Summary and composition

Here, we will focus on both summary and composition of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T. S. Eliot.

Summary

“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T. S. Eliot follows a middle-aged male speaker, Prufrock, as he struggles to confess something or ask a question to someone (either a woman or the reader).

Prufrock has a monologue about the way he wanders on the foggy streets, which give the impression of bleakness and mediocrity, and keeps hearing some women talking of Michelangelo. In his monologue, the speaker confesses his frustrations regarding his age and looks and his lack of courage to ask the questions he wants to ask. Though he is clearly a cultured man, who is familiar with many aspects of women and society, the speaker cannot help but feel like a failure, as a second-rate individual, very different from the heroes of Shakespeare, for example.

In the end, the speaker is completely disillusioned, as he states that not even the mermaids sing to him, and he feels like a fool, knowing that he will probably die without having achieved or lived anything special.

Composition

Both outer composition (stanzas, verses, graphical expression) and inner composition (beginning, subdivision, course) are important when discussing poetry like “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T. S. Eliot, as they can offer you an overall idea of the text and get you started on a deeper analysis.

Outer composition

The poem is organised in nineteen stanzas plus an epigraph in Italian taken from Dante Alighieri’s “Inferno”. The stanzas vary in length from a one verse stanza –“I do not think that they will sing to me.” — to longer ones up to 12 lines.

The poem is also graphically divided between the first fourteen stanzas and the last five, marking a change in the speaker’s attitude. Regarding graphical expression, also notice that the poem is very experimental, mixing rhetorical questions with parenthesis and direct statements in lines that also vary in length:

My necktie rich a...