Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock Essay: An Analysis -- Love Song J. Alf

An Analysis of The drive in Song of J. Alfred Prufrock The general fragmentation of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock is obvious. The poem seems a perfect example of what Terry Eagleton calls the modern transition from metaphor to metonymy ineffectual any longer to totalize his experience in some large figure, the bourgeois is forced to let it trickle away into objects related to him by sheer contiguity. Everything in Prufrock trickles away into parts related to one some other only by contiguity. Spatial progress in the poem is reserved or deferred, a scuttling accomplished by a pair of claws disembodied so violently they remain ragged. In the famous opening, the evening is crack out against the sky / Like a patient etherised upon a table, and the parable makes an equivalence between being spread out and being etherised that continues elsew here(predicate) in the poem when the evening, now a bad patient, malingers, / Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me. There it sleeps so peacefully / Smoothed by long fingers . . . . This severance is a rhetorical as well as a spatial and emotional condition. The streets that follow like a tedious argument / Of deadly intent lead not to a conclusion but to a question, a question too overwhelming even to ask. Phrases like the rumbling retreats / Of restless nights combine physical blockage, emotional unrest, and rhetorical maundering in an equation that seems to make the human being a combination not of apotheosis and beast but of road-map and Roberts Rules of Order. In certain lines, metaphor dissolves into metonymy before the readers eyes. The discolor fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes appears clearly to every reader as a cat, but the cat itself is absent, repr... ...becomes a collection of individual parts, just as the poems human denizens had been little more than parts And I catch cognize the eyes already, known them all And I have known the implements of war already known them all. The instantaneous movement from part to whole, from eyes, arms, evenings, mornings, to all, expresses the emptiness between, the jailbreak between dispersed parts and an oppressive whole made of stringently serial repetition. The very reduction of human beings to parts of themselves and of time to episodes makes it unrealistic to conceive of any whole different from this empty, repetitious an. As murder says, metonymy substitutes quantity for quality, so that instead of living life Prufrock feels I have measured out my life with coffee spoons. Works Cited Michael North, The Political aesthetic of Yeats, Eliot, and Pound. Cambridge Cambridge UP, 1991.