He may get down with his morning coat, with his collar rising stiffly up to his chin and an expensive but unpretentious tie secured with a plain pin. The women will comment on his baldness in the middle and the thinning hair. But he still ruminates over his condition.

There is still time for him to retrace his steps, get down the steps, to leave the place. There will still be time for him to ask himself whether he dare voice his intention to the lady of his choice, whether he has the guts to do so. The scene of the drawing room gets repeated with the same condition of women who enter and leave and talk of Michelangelo. There is time for all and yet there will be time for wavering a hundred times, for deciding and revising the decision before he gets into the posh room to take toast and tea. All his efforts end in the overwhelming question. However, this is apparently a parallelism but in fact it is a contrast because Prufrock never works strenuously like the farmers. There will be time to work hard through the day as the farmer’s life is depicted in Hesiod’s poem. He will have time to make plans and unmake them. He repeats the phrase “There will be time” several times in the poem revealing his timidity and inability to act. The speaker returns to his plight and avers that there will be plenty of time for the yellow smoke that slithers through the length of the street chafing its back against the windowpanes, and for him too there will be enough time to get made up and ready in the green room to encounter the faces of the women in the drawing room. The image of the fog cat progresses and sliding by the terrace it moved to the terrace, jumped up suddenly and noticing the weather of October, drowsily went round the house and curled itself to sleep. It gets darker and the black powdery soot falls on it from the chimneys. Gradually it spreads further and stays behind in the pools formed in the drains. So he says, Oh, do not ask, “What is it?” The speaker suggests that they pay their visit to the room where posh women of high society meet and speak of the artist Michelangelo because it is fashionable to do so.Īs the evening progresses the yellow smoke like the collecting mist intrudes into the corners of the room from the window-panes. The argument within leads to the irresistible question which he does not want to speak of at that time.

The winding streets through which they traverse are as boring and tiresome as the arguments in his mind about the intimidating purpose. The cheap restaurants use sawdust on the floor instead of carpets and contain shell ashtrays. In “one-night cheap hotels Eliot refers to unfulfilled sexual relationship in the past. Poor people who take refuge there spend sleepless nights, muttering in their sleep. There are cheap hotels where rooms are available for rent on a daily night basis. The streets they walk through are half deserted because the day’s work is over. The speaker and his other self move out in the evening, when all is calm like the unconscious patient lying on a table, on whom surgery is to be conducted. The words could also mean the speaker and his other self which would mean that the poet contemplates over his pathetic plight. “You and I” in the opening line may include the reader, suggesting that one can realize the significance of Prufrock’s problems only by moving along with him. But Prufrock reiterates some phrases and gets back to some central notions as the poem develops. As the reader is expected to hear his words, the poem appears to lack clarity on first reading. The prologue to the poem is a passage from Dante’s Inferno which implies that Prufrock is akin to the dammed and he ventures to speak only because he is certain that none will overhear him. Prufrock wishes to talk of love to a woman but he is not bold enough to do so. The title itself is ironical as the poem is not like the usual love song. They suffer from a sense of loneliness and isolation and have difficulty in making decisions.

The city bred speaker of this ironic dramatic monologue, Prufrock, is like most other of his type in that age.

Love song of j alfred prufrock summary