Revisiting T. S. Eliot’s “Prufrock”

How many coffee spoons = a life?

During the summer season, when local peaches are plentiful, as we’d finish dinner I’d ask my husband “Do you care to eat a peach?” I knew I was playing on the line “Do you dare to eat a peach?”—from T. S. Eliot’s poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” But after a while I realized that there was nothing else I remembered from that poem. I hadn’t read it in, literally, decades. So I pulled Eliot’s Complete Poems and Plays from my bookshelf and opened the book.

And there it was: the very first poem in Eliot’s very first poetry collection, Prufrock and Other Observations (1917). My penciled comments fill the margins of this five-page poem, but time has so faded them that I can’t read a word. So here I am, starting from scratch, engaging “Prufrock” 110 years after its publication (its first appearance being in Poetry magazine in 1915).

As I read now through the poem, other famous lines jump out. Take the opening lines—

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table.

—imaging the evening as numb, anesthetized.

Then the repeated

   In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

—the repetition suggesting a stasis: although the women “come and go,” they seem to get nowhere.

And now that I’ve got “Prufrock” open on my lap, its lines keep drawing me in.

There’s the word “time” making several appearances. In a single stanza, we get:

 And indeed there will be time…
There will be time, there will be time…
There will be time to murder and create
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift 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 a toast and tea.

What I notice is the future tense—there will be time—suggesting that none of what’s mentioned has happened yet. More stasis. Procrastination. Even the static “hundred indecisions” are waiting in the wings (as if indecision could ever be an action).

This is reinforced by the repeated anxiety about acting at all:

And indeed there will be time
To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”…
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?

And then that line that brought me back to “Prufrock”: “Do I dare to eat a peach?”

Then come more expressions of anxiety, in the variations on “So how should I presume” which end successive stanzas:

And how should I presume?

And how should I then presume?
And how should I begin?

The speaker is frozen in the fear of doing anything at all.

In the midst of all this unease comes another famous line: “I have measured out my life in coffee spoons.” So one of the speaker’s few actions is this wonderfully pathetic image: one’s entire life reduced to the repetitive action of measuring out tiny coffee spoons.

I haven’t yet mentioned the delightful role of rhyming in the poem. About a third of the poem’s lines are rhymed (recall “And time yet for a hundred indecisions, / And for a hundred visions and revisions” as well as “In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo), but I think my favorite is:

Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?

Here, again, amidst his life’s trivialities (like those “coffee spoons”), the speaker fears any grand action. Even thinking of actions makes him nervous:

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, [sic]
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball…

As with his previous expressions of anxious insecurity, this one gets repeated:

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…
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.”

All this—the expressions of anxiety, indecision, insecurity; the uncertainty about finding meaning—is why “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is considered a modernist poem. In fact, one of the earliest expressions of modernism. But it speaks to us today (at least to me) as a brilliant portrait of a person both comic and pathetic. I picture Eliot smiling as he created Prufrock.

Peggy Rosenthal has a PhD in English Literature. Her first published book was Words and Values, a close reading of popular language. Since then she has published widely on the spirituality of poetry, in periodicals such as America, The Christian Century, and Image, and in books that can be found here.

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