Like many literature / Ela teachers know it, Ts Eliot J. Alfred Prufrock’s love song It is worth teaching for a certain number of reasons, mood and narrative form in the voice, tone and internal monologue.
The images and the language (diction) of the poem even make it useful to explore relative ideas such as rejection, overcharging and social anxiety.
This animated version visualizes and underlines how the imagery establishes and underlines the atmosphere, and, of course, vice versa.
The love text of J. Alfred Prufrock Text and Audio read by the author
Eliot’s references to Dante, Shakespeare and the Bible make teaching on allusions and inter-textual references discussion on how authors overlap the meaning and rely on existing texts (something that music can also be used to do).
See below for the full version of The song of Loves by J. Alfred Prufrock Full text recording and audio read by the author
The Lovevesong of J. Alfred Prufrock by TS Eliot (1915)
If I thought my answer was
To the person who has never returned to the world,
This flame of storium without shocks.
But for what this background is Giammai
I am not coming back to anything, if the truth,
Without the theme of infamy, I answer you.
—Dant, HellCanto 27
Let us go then, you and me,
When the evening is distributed against the sky
Like an ethereal patient on a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserved streets,
Mapping up pensions
Agitated nights in cheap hotels overnight
And sawdust restaurants with oyster committees:
The streets that follow as a tedious argument
Of an insidious intention
To lead you to an overwhelming question …
Oh, don’t ask: “What is it?”
Let us visit.
In the room, women come and go
Talking about Michelangelo.
The yellow fog that rubs the back on the window panels,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window panels
Licked the tongue in the corners of the evening,
Land on the pools held in the drains,
Drop on her back the soot that falls from the chimneys,
Slipped near the terrace, suddenly jumps,
And see that it was a sweet night in October,
Curlled once in the house and fell asleep.
And indeed there will be time
For yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rub your back on the scanners;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces you encounter;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all works and hands of hands
Who raises and drops a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time for another hundred indecision,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before taking a toast and tea.
In the room, women come and go
Talking about Michelangelo.
And indeed there will be time
Ask yourself, “Do I dare?” And, “Do I dare?”
It’s time to go back and go down the stairs,
With a bald stain in the middle of my hair –
(They will say: “How her hair becomes thin!”)
My morning coat, my necklace rises firmly to the chin,
My rich and modest tie, but asserted by a simple pin –
(They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”)
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute, there is time
For decisions and revisions that an inverse minute will.
Because I already know them all, knew them all –
Have known the evenings, the mornings, the afternoons,
I measured my life with teaspoons;
I know the voices that die with a dying fall
Under the music of a furthest room.
So how should I presume?
And I have already known my eyes, I knew them all –
The eyes that repair you in a formulated sentence,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and I wiggle on the wall,
So how should I start
To spit all the buttons of my days and my ways?
And how should I presume?
And I already knew my arms, I knew them all –
Brasollets and white and naked
(But under the light of the lamp, shot down with light brown hair!)
Is it the scent of a dress
Does that make me get lost so much?
The arms that are along a table or wrap a shawl.
And should I then presume?
And how should I start?
I have to say, I went to twilight in narrow streets
And looked at the smoke that rises from the pipes
Solitary men in the shirts, you lean over the windows? …
I should have been a pair of shreds
According to the floors of the silent seas.
And in the afternoon, in the evening, sleeps so peacefully!
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep … tired … or it clever,
Stretched on the ground, here next to you and me.
Should I, after tea, cakes and ice creams,
Do you have the strength to force the moment to his crisis?
But although I cried and fast, cried and prayed,
Although I saw my head (slightly bald) brought to a tray,
I am not the prophet – and here is the big question;
I saw the moment of my flicker of my greatness,
And I saw the eternal foot holding my coat and sneering,
And in short, I was afraid.
And that would have argued, after all,
After the cups, marmalade, tea,
Among porcelain, among a few words from you and me,
Would it have been valid,
For having bitten the question with a smile,
For having tightened the universe in a ball
To roll it up to an overwhelming question,
Saying: “I’m Lazarus, I come from the dead,
Come back to tell you everything, I will tell you everything ”-
If one, adjust a pillow by the head,
Should say, “This is not at all what I meant.
That’s not it at all.
And that would have argued, after all,
Would it have been valid,
After the sunsets and the hairstyles and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the tea cups, after the skirts hanging along the ground –
And this, and much more? –
It is impossible to say what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
It would have been worth it
If one, adjust a pillow or throw a shawl,
And turning to the window, should say:
“It’s not at all,
This is not at all what I meant.
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, and I was not supposed to be;
Am a lord attendant, who will
To inflate progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; Without a doubt, an easy tool,
Defense, happy to be useful,
Political, prudent and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a little obtuse;
Sometimes, in fact, almost ridiculous –
Almost sometimes the madman.
I get older … I get older …
I will wear the bottom of my rolled pants.
Do I have to separate my hair? Do I have to eat a fishing?
I will wear white flannel pants and I will walk on the beach.
I heard the sirens sing, everyone.
I don’t think they will sing me.
I saw them getting to the sea on the waves
Comb white hair of the waves which is postponed backwards
When the wind blows the white and black water.
We dwell in the rooms of the sea
By sea girls wrapped with red and brown algae
Until the human voices wake us up and we are drowning.
Full text version; The love text of J. Alfred Prufrock Text and Audio read by the author
