Essay Database

Lines 1-36 Summary: J. Alfred Prufrock, a presumably middle-aged, intellectual, indecisive man, invites the reader along with him through the modern city. He describes the street scene and notes a social gathering of women discussing Renaissance artist Michelangelo. He describes yellow smoke and fog outside the house of the gathering, and keeps insisting that there will be time to do many things in the social world. Analysis: The title of the poem is Eliot's first …

… Eliot's final mock-allusion to yet another Renaissance artist (after Dante and Michelangelo). Petrarch unrequitedly mooned after his love, Laura, but Prufrock, whose name sounds much like Petrarch's, does not even have an unattainable ideal love. He has unattainable, frustrated, paralyzed desire for all women who reject him; they are all inaccessible, and any reminder of the social world ("human voices") drowns him - and, he hopes, his reader-as-Dante - deeper in his watery Hell.