The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

March 8, 2011

Hope and Despair. Transformation and Chaos.

These are the words I’m supposed to be typing into forms describing a writing workshop this summer.

It’s cold and gray outside, still bleak.

Winter appears still to be winning. So does despair.

Why is it, I wonder, that I’ve often found my way back to hope in reading poems that should take me anywhere but back to hope, poems that show a world entirely without hope or direction or purpose?

Having spent more time in the woods and at Friday night football games than with poetry prior to college, I was introduced to T.S. Eliot for the first time by Stanley Crowe, a Romantics specialist in the English Department of Furman. And though Eliot became a person of faith later on in his adult life, my favorite of his poems is his earlier “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” with its haunting insecurity and desperation.

Here’s the beginning. No doubt you’re already familiar with it, but I hope it helps jump-start your own writing or composing or painting or creating today….

“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

by T. S. Eliot

Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherized upon a table;

Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,

The muttering retreats

Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels

And sawdust restaurants with oyster shells:

Streets that follow like a tedious argument

Of insidious intent

To lead you to an overwhelming question…

Oh do not ask, “What is it?”

Let us go and make our visit.

 

In the room the women come and go

Talking of Michelangelo.

 

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the windowpanes,

The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the windowpanes

Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,

Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,

Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,

Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap….

 

Read the rest of the poem here.


And let us know if T. S. Eliot helped spur YOUR creative process….

 

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Posted by Joy Jordan-Lake | Filed Under Becoming a Writer: We're all in This Together--By Ourselves, Story and the Search for Meaning, Writing in the Midst of Real Life 

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  1. card magic says:
    October 11, 2011 at 6:22 pm

    We took a trip to vegas last May and this street magician did the most eye popping trick in my own hand. He put a fork in my hand and it started bending by itself. I finally found a video of this same trick here. Amazing – Magic Trick

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