關於ts eliot

Reading T.S Eliot is always a great pleasure for me. His poems made me realize one thing as for reading poems; that understanding the meaning behind every single word is not a necessity. Of course, I am not claiming we should neglect the meaning and motifs behind the words. What I am trying to say is that by simply reading out loud the words and the lines would cause us great excitement as well. To me, excitement is just not enough a word to describe the joy that reading poems brings. I would say it is an orgasm. Reading poetry is an orgasm for our teeth, our lips, our palate, and our tongue. (Am I being crazy?)

T.S Eliot’s poems were never easy to understand. I have tried to read “The Waste Land” but I failed. I could not even finish it. Well, this time we have “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, “The Boston Evening Transcript”, “Journey of the Magi” and “Preludes”. I like “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” the most. I would choose the first twenty lines to discuss, which leads the whole reading of the poem. The very first three lines are just too beautifully written: “Let us go then you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherised upon a table” As I read it out loud, hearing the rhyming “I” and “sky”, I just could not help but wear a subtle smile on my face. A mere laughter just came to me, like a possession. Right after this amazing line comes the most powerful line (as my consideration): “Like a patient etherized upon a table”. The line brings us to a gloomy ambiance, an ambiance that has the smell of death. I love this line, which is the most marvelous depiction of a sky. When we look at the sky, we may start to have a sense of nostalgia, we may feel the situation of the fact of things are ephemeral. But the sky is always high up there upon us, we would never think of it as an object being “upon a table” and personified, that is, being “etherised”. This would be a reverse of space, to put the infinite sky upon a table, and make it die. I was wondering, what would happen if we could pull the sky down and destroy it? Why would the speaker want to etherise the sky? Why not just smash it into pieces but to etherise it, to let it die slowly? As my own interpretation, sky may be a symbol of dreams, fulfillment, and broaden space. On the other hand, the sky may also be a symbol of melancholy feelings, such as what I just mentioned: nostalgia, ephemeral, losing, and so forth. The speaker ejaculating the sky is like a patient being etherised upon a table might be suggesting eliminating the dreams and hopes. Being despair. It could be the other situation, that to kill the despair, or to kill the negative feelings.

Then the speaker changes his view from the sky to the street. “Let us go” again. I think this is interesting. My own interpretation is that the speaker, J. Alfred Prufrock is being alone. It is like a monologue going on, saying, “let us go”. I have a very strong feeling, or empathy to this “Let us go then you and I ”. No matter we travel or just simply wandering around the road, whenever we are alone, we may wish that our beloved were able to accompany us. To see beautiful things with our lover is euphoria. Beautiful things always make me a bit gloomy and sentimental, I always desire to have somebody being beside me and appreciate the beauty. I also have a fantasy, an ideal, which is to have a boyfriend (sorry, I do not intent to come out as this way) lying on the bed and listen to my poems reading. I love to share poems with anyone, but actually there is not much that appreciates the beauty of a poem. What a shame. Being a love song, this poem may be a pour out of the speaker. This is the reason I feel great empathy toward the speaker. I am saying too much. Back to the view of the street, we can see that the street is quite dejected and crestfallen by the lines “The muttering retreats of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels And sawdust restaurants with oyster shells”. Maybe we can rephrase these lines as “The muttering of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels and sawdust restaurants with oyster shells retreats”, so that it become easier to understand. Well, I do not know whether I am right or not. I just know retreat from, and retreat to; I never knew what is retreat of. Then the speaker begins to ask himself questions, and it is the street causes his questioning. “Streets that follow like a tedious argument Of insidious intent To lead you to an overwhelming question”, just right after the “overwhelming question” the speaker tells himself “Oh, do not ask what is it ”. Such a riddle would trigger our reader’s curiosity, yes, what is it? Well, by just seeing the coming line “Let us go and make your visit”, we can see that the speaker is a bit anxious about the visit he is attending. After the line “In the room the women come and go talking of Michelangelo” comes the “yellow fog” part. I think the yellow flog is suggesting the air pollution, dusty and stagnant air just perfectly fits the dejected street scene. Well, I am not an expert of modernism, but I can feel that there is a sense of modernism. In modernism poetry we can see elements of the city, things that are close to your life, things on the street. I do not really know why, but the atmosphere of modernism always seems to be gloomy, quite dark and depressing. The yellow fog, sawdust restaurants build this scene that matched my imagination and impression of modernism. There are some modernism writers came into my mind: William Faulkner, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce. These are all writers famous of the skill of “stream of consciousness”. To simplify, I would say the skill is sort of a monologue (maybe not so precise). I think the stream of consciousness is disintegrating the chronological system (not showing off, Benji in The Sound and The Fury is a great example). The speaker, J. Alfred Prufrock is also making a monologue, let is go then you and I.

Another thing I found interesting is Prufrock’s ambivalent and contradicted attitude toward the visit, to the place where “The women come and go talking of Michelangelo”, by the lines “My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin, My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin”. It shows that Prufrock does care about the visit, or he would not be well dressed. He cares about how he looks in the visiting, worrying about people might say, “How his hair is growing thin”. But we cannot claim that Prufrock likes the visit. “To prepare a face to meet the faces you meet, There will be time to murder and create” is like a complaint of being pretentious, the face needs to be “prepared” to meet the “faces”, to murder the real self and to create a new one to meet the people. This is really tedious, it is tedious to social and meet people we do not really like.

I also like the atmosphere of sea in the end, the mermaid part. The lines somehow remind me of Joyce’s Ulysses (of course I never finished this thick and difficult novel). I remember there is a chapter the protagonist (Stephan, if I did not remember it wrong) is walking along the sea, and lots of thoughts come to his mind. He sees the green color of the sea, and the green reminds him of his mother’s death. There are beautiful depicts of the sea in Ulysses, and it is somehow related to death. In “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, we can feel the atmosphere of death as well, “Till human voice wakes us, and we drown”. As the moment finish reading this line, I sighed a little bit, with some tristesse. We do drown in the water that we never wanted to be in. Sigh.