Contents: IntroductionPoem Text Poem Summary Themes Critical Overview Criticism Sources For Further Study |
Style
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” begins with an epigraph, a quote that sets the tone for the poem to follow. This epigraph, included in the poem in the original Italian, is from Dante’s Divine Comedy. Its use here emphasizes Eliot’s belief in the instructive function of poetry, as well as his conviction that it was a poet’s responsibility to be aware of and build on the established tradition of poetry.
This poem (exclusive of the epigraph) is structured into four sections, with each section separated by an ellipsis, a mark used in conventional punctuation to indicate an omission, but used here to signal either time passing between thoughts relevant to the subject under consideration, or information considered too obvious to be included.
Eliot’s belief that “No verse is free for the serious poet” is apparent in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” This poem is written in free verse with varying line lengths, but Eliot employs rhyme as a major structural component in its composition.
In fact, in the 131 lines of the main poem structure, only 12 lines are unrhymed. Note the pattern of the rhyme in the first stanza, beginning “Let us go then, you and I....”: a couplet — an unrhymed line — a series of three couplets — an unrhymed line — a couplet. Such a pattern serves to establish coherence in the stanza, as well as to create a distinctive music.
Eliot also found repetition useful to establish rhythms of ideas as well as sound rhythms. Note the repetition of the word “time” in the two stanzas beginning “And indeed there will be time....” in the first section.
Conventional punctuation and sentence structure are used in this poem, but capital letters at the beginnings of lines stress lineation, thus balancing the importance of the sentence with the importance of the line. While Eliot maintained that poetry should conform to current conversational speech, he emphasized the musical qualities of speech, as well as the imagistic and symbolic possibilities of words, by his use of lineation.
The varying line lengths and stanza lengths of this poem are indicative of Eliot’s refusal to impose a form on the thoughts and emotions at the center of the composition. It was not his purpose to discover or create a new form for poetry, but to free the poet from set forms in order to allow each poem to create its own form — in this case a “love song” which Eliot sings onto the page for the reader.
