This is Thomas Sheehan's Heideggerian reading of Prufrock, focused on the speaker's flight from the groundlessness of his engagement with meaning and the meaning of his own death. It's Prufrock's experience of Heidegger's existential dread and his flight from it. Prufrock tries to continue living in the everyday ways that paper over mortality and the final absurdity of living ("I have measured out my life with coffee spoons").
The poem concludes with virtual identification of speaker with the reader ("Till human voices wake us, and we drown"). Prufrock takes flight into a world of erotic fantasy, even though that “life” will prove to be only a suffocating death-in-life.
What is the alternative to Prufrock’s flight?
It's to let onself be held out into the no-thing for a cold, focused moment. To hang suspended, with nothing to hold on to, over the abyss of the utter absurdity that gapes at the heart of your life. To live into the experience with faint hope and trembling courage. Tthis would be to understand what is at stake in the seemingly innocent act of making sense of things.
You can take responsibility for yourself and your life. You can wake up to that absurdity and live through it, despite the ultimate futility of it all. Accept the absurdity as your personal condition.
The experience of mortality throws you back upon yourself as a mortal engagement-with-meaning. This is the possibility of your own impossibility. This is a push-back from death, which is what mortality is and what the absurd does.
This is the same for the feckless Prufrock and the person of resolve as each faces their facticity. What distinguishes the two is their decision about living with that awareness.
But now you have a choice: flee your experience of your groundlessness, or make your awareness your own as you return to the everyday business of living as the author of your own life.
Annotated text below.
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
By T. S. Eliot
S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse
A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma percioche giammai di questo fondo
Non torno vivo alcun, s’i’odo il vero,
Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.
Dante addresses Guido da Montefeltro in hell, the standard-bearer of bad faith. I beg you now, tell me who you are – Be not harder than others have been to you – That your name may still endure within the world.
Guido responds to Dante in the epigram above: If I thought my answer were given To one who might ever return to the world, This flame would flicker no longer (= I would say no more). But since from this abyss no one Has ever returned alive (if what I hear is true), Without fear of shame **_I will answer you**
“Let us go then, you and I”
- The poem then progresses to your own side-by-side journey with him.
- He’s telling him because he knows that Dante is never going to leave hell.
- This is you telling yourself about yourself.
*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
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question ...
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.*
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.
And indeed there will be time
- Cf. Andrew Marvell, "To His Coy Mistress," line 1 (p. 478).
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
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.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
And indeed there will be time
To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair —
(They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”)
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin —
(They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”)
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
- * Cf. Shakespeare, Twelfth Night 1.1.1-4:
- "If music be the food of love, play on. . . . That strain again, it had a dying fall."
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?
And I have known the eyes already, known them all—
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?
And I have known the arms already, known them all—
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
(But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!)
Is it perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
And should I then presume?
And how should I begin?
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?
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet — and here’s no great matter;
- The head of John the Baptist was presented to Salome on a plate at her request (Mark 6.17—20, Matthew 14.3-11).
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. - Prufrock has a riveting vision of his mortality—the Eternal Footman—but with his decisive “No!” he takes flight.
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,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
- Cf. "To His Coy Mistress," lines 41-44.To 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”—
If one, settling a pillow by her head
Should say: “That is not what I meant at all;
That is not it, at all.”
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,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—
And this, and so much more?—
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
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.”
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
- Prufrock flees from the groundlessness of his engagement with meaning, retreats from this awareness of facticity .
- Tries to continue his life in the everyday ways that paper over mortality and the final absurdity of living.
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.
I grow old ... I grow old ...
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
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.