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

An Analysis of The wonder 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 futile any longer to totalize his experience in some sumptuous 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 another(prenominal) only by contiguity. Spatial progress in the poem is unsure or deferred, a scuttling accomplished by a pair of claws rid so violently they remain ragged. In the famous opening, the evening is open up out against the sky / Like a patient etherised upon a table, and the metaphor makes an compare between being spread out and being etherised that continues elsew here in the poem when the evening, now a bad patient, malingers, / Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me. There it sleeps so peace fully / Smoothed by long fingers . . . . This rift is a rhetorical as well as a spatial and emotional condition. The streets that follow like a tedious argument / Of pestilent intent lead not to a conclusion but to a question, a question too overwhelming even to ask. Phrases like the maunder 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 saint and beast but of road-map and Roberts Rules of Order. In certain lines, metaphor dissolves into metonymy before the readers eyes. The chickenhearted 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 receive know the eyes already, known them all And I have known the ordnance already known them all. The instantaneous movement fr om 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 stringently serial repetition. The very reduction of human beings to parts of themselves and of time to episodes makes it undoable to conceive of any whole different from this empty, repetitious an. As dispatch 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 artistic of Yeats, Eliot, and Pound. Cambridge Cambridge UP, 1991.