Imagery

T.S. Elliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

By: Ann MacAulay

English 230

Intro to Literature

Imagery in Poetry

• Using a different language provides illusion and wonder

S`io credesse che mia risposta fosse A persona che mai tornasse al mondo, Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.Ma perciocchè giammai di questo fondo Non tornò vivo alcun, s'i'odo il vero,Senza tema d'infamia ti rispondo.

Elliot uses images like “half-deserted streets,” “cheap hotels” and “sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells”

“Streets that follow like a tedious argument Of insidious intentTo lead you to an overwhelming question…”

“Yellow smoke” and “Window-panes” is repeated in poem

“The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes”

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;

Elliot speaks of time and indecisions/visions and revisions

“There will be time, there will be time”

Elliot compares the male and female images

• Male (himself/narrator of poem)

-this arms, baldness

-growing old

• Female (lover/wife)

-white arms

-perfume

“Arms that are braceleted and white and bare”“But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!”

Is it perfume from a dress

That makes me so digress?

The narrator longs to be understood.

“That is not what I meant at all,

That is not it, at all”

Growing old and thought of as a fool.

“Almost, at times, the Fool.

I grow old…I grow old…

…and we drown.”

T.S. Elliot

1915