Arantxa Velezmoro
JOURNAL 2
In the short poem, “The love song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, T.S Elliot illustrates himself to be a modern man who is simply trying to grasp the attention from a lady. Prufrock seems to be an overeducated, powerful, fearful, observant, and emotionally mannered man. Some of the major images in the short poem are the sinister streets, the eating and drinking, the ocean, the body parts, and the rooms. T.S Elliot presents and adds to the development of the narrator’s character with imagery and metaphors. For instance, Prufrock is very concerned about his reputation, and he doesn’t want to stick out in a crowd. He’d rather people not notice him at all. In lines 2-3Although it doesn’t directly deal with body parts, the simile comparing the evening to a patient who has been put under anesthesia “etherised” on a surgery table prepares us for all the metaphorical "surgery" and "dissecting" that Prufrock does when he sees people only as body parts. Also, Prufrock says that the spoons he uses to measure his coffee are like a "measure" of his life, as well. Here the spoon is a synecdoche that actually refers to the whole process of sitting around in the afternoon and sipping on a caffeinated drink. Basically, he lives from one cup of coffee or tea to the next. Another example of imagery is when Prufrock presents the "claws"; the claws are synecdoche. They stand for a crab, which is the animal you’d most likely think of as scurrying on the ocean floor. Prufrock is calling himself crab-like. He is also consumed with thoughts of his own death he refers to his balding head and the eternal Footman (death), and he is afraid. The poem is filled up with his own anxiety and his feeling of being at a loss, not only in how he should proceed how he should presume but also in where he fits in the world. On the other hand, you have this world of “tea and cakes and ices...of the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets...the novels...the skirts that trail along the floor”and then the world of “narrow streets...lonely men in a shirt-sleeves, leaning out windows”...,This highlights Prufrock's position as “in between”. He sees this other world of lonely men, etc., yet he is in another world and one can believe that those in this other world don't see what he sees, therefore adding to his loneliness.