Blog #2

Colette Weese

Allusions in “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock”

None of the allusions in T.S. Eliot’s “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock” is optimistic. Rather, they are all ways for the narrator to minimize himself, and to convince himself of his futility and the futility of talking to a woman at a party.

The first allusion comes in line 29, when the narrator says there will be “time for all the works and days of hands” (Eliot, line 29). Here, “works and days” references Hesiod’s 8th century B.C. poem by that name, which celebrated farm work, one of the many necessary toils of the ancient world. This allusion subtly adds to the narrator’s own sense of irony because he is saying that his greatest toil, or exhausting labor, is socializing, whereas the people for whom “Works and Days” was written lived lives of actually exhausting physical labor. With this early allusion, the narrator invites the reader to his world in which he both hyperbolizes his problems and diminishes his right to be concerned.

The next allusion, found in line 52, references Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night,” with the line “I know the voices dying with a dying fall.” In his opening lines, Orsino says that he hears music with a “dying fall” that reminds him of his unrequited love for a woman. This sets up a parallel structure in which, if the reader understands the reference before continuing with the poem, they should know that the narrator’s aspirations to ask out a woman will probably end with a “dying fall,” just like Orsino’s relationship.

After providing a prediction for how his interaction with the woman will unfold, the narrator references the killing of St. John the Baptist, saying “Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter,/I am no prophet, and here’s no great matter” (82-83). St. John the Baptist was killed because a woman asked for his head on a platter, and here the narrator once again explains how he thinks this woman will deny him, and points out his physical insecurities while he does.

His head is never “brought in upon a platter” because the narrator tells the reader that he did not speak to her, in the next stanza which contains two allusions. Eliot writes, “Would it have been worth while,//...To have squeezed the universe into a ball/To roll it toward some overwhelming question,/To say: ‘I am Lazarus, come from the dead” (91-95). The first allusion about squeezing “the universe into a ball” references Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress,” in which a man is asking a woman to roll their “strength” and “sweetness” into a ball and hurl it at the “iron gates of life” (Marvell, lines 41-42). Marvell’s poem focuses on a man who is expounding on his desire for a woman, and here, Eliot’s narrator is once again being overly dramatic about his predicament in order to justify his failure to talk to the object of his (unvoiced) affection. Then, he references Lazarus, who in the gospel of John is brought back from the dead, and in the gospel of Luke, a different man named Lazarus is a beggar. Eliot’s narrator is not brought back from the dead, and so he must be Lazarus the beggar, desperately wishing that the woman will respond positively to the attraction that he never confessed. Again, he is talking down on himself.

The consistently negative allusions focus on death, denial, and what the narrator will not achieve. Together, they amplify the self-deprecating tone of Eliot’s poem, while also highlighting the folly of the narrator’s obsession over a interaction that is not nearly as grave as the situations in which the alluded characters found themselves.