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

An Analysis of The make out 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 unable any(prenominal) longer to totalize his experience in some heroic 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 1 another only by contiguity. Spatial progress in the poem is diffident or deferred, a scuttling accomplished by a pair of claws unembodied so violently they remain ragged. In the famous opening, the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherised upon a table, and the simile makes an equation mingled with being spread out and being etherised that continues elsewhere 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 suspension is a rhetorical as well as a spatial and emotional condition. The streets that follow uniform a tedious argument / Of insidious intent lead not to a conclusion but to a question, a question too raise even to ask. Phrases like the muttering 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 angel and beast but of road-map and Roberts Rules of Order. In certain lines, metaphor dissolves into metonymy before the readers eyes. The yellow 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 have know the eyes already, known them all And I have known the arms already known them all. The instantaneous movement from part to whole, from eyes, arms, evenings, mornings, to all, expresses the emptiness between, the gap between dispersed parts and an oppressive whole made of purely serial repetition. The very reduction of human beings to parts of themselves and of time to episodes makes it impossible to conceive of any whole different from this empty, repetitious an. As Burke says, metonymy substitutes quantity for quality, so that instead of living life-time 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.