T. S. Eliot was writing about the mundane drudgery of life. Watching the smog roll in "The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes", and those little routines that rule our lives "I have measured out my life with a coffee spoon". He is also writing about the realization that he has fairly ordinary, "No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be".
It can be a difficult realization that your nothing special and that most of the of your life has been pretty boring. I think that Eliot is writing about a middle aged man who has come to accept that about himself. He opens up the poem by comparing himself to an anesthetized surgical patient. Then he ends by saying that to be awakened from our trivial lives is to die.
The poem did have a really dry sense of humor and was very unpresumptuous. T. S. Eliot had way of writing about life almost like an outsider looking in. One thing that cracked me up was him constantly going back to the fact that he was going bald. This poem and all of the reading left me feeling sort of disconnected. They were incredibly depressing in odd way that I can't quite put my finger on.
I like how he compares himself and realizes that he is just an ordinary guy Go T.S. Elliot! Nice Post!
ReplyDeleteI am glad someone decided to tackle Eliot. What I like about this poem is that is very tangible and also very elusive: he uses concrete scenes and actions, and yet he depicts his mindset in blips of thoughts that are hard to piece together. So, no wonder you can't put your finger on why it is depressing; I think the narrator can't seem to put his finger on it either.
ReplyDeleteI just realized, Prufrock is totally a name that an American who's lived in the UK would make up for an Englishman.
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