions Dr. Hinrichsen posted about this poem. "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" appears to be narrated by Prufrock himself. As I read this I was under the impression that Prufrock was not speaking about love, but about his philosophy on life. He seems to be addressing a general companion, perhaps not one particular person. Maybe anyone that will listen. I found it interesting that he opens the poem on line 3 with an allusion to death: "Like a patient etherised upon a table." That line is unnerving and is certainly not a visual one would normally include in a love poem.
ReplyDeletePrufrock takes notice of the slightest details. Eliot is a visual writer, the way he describes the yellow fog is important. He also repeats the word "yellow" often, perhaps in order to keep the fog and smoke a dreary reminder of the way Prufrock sees the world. Prufrock is afraid of talking to women. The phrase "In the room the women come and go/Talking to Michelangelo" is repeated as its own stanza. Eliot isolates this thought in order to give us the impression that Prufrock is afraid to approach them. Prufrock asks "Do I dare/Disturb the Universe?" as he's watching these women, further giving me the impression that he is anxious, and unwilling to socialize with women. But he IS willing to let us know that he thinks women are important. He is so intimidated that he compares them to the universe. The fog/smoke could be a metaphor about his feelings of being trapped by his anxiety about the opposite sex. The mermaids near the end lead me to believe that he gets lost in his own mind, unable to cope with his outward behavior. Even so, they still don't acknowledge him in his dream world. The last line "Till human voices wake us, and we drown." is terribly depressing. Prufrock is drowning in his own reality.
While reading T.S. Eliot's poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, I wondered who the speaker had in mind as his intended audience. Although the first line states "Let us go then, you and I," I'm not sure that he is actually talking to another person. I believe that this is actually an internal monologue, as I'm not sure that the speaker would actually recite this poem to another.
ReplyDeleteLater in the poem, the speaker opens a stanza by stating "And indeed there will be time/To wonder, "Do I dare?" and "Do I dare?" This also supports that the speaker is not actually speaking or reciting this to another person. These lines answer a question that is not asked. This is implied by the word indeed. The speaker must be answering an internal question, as indeed implies that he is answering his own question of "Will there be time?"
Also, the lines that serve as the chorus in the poem, "In the room the women come and go/Talking of Michaelangelo" is a passive statement. This could imply that the speaker is merely thinking these stanzas or statements to himself. While the intended audience of the poem is not explicitly clear, I do not believe that the speaker is actually talking to another person
Prufrock as a person appears extremely insecure about himself and his actions. He is constantly doubting himself, repeating the phrase "do I dare?" Prufrock questions things that seem like trivial, everyday things, such as parting his hair and eating a peach; yet these things take on a different meaning for him individually. Parting his hair behind would reveal his face more, making him more visible to the people around him and to society. He would not be able to hide among the crowd if his hair is not parted in front of his face. Also, eating a peach takes on a more sexual meaning for Prufrock. The peach has always been looked upon as an incredibly sexual image and by Prufrock questioning eating one would double as him wondering if he should approach a woman or not.
ReplyDeletePrufrock's life can be looked at as trivial or meaningless because we never see him actually approach anyone or act on the things he is wondering about. He talks himself out of doing anything by assuming that he is not good enough or he will say something wrong. By the last two stanzas of the poem, he has distanced himself so much from society that he has set himself up in a whole other world, where mermaids sing to him and he is surrounded by "sea-girls." I see this as his incredible want to be noticed and have a woman be attracted to him and since he does not recieve any attention from the women talking, he creates his own scenario.
Also, I believe by "disturbing the universe" Prufrock is meaning by taking initiative and talking to these women he will be disturbing his universe. Everything he sees around him is included in his own personal universe and by doing something unexpected, he will throw things off balance. So he is speculating on whether to take a chance and possible be rejected or simply remain in perfect balance with the universe and keep quiet.
Brittany Evans
When reading "The Waste Land" the first time, I found myself wading through a thorny maze of allusions and quotes-- such as with the very first quote prefacing Eliot's poem. Then, throughout the entire body of the text I would look at footnote after footnote and then try to get back into the poem. This was extremely disorienting and confusing, a broken reading that left me discouraged. It seemed as though every other line was a reference to Tristan and Isolede, or the Bible, or Dante's Inferno.
ReplyDeleteAfter re-reading it and listening to the poem, I feel that this abundance of allusions and references are rather a part of the poem that not only reinforces what Eliot is saying, but also are disheartening in and of themselves. I believe the allusions and notes and references are a part of the form of the poem, helping to create an specific atmosphere and requiring multiple readings. For, in their sheer number of as well as the quotes in other languages there will be time after time that the reader finds themselves lost, not knowing a particular reference or needing a dictionary to translate a line. This is, to me, reminiscent of life in general where often each individual is met with many instances where they have no idea of what to do, or no prior knowledge of the circumstance at hand.
I think that Eliot included as many references as he did (partially to show off) but also to prove that the reader is, himself, imperfect.
Though I must agree with Whitney on the fact that the literary allusions in The Waste Land strengthens the text by adding an abundance of depth. However, this depth takes away from the text for a modern reader. When it was written, most of the texts that Eliot cites would have been read by scholars and the well to do, and they would have known the Latin to read his original footnotes. In today's world, we have lost the emphasis on the canon of literature and the need to learn the classics in Latin and Greek. So we feel nearly pushed away by the poem, lost in a jumble of footnotes that is almost more text than the poem itself. We find ourselves looking down, up, down, up so that we understand his allusions. Granted almost everyone of us (an assumption) has read Dante's Inferno (first Italian poem/work-thingy), it is hard for us to place these stray quotes in context when reading them. The language is not ingrained in our heads like the quote "abandon all hope, ye who enter here" or a more modern "p-p-p-p-p-p-poker face". This adds, in The Burial of the Dead, to making us feel removed from the text and almost pushed away by Eliot himself, judging us as unworthy. He then, using Baudelaire, a censored and erotic and out there French poet (akin to Poe), he calls us hypocrite readers, only to call us his resemblance and his brother, terms of endearment. It leaves us confused. Very confused.
ReplyDeleteAs poetry is probably my favorite element of literature I enjoyed reading the poems by Eliot. Though both poems seem to portray a negative outlook on life's challenges it is easy to see that Eliot is using his poetry as an outlet in which he vents his feelings. I can relate to this because I too write poetry to get my negative feelings out and onto paper instead of keeping them bottled up. In "The Waste Land" Eliot is taking all of his anxiety about life after World War I and descrbing it through his abundance of knowledge about the world and it's different cultures. Some might see his strategy as a way to show off his educated mind in a conceited manner but I find his technique an intriguing motivation to further my own education.
ReplyDelete