Friday, September 30, 2011

    As a lifelong reader and teacher, I often like a poem because it reminds me of a hundred things I’ve encountered somewhere else  or discussed with people smarter than me  This chunk of Prufrock, with its marmalade and it’s bug collector’s pins, its allusions to the Bible, to Shakespeare, and to Andrew Marvell, its ironic nod to Darwin, its real life perfume and arms of women...this chunk of poetry is about perfect.  I loll in it like lolling in the smell of grandma’s bread baking or in the sound of my Dad’s old opera recordings.  Eliot has somehow gotten into the kitchen of lonely literate men, and, although what he serves is bitter, I feel like I’m at home in thin socks with worn heels.

The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock Part 2

For I have known them all already, known them all:


Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,


I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;


I know the voices dying with a dying fall


Beneath the music from a farther room.


   So how should I presume?


And I have known the eyes already, known them all--


The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,


And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,


When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,


Then how should I begin


To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?


   And how should I presume?

And I have known the arms already, known them all--


Arms that are braceleted and white and bare


(But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!)


Is it perfume from a dress


That makes me so digress?


Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.


   And should I then presume?


   And how should I begin?

 *         *         *         *

Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets


And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes


Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? ...

I should have been a pair of ragged claws


Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

 *         *         *         *

And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!


Smoothed by long fingers,


Asleep ... tired ... or it malingers,


Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.


Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,


Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?


But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,


Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald)


brought in upon a platter,


I am no prophet--and here's no great matter;


I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,


And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,


And in short, I was afraid.

And would it have been worth it, after all,


After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,


Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,


Would it have been worth while,


To have bitten off the matter with a smile,


To have squeezed the universe into a ball


To roll it toward some overwhelming question,


To say: "I am Lazarus, come from the dead,


Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all"--


If one, settling a pillow by her head,


   Should say: "That is not what I meant at all;


   That is not it, at all."

And would it have been worth it, after all,


Would it have been worth while,


After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,


After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts


that trail along the floor--


And this, and so much more?--


It is impossible to say just what I mean!


But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in


patterns on a screen:


Would it have been worth while


If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,


And turning toward the window, should say:


   "That is not it at all,


   That is not what I meant, at all."

     In Twelfth Night, Orsino, a guy who’s in love with love, listens to love songs and sighs about how the last phrase had a “...dying fall.” Here, the voices are dying beneath the music.  Nothing in this mating game brings life to either Prufrock or the women he can’t connect with.


    Women, you know you sometimes formulate men with phrases, categorize them, find some little things to belittle them with.  Prufrock sees women’s eyes not as daggers, but as little pins, holding him down.  He won’t act because the act will be judged and categorized.  This is why men go fishing alone.

    “Known” in the Biblical sense can mean “had sex with’” and knowing someone’s arms sounds pretty damn snuggly.  But, Prufrock is too much of an intellectual.  He knows what the arms look like, and he knows the power of the perfume and the bracelets and the dresses, but he won’t presume to make a move.  The two sexes are too alienated to do what two sexes do.

    I like these guys, even if Eliot finds them pathetic.

    Here’s Darwin.  Man has evolved into a species that can be lonely and self-doubting.  Evolution has been a cruel joke.

Don’t forget, the evening was a cat in the early lines.

    Here’s John the Baptist.  When he wouldn’t sleep with Herod’s wife, she got mad and conspired with her oversexed daughter, Salome’, to have the prophet’s head removed and brought to her on a platter.  Then she stuck pins in his dead tongue.  See above pins!

    I love the way marmalade makes an internal rhyme with afraid from the previous stanza

    In “To his Coy Mistress”  Andrew Marvell wants to roll a bunch of strength and sweetness into a ball and use “rough strife” to tear it though the gates of life.  Pretty passionate! Here, Prufrock considers squeezing the universe into a ball and rolling it toward a question.  See, he thinks too much. Instead of kissing, he’s considering the universe.  Even with a woman’s head on the pillow next to him, he imagines talking and being misunderstood. For God’s sake, KISS THE GIRL!  Even a pair of ragged claws could tell you that. (Remember Sebastian in Little Mermaid?)

    This is Prufrock’s problem.  He wants to say what he means.  Communication is never exact.  That’s the great irony of trying to write.


    A magic lantern is an old device used to project pictures.

Notice, the woman can’t get her point across either.  Somebody, maybe it was Kathryn Hepburn, said men and women couldn’t really live together, they could maybe live next door and visit.