Sunday, April 09, 2006

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

This poem confused me quite a bit. At first I thought that the narrator was talking about going to heaven with the one he loved, especially when he says,"Time to turn back and descend the stair", but somehow that idea doesn't fit into the way he talks about "the yellow fog", almost like a hound. As the poem progressed, however, I came to think differently about the poem. I thought of the narrator more as an old and wise man who has come to understand the disillusionment of mankind, but in his indecision keeps this insight to himself. In this way, the "yellow fog" transformed into the ethereal representation of that disillusionment, causing a haze to distort the true meaning of life for the women who "come and go/ Talking of Michelangelo." In the end, the man seems to come to something of a conclusion that this disillusionment is the inevitable path of life, and there is nothing his little insight can do to change that inevitability.

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