Charles Yu (MBA ’25) revisits a high-school classic, offering fresh analysis and insight into the protagonists’ view and his opportunity, which may ultimately uplift all.
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, 11-12
In his epic The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, T.S. Eliot creates Prufrock, a protagonist who has confounded generations of high school students in the English speaking world. Explanations as to the mixed metaphors, intense imagery, and uncannily coherent logic abound, but an answer to the simplest of questions remains still elusive: what is going on here?
Here’s my take, recently inspired:
Love Song is not unlike a My Take in which Prufrock systematically addresses the collective consciousness of all those he has met in his life as an audience, instead of each one individually. Incidentally, this is both the catharsis of his personal lifelong suffering as well as the principal root cause of it. Perhaps only spinach has more iron in it.
In the microscopic evolution of imagery at the line level –“yellow fog… upon the window panes / yellow smoke… on the window panes” (15-16) – and at the stanza level “I have known… known them all” (49, 55, 62), then “And would it have been worth it, after all” (87, 99) – we have evidence that Prufrock’s is a systematic mind. Prufrock reuses the same familiar structures to communicate new ideas, as if to save the cognitive effort of new structures to enhance the focus on the different ideas that are presented and evolve. One might hypothesize Prufrock the efficient engineer, rational to a fault, in delivering his Love Song.
But who is the “you” (1, 31, 56, 78, 89, 95) to whom his Love Song is addressed? From the wildly shifting tones – enticing in Stanza I, imperious in Stanza II, brooding by Stanza II, etc. – to the disruptively changing context – city streets (Stanzas I-IV), an auditorium (Stanzas V-IX), city streets (Stanza X), bottom of the sea (Stanza XI), etc. – Prufrock’s Song is not one of conventional love directed at a single person. Perhaps this is what has made the poem so preternaturally interesting. But to determine Prufrock’s addressee, we have to look deeper, beyond tone and into attitude, and we may deduce from an attitude, the relationship between Prufrock and his audience, and so finally better speculate as to who that might be.
Pensive one moment, “And indeed there will be time…” (23), grandiose the next, “Time for you and time for me, / And time yet for a hundred indecisions, / And a hundred visions and revisions…” (31-33), then sorrowful, “I should have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across silent seas” (73-74), whimsical, “Should I, after tea cakes and ices / Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?” (79-80), returning to sincere, “And in short, I was afraid” (86), before finishing imperiously, “No! I am not Prince Hamlet” (111), Prufrock’s attitudes shift too quickly to be coherent in a single-threaded one-on-one conversation. We have to consider the alternatives: that Prufrock is speaking to multiple persons throughout the poem, or that he is speaking to himself but that he has a multiple personality disorder.
Keeping it simple and staying with a systematic Prufrock, we can say Prufrock has much to say to many. We have a clue that Prufrock in Stanzas V-IX stands in an auditorium, delivering a speech, “Time to turn back and descend the stair” (39), as if he returns from walking up a staircase into the audience in a moment of intense passion, delivering lines 37-38. Then for the many addressees, one can imagine Prufrock standing on the stage, looking each addressee in turn in the eye as Prufrock trumpets out what he would like to say to them, the deepest feelings held in his bosom, ordinarily restrained, now publicly displayed. How personally cathartic for Prufrock, for it is a highly efficient affair for Prufrock, but also how unhappily unrealistic.
Can you imagine if this address took place in real life, and you were one of the intended recipients of Prufrock’s laments? That he called you out in front of your peers in an auditorium, “(They will say: ‘But how his arms and legs are thin!’)” (44), and without giving you the chance to address his complaints or give any reply, Prufrock moves onto another topic, positing a rhetorical device to evoke sympathy, “Do I dare / Disturb the universe” (45-46)? How might you feel? Voiceless, perhaps dehumanized, and certainly antagonistic towards Prufrock. There’s no evidence in the Love Song of ill-will or malice, so we can best assume that Prufrock may have a lifetime of lost friends and needless enemies purely borne from his imperviousness to his own outside perception – a lack of self-awareness. This would then explain Prufrock’s condemnable state, one of loneliness and isolation.
So we begin to substantiate a sad Prufrock, lonely and frustrated. Prufrock feels lonely, only fantasizing of connection, “Time for you, and time for me… / Before the taking of a toast and tea” (31, 34) and sadly resigning, “I do not think that they will sing to me” (125). Not only outcast, Prufrock appears consistently rejected in spite of his every best effort, unable to much better his fate, “I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. / Shall I part my hair behind?” (121-122). If the title of the poem was not enough evidence on its own, Prufrock is wanting for connection, and through his Love Song he aims to obtain it.
But his means of obtaining connection are somewhat unorthodox. Chained by the “Curse of the Engineer,” appealing with reason where emotion is wanted, Prufrock is parched for the paucity of positivity that he has ever felt, and always wanting to purchase more. And this through an emotionless, transactional framework: Prufrock would procure his connection with others by bartering what value he does control. First, Prufrock entices through curiosity, “do not ask, ‘What is it?’ / Let us go and make our visit.” (11-12), then talking up his worldly wisdom and consequential value, “I have known… known them all” (49, 55, 63), before proposing the transactional value of dispensing some of his wisdom, “... tell you all, I shall tell you all” (95), before again changing the subject without disclosing anything, further enticing the audience with an appeal to their curiosity. In modern parlance, Prufrock could be mistaken for a Pick-Up Artist (PUA) of questionable efficacy.
But like most PUAs, Prufrock’s logical implementation of an emotional appeal delivers him disappointing results. Not only is his continued frustration self-declared, “It is impossible to say just what I mean!” (104), in the end of the poem, Prufrock is still appealing to his audience to accept him, evidently having not won them over. In his final attempt, for the failure of his earlier stratagems, Prufrock is reduced to fearmongering, “and we drown.” (131). And as with most PUAs, the only person successfully deceived by PUA tricks is the PUA himself – that they had any chance of working in the first place.
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, 45-46
Perhaps unaware of the Achilles’ of his own approach – and certainly undeterred – Prufrock would add an epigraph to his Love Song, in one final appeal. Opening in Italian to demonstrate his pontifical intelligence, he discloses his knowledge of a great secret, then hides it in plain sight. In Italian he implies that he knows something that may be told to anyone “not returning to this Earth” (iii) (so anyone but Lazarus), and then posits himself as Lazarus: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead, / Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all” (94-95). Except that he would tell it enciphered and difficult to decipher, so that he “can reply with no fear of infamy” (vi).
And this explains Prufrock’s game of cat-and-mouse hesitation that plays out throughout the piece: the teasing switch-and-baits (10-11, 38-39, 95-96), the refrains of disappointment “that is not it, at all” (98, 109), and the jarring context shifts that punctuate the piece throughout. Prufrock is at once judging his audience’s attempts at unraveling his mystery as inadequate, while enticing, half-encouraging, them to continue to try to win his guessing game. There’s something Prufrock wants his audience to discover, but what?
His indirectness suggests a prohibition on open disclosure that Prufrock is also subject to. Yet Prufrock would disclose verboten knowledge anyway, “because no one has ever returned… from this gulf… I can reply” (iii-v). Perhaps so deeply enciphered in metaphor and allusion, Prufrock’s message is safe from comprehension, such that he may at least technically be in compliance. But who knows Prufrock’s ultimate penalty for this gray-zone transgression – and this sacrifice is Prufrock’s ultimate transactional offer to his audience and the universe at large, one which involves no PUA techniques. It is pure logic: I give you value, so I am valuable, so perhaps worthy, and so would I finally be worthy of your love and acceptance?
Has there been any other inkling of love, except in this pained plea for it, in this Love Song?
Though interpretations abound and all of them are legitimate, this particular interpretation stands out not only because it detects a trace of true love where others don’t, but also because of its constancy throughout a long poem. Throughout this interpretation, Prufrock appears as the same cold, systematic, rational thinker that cannot think his way into love. While each frame of the poem interpreted may be debated, the degree of agreement between all of these separate interpretations is quite high – a test that other interpretations may not live up to as well.
So, with much surfaced from the poem and about its central character, we turn our attention in the rest of this piece to character analysis to see what we may learn. What can we take away for our own benefit?
Firstly, Prufrock misunderstands relationships. Relationships are relational and emotional, and built on an exchange of feelings, not fortuitous facts. While the brick and mortar of a relationship are simple feelings, authentic responses, and the ensuing natural sense of connection, Prufrock has only emotionless yet empirically measurable, substantial value with which to build his house. His whole Love Song is a collection of variegated attempts to barter and thus connect. Alas that such houses that Prufrock builds are not unlike those of sand by the sea.
Then Prufrock is hungry for relationships, and the feeling that they provide. Love, connection, belonging, safety – the opposite qualities of character traits others would divine of Prufrock. He sings such a long Love Song indeed seeking it from his audience and the world, believing that he is deserving and all the world should be providing for his need. But worldly and wise as Prufrock would like us to believe he is, the one place he forgot to look was inside himself, to discover the quietly humble yet eternally effervescent source of all humanity: love begins inside each one of us. It is a choice that starts so simply as: "I love me."
And then, all the world would follow.
Prufrock’s error is that he believes his intellect justifies the connection that he craves, which is logically sound but emotionally not. That’s why we have a long Love Song all but devoid of love.
Prufrock’s folly is to venture with such a long lecture to try to fill the void in his heart. That’s why in the end, Prufrock is reduced to fearmongering for the failure of all his other cajoling.
Prufrock’s foil is that what he believes the world should provide him, but doesn’t: “the mermaids, singing each to each. / I do not think that they will sing to me” (124-125) is actually supposed to come from inside himself. Then only, perhaps he would be included.
So Prufrock’s opportunity is in all the possibilities afforded by the energies previously tied up in his quest for connection, recognized as futile, now freed. Instead of exhausting himself by appealing like an Android to a clique of iPhones, Prufrock could apply the book Art of Possibility by Benjamin and Rosamund Stone Zander to discover happiness and fulfillment, all within himself.
Androids will never be iPhones. You needn’t say that one is better than the other (I’m looking at you iPhone groupies). And you can say that Androids make for great phones nevertheless.
Instead of imploring others to value him and accept him based on his own values, if Prufrock simply appreciated himself – loved himself – he would be freed from the need for approval from others. Then with talent, intellect, worldly experiences and drive, what would such a self-fulfilled Prufrock have to offer the world? The possibilities are for anyone to imagine. Perchance, they may even be appreciated.
So if you’ve ever felt like Prufrock with something to prove, remember that you can always choose to love yourself! It starts so simply, and everything else follows.
But that’s just what I think – what do you think? There are no wrong answers, I’d love to read them all! The best take on Prufrock I have ever heard was only one word: “Incest.” I was in stitches the whole afternoon! So feel free to drop me a line at cyu@mba2025.hbs.edu and hopefully give me a laugh!
Charles Yu (MBA ’25) was born a Beijinger though spent his formative years in The Hague in The Netherlands. He did his bachelor’s and master’s both in Electrical Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Stanford respectively. He then spent 4 years at Amazon and Tesla as a software engineer, before launching his first venture to build a Bloomberg Terminal for retail investors during the Covid-19 pandemic. He loves dogs and running, and hopes to combine these passions one day. He enjoys trying new recipes and visiting cafes, is a casual Go player and aspires to be an eternal student.