5/26/2023 0 Comments J alfred prufrock![]() He is afraid of the society’s perception of what a man’s life that is ending should look like. However, it is clear that his distress is not caused by his inner feelings, but due to acknowledgement of his aging. Eliot portrays Alfred Prufrock as a middle-aged man undergoing a period of distress due to his shyness, which makes it difficult for him to face women. Alfred Prufrock” allows the reader to eavesdrop on the inner consciousness and thoughts of Alfred Prufrock. So he’ll never know if that’s what she "meant.Written by T. At any rate, he never asked the question, because he was too afraid of getting rejected.Do you want to kick it with me?" But that’s just a wild guess. ![]() Maybe his question is something like, "I’m really into you, and when you did such-and-such thing, it made me think you were into me, too.But why would the woman with the pillow think she has been misunderstood?.Prufrock is imagining his worst-case scenario: he has asked her his big question – though we still don’t know what it is – and she replies that she has been misunderstood.So, he thinks, it’s a good thing he never tried or risked anything. Clearly Prufrock thinks that, no, it would not have been worth it.The sentence goes, "Would it have been worth it, after all, if one, settling a pillow by her head, should say: ‘That is not what I meant at all. Now he finally completes the sentence, "Would it have been worth it, after all," from the beginning of the stanza.Should say: "That is not what I meant at all. He’s more like Dives, the guy who never escapes from his terrible situation. But Prufrock is no Lazarus, nor is he a Dante.Now, ahem: (Pointing our finger, Batman-style) to the Epigraph! The epigraph comes from a poem about another guy who, unlike Dives, did make it back from Hell to tell warn people about sin.If your brothers didn’t get the message already, what with all the prophets and such who have been running around, one dead guy coming back to life isn’t going to save them." Dives asks the prophet Abraham to please send Lazarus back to earth to warn his brothers to mend their ways or they’ll end up in Hell. Around the same time, a poor man named Lazarus dies and gets sent to Heaven. In the Bible, a rich man named Dives dies and gets sent to Hell. It shouldn’t take a resurrection to tell someone how you feel. Prufrock compares his task of asking the question to Lazarus coming back from the dead.To say: "I am Lazarus, come from the dead,Ĭome back to tell you all, I shall tell you all"– Sounds pretty hard, but do we believe him? He compares the effort it would required to take on "some overwhelming question" to squeezing the entire universe into a ball."The matter," we assume, is the important thing that he meant to discuss so many lines ago. He talks about "biting off the matter," as if it were something he could eat, like his precious marmalade (a kind of jam).It seems that even more eating and drinking have been going on, as well as "some talk of you and me," which suggests that "we" have been having tea with our dear Prufrock.He starts this big long thought about whether "it would have been worth it," which he won’t finish until the end of the stanza, so just keep this thought in mind.Now Prufrock talks as if he has already passed up on his opportunity to do that important thing. Time in the poem continues to play tricks on us.To roll it toward some overwhelming question, To have squeezed the universe into a ball To have bitten off the matter with a smile, And would it have been worth it, after all,Īmong the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
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