Friday, October 28, 2011

    Again,  I know this poem can be read as an existential mockery of a whole generation of intellectuals, of impotent ideas and  pathetic self-alienating decorum. But, it’s a great read if you see the poignant plight of Prufrock.  He’s getting old, and there’s been no lust, no passion in his life.  He’s been in a sexual hell, like Tantalus, reaching out for peaches that recede from him, but are always there to remind him of his  irrelevance to the women coming and going and Michelangeloing.


     It’s REAL!   I’ve been there.  Been to the parties and taverns where women will be alluring up to a point at which they say, “That is not what I meant at all. “ 


    Prufrock’s tragedy, like Hamlet, is that he thinks too much.  He analyzes what’s going on too closely to participate in it.  I wonder if one of these seemingly impossible impervious women is going through her own angst.  Does one of them wonder, “ Why did I formulate him with a phrase?  Why did I pin him down and make him wriggle?  Will I ever just offer a peach without analyzing it?”

The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock   Part 3

*         *         *         *

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;


Am an attendant lord, one that will do


To swell a progress, start a scene or two,


Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,


Deferential, glad to be of use,


Politic, cautious, and meticulous;


Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;


At times, indeed, almost ridiculous--


Almost, at times, the Fool.

I grow old ... I grow old ...


I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?


I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk


upon the beach.

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves


Combing the white hair of the waves blown back


When the wind blows the water white and black.


We have lingered in the chambers of the sea


By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown


Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

    Hamlet didn’t willfully act until he was going to die.  In his case, though, his problem was revenge not sex.  (We’re pretty sure he had deflowered Ophelia.) Prufrock doesn’t seem like he will ever get any play, so he’s not Hamlet.  (Also, he’s not as noble as Hamlet.) Here Prufrock compares himself, it seems, to Polonius, who was full of “high sentence” to the point of being a fool.  Polonius is Claudius’s right hand man until he gets stabbed for evesdropping.  He never does, he just advises.  And Hamlet mocks him for being old...

    This line kills me because it’s so true.  Old men, including me, have all these ill-fitting, unfashionable outfits.   When they try to look cool, they just look undignified.

    This “eat a peach” line has been the sexual-yet-ironic version of carpe diem for as long as I can remember, and I’m old!  Think of a peach...It has soft, glowing skin.  It’s sweet but messy.  The seed inside is bitter.  It kind of looks like it has a nice butt. It’s delicate and can easily turn mushy or rotten.  After you go through the trouble of having it, you wonder whether it was worth the bother.  Still, tomorrow you are thinking about having another....To a guy, every one of those lines might describe a woman.  Plus, women often sing about their peaches.  As in, if you don’t like ‘em, don’t shake my tree.In this poem about sexual frustration, “eat a peach” has to be a code phrase for attempting seduction.  Of course, it’s the peach that seduces the man. 

    The sirens were mermaids that lured men to their dooms with their seductive songs.

    Notice all the wooshing of the alliterative w’s in these lines.  It’s like experience is rushing past Prufrock.

    At the end, here, it’s human voices that drown us.  We can imagine Prufrock drowning in a sea of tea cakes and bare arms, surrounded by mermaids howling, “look how he grows thin,” and “That’s not what I meant at all!”  We kill each other with a thousand pinpricks that formulate each other with phrases.  Can we understand one another? Can we feel unity instead of alienation?  Only if we stop thinking about it.