“A Patient Etherized upon a Table” The Love

“A Patient Etherized Upon A Table”
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock deals with the theme of alienation, which is an outcome of modern life. Before the out break of the First World War, English poetry which portrayed the crisis in modern civilization was a part of the social, economical, moral and intellectual crisis in England and Western Europe. In the words of Leavis, it represents a complete break with the 19th century tradition and a new start.

In the modern society, people like Prufrock find it difficult to preserve their identity. Prufrock has a spiritual vacuum. He endeavours to improve his position in the society by better clothing. The poet brings out a contrast between the early life of Prufrock and his later life. He, like Hamlet, oscillates and easily drifts into a reverie. He is unable to meet women and make amorous advances. In a way, he is drowned in the sea of reality. Through certain powerful images, the poet brings out the identity crisis of Prufrock.

Prufrock’s passivity is portrayed by means of the image of a patient etherised upon a table. In the words of the poet

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the Sky
Like a patient etherized upon table;

This image reflects the twentieth century scientific advancement in which man has lost his essential identity and is at the mercy of science for the restoration of that identity. In the words of George Williamson: Prufrock sees evening in the aspect of etherisation, and the metaphor of etherisation.....suggests the desire for inactivity to the point of enforced release from pain.

The evening stands for Prufrock’s sickness and the colour which can express this idea is yellow, the traditional colour that symbolizes disease and decay.

In the room the Women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo. (13-14)

Common women without any knowledge of art discuss the great artist Michelangelo. They cannot estimate the value of the artist. Prufrock selects a place for his destination, the place that cannot solve his emotional problems. This again denotes the hypocrisy and the snobbery of the modern city dwellers.

The poet finds fault with the modern urban society and its mechanical ways of living that leads one into the world of illusions and to the loss of one’s identity. An excessive dry intellect and the lack of emotional experience account for the shallow and the self-evasive behaviour, which produce a sense of boredom. So like an able surgeon the poet wants to operate on the ulcer of the present society.

Oh! do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit. (11-12)

This shows the need for meaning in life. It also suggests one’s decisiveness to act but what is despicable is inactivity.

The Yellow fog that rubs its upon the window - panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window - panes,
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains, —

Here ‘the imagery of yellow fog’ throws light on the inactive mental state of Prufrock. The words ‘cat’ and ‘yellow’ suggest inactivity that evokes in him a feeling of the loss of his personality. Cats are not active during the daytime. ‘Yellow’ signifies Autumn and withering Spring. Night follows evening. Night is a symbol of death. Naturally, the ageing of Prufrock is not the right time for love affairs. Williamson makes the following observation on the imagery of fog and cat:

With the fog as a cat, we have another reflection of his mental state; desire which ends in inertia. If the cat image suggests sex it also suggests the greater desire of inactivity. The speaker sees the evening in aspects of somnolence or of action lapsing into inaction, both artificial and natural sleep and etherisation.

Action or inaction, decision or indecision are concepts related to time. Here the time imagery is brought into the theme of mental indecision and the desire for escape.

And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street
Rubbing its upon the window - panes;
There will be time, there will be time
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.                   (23-39)

These lines hint at the indecision of the protagonist who finds relief in postponement. The reference of time sharpens the state of his mental indecision. Escape is good until the crucial moment when the question arises. Though the protagonist is indecisive, he says that he may act in future. He acts not according to his wish but according to what others have made of him. So he is alienated from his own self and has become a man who has lost his sense of identity. He cannot take any major decision.

In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse. (47-48)

Convinced of his incompetence and impotency, he would prefer to compromise with time, which would be far easier than confrontation with it. He knows that time allows but little consciousness. Where the human breeds the inhuman and where there is death in every moment of life.

For I have known them all already, known them all
­Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons; (49-51)

Prufrock cannot face the reality. He fails to assert his true self because he has lost the redeeming features in his personality. He has become a play thing of other selves which hold him in complete sway such as arms that are white and bare, light brown hair, perfume–suggest the theme of fragility and superficiality of his life. The life of outward appearances is revealed in the following lines:

And I have known the arms already, known them all –
­Arms that are bracelated and white and bare
(But in that lamplight, downed with light brown hair!)
Is it a perfume from a dress
That makes so digress? (62-66)

Here he does not assert his identity. He instead, prefers to surrender his ‘self’ to the will of others. What makes him digress is his own timidity and self-consciousness. His self-pity and self-disgust fill his inauthentic being.

Prufrock finds that he is impotent. He does not see any means of making existence  concrete. He has become used to regrets and hesitations to do things in his life. His lack of action is in a way a lack of self-realization. T.S. Eliot in his selected essays on Baudelaire remarks that it is action that is important:

So far as we are human, what we do must be either evil or good so far as we do evil or good, we are human; and it is better in a paradoxical way to do evil than to do nothing, at least we exist. It is true to say that the glory of man is his capacity for salvation, it is also true to say that his glory is his capacity for damnation. The worst that we can be said of most of our male factors from statesmen to thieves is that they are not men enough to be damned.

The life around Prufrock is illusory for it presents a vision, a seeming perfect existence.

And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully! (75)

The mind beholds a sense of contentment and the body is satisfied with such trivial things as “tea and cakes and ices.” Here one’s attention is distracted because of the ordinary things. The protagonist returns to the world of non-being to the world of misused possibilities.

Asleep... tired... or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me. (77-78)

There are other images that suggest things that pass into his receptive consciousness.

After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
 Among the porcelain... (88-89)

Perhaps it is a futile exercise on his part to attempt to know the universe. His buried life reaches a mock-heroic counterfeit, the miracle of history. The mocking voice of his rejected self can be heard through the historical imagery.

To say: ‘I am Lazarus, come from the dead, Come to tell you all, I shall tell you all’–­If one, settling a pillow by her head, Should say: ‘That is not what I meant at all. That is not it, at all.’ (94-98)

Prufrock does not make miraculous revelations but he resumes the time-ridden existence, a life of indecisions and revisions and hesitations, which characterize contemporary life. This is illustrated through the hair and peach imagery.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach? (122)
Weariness overtakes Prufrock,
I grow old... I grow old...
 shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. (120-121)

Like Hamlet, the prince of uncertainty, he cannot perform the action, which he may like to perform.

A well-known critic like Elizabeth Drew says:
Mr. Prufrock is an unromantic and unprincley Hamlet in a tragical, comical, historical urban drama where the prison is a divided self in the tortures of neurotic conflict. The love-song as the epigraph implies will never be uttered outside the inferno of his own mind and the ‘you’ and ‘I’ of his soliloquy are the impulses within him to murder and create or to be or not to be concluding neither in suicide nor in the release of a chosen action but in the death-in-life of the abdication of will.

In the last part of the poem, we see the image of drowning. The protagonist is drowned in the sea of reality, reality of sordid and sophisticated life. Grover Smith says:

The reminder of the poem moves towards the image of drowning...Henceforth Prufrock speaks of what would have happened and affirms the improbability of a favourable issue to his suit of their clash with decorous commonplaceness and above all of their unacceptability because they would have brought exposure...

This expression of Grover Smith is almost similar to the one expressed by George Williamson who says:

The imagery of the sea, began with oyster shells, again emerges at this point. It is the imagery of his suppressed self...The lyric note comes with the erotic imagery of mermaids and the hair of the waves recalls the dawn on the lady’s arms. This watery, floating imagery involves the relaxation of all effort and offers a submerged fulfillment.

Here the sea imagery is significant for it develops the theme of emotional frustration. We can possibly say that ‘you’ is not the lady or the second person in the poem. It shows the conflict in the mind of the protagonist. Here the ‘you’ is the amorous self which is suppressed by the timid self. It is to this suppressed self that Prufrock addresses and excuses himself. The song is divided between passion and timidity. So it is never sung in the real world.

Towards the end, Prufrock’s mind fails to perceive the vision evoked by the singing of mermaids. So Prufrock turns to the world of purity, to see if reality could be discovered through fiction. The poet likes to ridicule the sophisticated life of modern man who suffers emotionally. The poet seems to suggest that there is a need for the restoration of the full-blooded and natural being rather than the sophisticated man of today. F. R. Leavis almost reiterates this in his New Bearings.

Prufrock and Portrait of a Lady are concerned with the directly personal embarrassments, disillusions and distress of a sophisticated Youngman.

The life of the modern man who is conscious of his identity needs to be restored. Only then we can call our civilization glorious. If Prufrock is a representative of this civilization, he has also to restore his lost identity, otherwise both the man and modern civilization move towards damnation.

The poem thus, throws light on the identity crisis of the modern man. Like Prufrock, the modern man cannot face the complexities in life. Like Prufrock, the modern man suffers from the loneliness and inaction. There is a chasm between resolution and execution. A wanton woman causes Hamlet a mental agony. The bare arms of the lady and the perfume from her cause similar agony to Prufrock. Modern man’s inability to overcome his suffering, such social, moral or psychological elements is the most central to the poem. So the so-called modern emancipated spirit is in decay. We know this and so we get knowledge and help to reshape our lives, which are obviously in moral confusion, and to restore our unique moral identity.