Essay On The Love Song Of J Alfred Prufrock

It is impossible to read a piece of literature the same as another person. Every internal voice reads with a different pace, tone, and attitude, which can slightly alter the interpretation of the same piece of literature. Music, however, decreases the opportunity to be interpreted differently. The vocal influxes and beat of the music allow for an audience to understand the music in the tone the producer intends, rather than starting off with a blank slate and trying to determine a genre from just words. Music still presents different meanings to people, but overall, the genre determined by the creator of the song limits the amount of interpretation done by the audience, causing the overall message to be less controversial. The poem The Love

T. S. Eliot’s poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock takes careful reading and interpretation to draw one of several meanings from the text. The opening lines, “Let us go then, you and I,/When the evening is spread out against the sky/Like a patient etherized upon a table,” (Eliot ll. 1-3) presents the sharply contrasted mental images of a beautiful night to an anesthetized patient on an operating table. With only words to create images, the tone of the poem is unclear from the beginning, creating a difficulty going forward with the rest of the poem. When Eliot writes “Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels,” (Eliot l. 6) and, “In the room the women come and go/Talking of Michelangelo,” (Eliot ll.13-14) it is unclear whether his mention of women is in relation to the one-night cheap hotels, or he has switched topics. The confusion of the beginning lines carries into the remainder of the poem, evoking different perceptions based upon the initial mental images Eliot provides. Keeping the mental image of a beautiful evening, his poem points to knowledgeable women discussing art history and enjoying quiet nights. However, if the reader keeps the mental image of a patient on an operating table, the mood of the poem shifts. The women are no longer elegant and knowledgeable, but prostitutes making short visits to a dingy hotel room, causing Prufrock a restless night. The amalgamation of facts provided to the audience can be analyzed with a blissful or bothersome approach, among others, to provide numerous meanings to Eliot’s words. The reader decides the tone the poem is read in, and therefore, has more of an opportunity to discover different meanings within the