Many people undergo life through a series of predestined steps, sustaining stability and order. Each day, people strictly adhere to a planned schedule, incessantly enveloped in their own realities. However, in “The Love Story of Alfred Prufrock,” the poet admonishes the mechanical livelihoods people indulge themselves in. He notices the futility of mankind to pursue love and happiness when death is the inevitable force that terminates what was gained in life. To him, falling in love is like dying and as a result, dying becomes an inevitable force just like love, impossible to avoid. In a sense, he enforces the meaningless of life when one knows that death is as imminent as the next breath one takes. Loving is like pinning ourselves to a wall, shackling ourselves to a reality that is fruitless to avoid no matter how much we try.
Throughout “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” the poet sees the potentials in life, but is unable to act on his desires. He does this by pointing out the meaningless world of “tea and cakes and ices” and the pretentious and superficial chatter of women, coming and going and thinking of Michelangelo. He provokes the meaning of life. Is there a point to life at all, when everything we do is already pre-planned for us? The majority of people don’t live spontaneously. They live in small deliberate increments. “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?” Today, no one is able to experience the validity of life. We believe that adolescents who are at the prime of their lives are meant to live life brilliantly, to venture on a whim. Students in high school don’t go out and experience life as is. Instead, they are trapped in their white-walled rooms with textbooks stacked stories high, faces full of paragraphs and words that we can only try to comprehend. We are blinded by the surrealism professed from our textbooks and yet we know nothing. We don’t know how it feels to actually love, to actually fight in a war or to actually fly. We are paralyzed.
The time that we use to measure out our lives is wasteful, but people spend their entire lives making choices – as if it matters at all. “And indeed there will be time for the yellow smoke that slides along the streets rubbing its back upon the window-panes; there will be time, there will be time to prepare a face to meet the faces that your feet; there will be time to murder and create, and time for all the works and days of hands that life and drop a question on your plate; time for you and time for me, and time yet for a hundred indecisions, and for a hundred visions and revisions, before the taking of toast and tea.” From this quote, the poet exemplifies the fact that we all live in a fog, simply trudging through the day-to-day situations of our reality. We’re all trapped in our own selfish little bubbles, only concerned about what we desire immediate gratification. We fail to notice anything outside of that very bubble, out in the world out there. We are decapitated by restrictions and entrapment, shackled by false dreams. Our inability to escape social routines proves our inferior forms.
Throughout his poem, Prufrock’s voice denotes sarcasm, when he says “there will be time, there will be time...” There is never enough time. Time is always fleeting. It is fleeting like our lives. Incessantly, Prufrock condemns society’s materialistic values and its placement in people’s lives. He jeers at the continual waste of time in performing his daily routines. “I grow old … I grow old … I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare eat a peach?” What is the reason of pursuing anything when we will one day crumble to dust? We are born. We grow. We live. We die. We have all these plans and dreams and things, but we never are able to attain all of them. So then why do we have so many aspirations in the first place? Why bother when we are bound to perish in the end? Many times over, he wonders if there is a point in trying in the first place. Living seems to be a waste. “Do I dare disturb the universe?” He feels not only his life, but life in general is hollow. To him, we are just live corpses left to walk a written path for us.
“I have 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.” Here, the poet symbolizes the “flickering of my greatness” as a man with a “dying soul.” Our lives will wind up and wind down, but in the end all of our fates are the same. There is no escape – because death is always waiting for us, with its wide arms and black eyes and mocking smile, just waiting to swallow us whole.
In the end, the poet denotes the liberty professed by these majestic creatures of the sea. “I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me . . . 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.” The mermaids are in a way like the "Kurtz" of the world. They are the transcendence of humanity. They exhibit the very brilliance in which everyone seeks to possess. They never even acknowledge someone like Prufrock. The mermaids symbolize freedom and youth. They symbolize the small moments that everyone has in their lives, when we are not bogged down by the stress of our future. The mermaids are the days of summer when we are the happiest, when we are the greatest and the days that, unbounded by the thought of death (or the future), we shine the brightest. Mermaids have the will to explore and know all. They are not conscious of their eventual fate, but more subdued to opportunities of this unbound world. In that, Prufrock and all the men in the world have envied and lusted.
The security of the familiar routines of everyday life is not only comforting and easy to accept, but is also stifling and debilitating to the soul. Prufrock admits he would like to “murder and create” and to “disturb the universe,” but the safety of the comfortable routines is too hard to break free from.
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