The Ageing Dante holding a copy of The Divine Comedy
Sentiments in the poem are of loss, love and melancholy related to growing old. Eliot was reading Dante Alighieri’s main works when he wrote this poem. Above is a portrait of Dante holding a copy of The Divine Comedy
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
…
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
…
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?
T.S. Eliot
Urban images are juxtaposed with those of art and beauty by T. S. Eliot
The negative urban images in the poem are juxtaposed with very pleasant images. Some of these are of beautiful women, like in the painting by Botticelli and art in salons, and the mermaids frolicking in the sea at the end. This “feminine imagery” stays with me, rather than the negative ones of growing old, smoky streets, and lonely men. That is partly because of the rhythm and the sound of the words as they slip off the tongue, sublimating the ugliness inherent in some of the lines.
From The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot
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?
