T.S. Eliot

[curlyqlink]

I've been reading T.S. Eliot's Prufrock and The Waste Land. Very impressive. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock strikes me as a perfect anti-carpe diem poem, all about hesitation and preemptive regret and not-- as the horrible advertising world has it-- "just doing it".

Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

There is a delightful and insightful mixing of the profound and the trivial going on here, with the mention of toast and tea. And again:

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons

Eliot does not shy away from the trivial aspect of life in this poem, which yet is anything but trivial.

He hammers away with the phrase, "do I dare?"

And indeed there will be time
To wonder, "Do I dare?" and, "Do I dare?"
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair

and again,

Do I dare
Disturb the universe?

There is something terribly honest in the anti-heroic tone. It is the very opposite of glib triumphalism.

[JBI]

Also, the rhymes are ironic rhymes, in the sense that they are there to ironize poetry in general, and to mock formalism.

The poem is fantastic; did you happen to read an annotated copy, or just the text? There are many literary allusions throughout, besides the Dante one in the beginning, and the Marvell running through the whole thing.

Also, the troubling part of the poem is deciding a) where Prufrock is, and b) who he is speaking to, if anyone.