The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Prufrock is the poems speaker and it seems to me that he is addressing someone that he loves a lot or significant other, with whom he would like to get to know better by somehow consummating their relationship. But Prufrock is smart and is nervous about approaching this woman he is talking about. In his mind he hears comments that people are saying about how he is not good enough for the woman he is after, and he is almost embarrassed that he thought he had any chance with that woman or emotional interaction could be possible at all. The poem moves from a scene of concrete physical settings a cityscape and several interiors like women’s arms in the lamplight, coffee spoons, fireplaces to a series of not clear ocean images conveying Prufrock’s emotional distance from the world as he comes to recognize his second rate status. Prufrock is powerful for its range of intellectual reference and also for the vividness of character achieved.