The ironical title of the poem, its epigraph from Dante’s Inferno, sudden or abrupt shifts in meaning and contexts, and the split selves of the protagonist and the use of metaphysical conceits, and use of free verse establish it as one of the great experiments in poetry made in the Modern period. The sense of disjointed and split selves of the persona and the inactivity of the dramatic character and the psychological state of the protagonist suggest that the poem is a kind of monologues that is acted into the mind of the protagonist Prufrock himself. The poem is rightly categorized as an interior monologue as it presents a modern man of around thirty and odd years who is cut off from the world outside and lacks communication, action, determination and will. It rightly portrays the condition of all modern youths through the proper “objective Correlative” of the third person Narrator-character Prufrock.
Composed and published in the beginning or during the World War I, the monologue instances itself from the horrors of the war as depicted into the war poetry. The allusions like “Michelangelo’, ‘Lazarus’, Eternal Footman’, and “Prince Hamlet’ connect the poem with the tradition and its use of free verse, sense of fragmentation in human consciousness, modern sense of loss, loneliness and decay, use of irony make the poem ‘new’. The context of the epigraph is symbolically explored throughout the poem: the fir that torments Guido de Montefeltro in Hell and the fires of carnal desires that torment the protagonist Prufrock are the representations of pain, suffering and decay.
The diction of the poem is a blend of scientific development of Modern Period and the wanderings of a modern man to find meaning in the world of images: words like ‘etherized’, ‘patient’ and ‘oyster-shells’, ‘soot’ and ‘yellow smoke’ depict the gloomy, unpleasant picture of modernity while the rhetoric and the rhetorical questions like ‘Do I dare?’, ‘Do I dare/Disturb the universe?’, ‘So how should I Presume?’ And ‘How should I Begin?’ Represent break of voice, reluctance and failure of the modern youth.
© Dr. Sanjeev Kr Vishwakarma
Literary Latitude 