Melancholetta

Observations on Prufrock

(The text of Prufrock can be found HERE. You're urged to read it first! -- Ed)

Hi all,

Since, this is a poem which most of us have discussed, I thought we can start moving beyond the obvious and start dissecting the poem a little differently. I, for long have a slighty different interpretaion for Prufrock... not totally different but slightly varied...I'd love to know what you feel abt this.

Modern man seems very eloquent, confident, aware and self-sufficient. He dresses like a gentleman, he prefers a good society, expected to be socially conscious, assertive of his freedom, ready for his civic duties et al. In a sense, modernity seems to make all men feel equal, purposeful in life, and disciplines them, in the art of social living. And superficially, it seems to succeed. On a material level, we have grown through the ages.

Imposed equality and moral reponsibilities create stable societies. It evens out wrinkles of differences when you look at the macrocosmic level...So, what is wrong? Why is there so much dissent in the world? Maybe because, at the individual level, there are misfits. Your role is either too big for you or too small for you... The speaker is perhaps, afflicted by a sense of emptiness, of feeling a big void inside the huge mould of his personality. Nowadays, everybody reads...everybody is a poet. Everybody has some poetic sense in him. Exaggeration, profoundness is evident in almost everybody. Everybody is able to think big. Compare this with the olden ages...where Greek and Latin were esoteric, the only real scholars were those who knew these languages...Philosophers and scholars had their intricate thoughts expressed in such languages,which was kind of closed to everybody else. Moreover, poetry was for ecclesiastical purposes, which by itself was tightly controlled. There was really no opening up. Everything was so rigid but somehow everything FIT. Peasants worked, they did not think. though life was full of hardships.

The revoultions started the opening up. They fought for equality of the masses. Nothing and nobody was special anymore. Essentially, among all those mundane things that happened as a result of the revolution, one important change was that people were "free to think." I know, how incorrect this seems politically...but, I have a feeling on reading Prufrock, that maybe, the problem is this "Freedom to think" itself. The problem with this guy is, he feels inundated with all the thoughts, knowledge, information, mannerisms, culture etc, that he has and he is unable to handle them all. It required a Socrates or a Plato or a Sophocles or a Homer to be a great scholar or a great poet or even really amounting to somebody . Presumably, this was not because they "could merely think" but they had something else apart from being able to think. Some kind of capacity to handle the truths, that they may derive out of the deep thinking.

The following is an extract from one of the sites that guided me to the poem:

"The last line of the poem suggests otherwise--that when the world intrudes, when "human voices wake us," the dream is shattered: "we drown." With this single line, Eliot dismantles the romantic notion that poetic genius is all that is needed to triumph over the destructive, impersonal forces of the modern world. In reality, Eliot the poet is little better than his creation: He differs from Prufrock only by retaining a bit of hubris, which shows through from time to time. Eliot's poetic creation, thus, mirrors Prufrock's soliloquy: Both are an expression of aesthetic ability and sensitivity that seems to have no place in the modern world. This realistic, anti-romantic outlook sets the stage for Eliot's later works, including The Waste Land."

Maybe, the poet wants to convey this...Thinking, romancing, contemplating.... doesnt make a great man (Talking of Michaelangelo gets you nowhere). Understanding philosphical truths at the outset, recognising the beauty and ugliness of things, doesnt move you an inch from who you are... (You still measure your life only with coffee spoons...afflicted by mundane issues)..Thinking profoundly is not going to raise you to any exalted position...Still it is going to be the same old life, only you pretend to be enlightened...and be recieved by others like you have been...But you are still empty, as ever, because what is cast on you doesnt fit.

In reality, it is something else that makes a great man. Something apart from thoughts, emotions and feelings. Some thing that makes some people more gifted, and better equipped than the others...which Prufrock (and may be TSE himself didnt have). I think the love story is secondary and only sets a background for expreseing this helplessness, of somehow not amounting to much. This seems to be a very good reason why such a learned poet like TS Eliot, was still depressed a lot. To write "Hollow Men" and "Waste land" affter this seems a very logical continuation. In the end, he discarded his quest for philosphy and converted himself to Anglicanism, out of a need for a stable life, and went on to write about mundane things like "Cats"...His life somehow reminds me of Phaedrus in Zen and the Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance, who after pursuing on his quest to find the basis of rationality, abandons it in despair and backs off for a "normal" life.

I have written something so long that it troubles me even to read this stuff again. Hope, you came upto this point still trusting my sanity.. :-) I just opened up a little. Hope to hear your views,

Cheers,
Stangenlord

posted by Dileepan @ 8:20 PM