Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock Essay: In Depth Analysis

In Depth Analysis of The sack out Song of J. Alfred Prufrock The five-line interlude ending on the floors of silent seas forms an encapsulated version of the destruction of the poem, in which the frustrated effort to establish purposive discourse leads one time again to withdrawal downward and inward to a silent founding of instinctual beingness. A return to images of distension and distracting sensuality provokes a final beat toward violent imposition of the will--to force the moment to its crisis--which ends, like previous thoughts of impress the universe, in ruthless self-mockery. The image of decapitation parodies the theme of disconnected being and provides for at least a negative definition of the self I am no prophet. By this point the tense has quietly shifted from give way to past, and the speaker offers a series of prolonged interrogatives on the consequences of action non taken. While its grammatical context (And would it be intimate been worth it) reduces it to the contemplation of what superpower suck been the language and imagery of this passage enact with renewed ecstasy the recurring drama of intellectual conflict Would it have been worth while,To have bitten off the matter with a smile,To have squeezed the universe into a earthTo roll it towards some overwhelming question,To say I am Lazarus, come from the dead,Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all. The infinitives in this passage--to have bitten, to have squeezed, to roll--conform to the poems widespread use of transitive verbs of direct action in expressing the speakers violent impulse to combat the forces of disorder to murder and cook, to disturb the universe, to puke out all the butt-ends, to force the moment. The poems ling... ...hich the author has elected to work, may itself extend other psychic material and then, lines of poetry may come into being, not from the original impulse, but from a vicarious stimulation of the unconscious mind. The mental forces at work in Eliots description of the poetic process assist as an analogy to the conflicts besetting the speaker in Prufrock. The speaker is a failed poet in terms of his inability to murder existing structures in order to create anew be finds it impossible to say what be wants to say. In the secondary stimulation of the unconscious mind that occurs at this point, he part abandons and partly resolves the struggle of form and matter the integration of the psyche remains at best incomplete. Works Cited Conflicts in Consciousness T.S. Eliots Poetry and Criticism. Urbana University of Illinois Press, 1984.