Meeting Prufrock

No doubt it's bad form to reference T.S. Eliot two days in a row, but I'm going to do it anyway. (And it probably won't be the last time I do so -- his work is uncannily applicable to everything in life.)

By far my favorite work by Eliot is the much acclaimed "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock". I couldn't count how many times I've read and re-read it to myself, to friends, to anyone who would listen; or how many times I've worked various quotes from this piece into conversation, hoping that someone would catch my allusion. And despite many arguments I've heard to the contrary, I've always found this poem full of hope. Perhaps I'm guilty of some literary narcissism here, of looking into a work and seeing my own reflection instead of the author's words, but I have viewed the piece more as a warning than a resignation. And in light of Eliot's own trajectory as a poet and human being, I like to think he would have also seen it this way;. Prufrock's questions are Eliot's and my own, but the answer the poet and I come to is not the same as his. In penning the line, "It is impossible to say just what I mean", Eliot so poignantly disproved the exact point he was attempting to make, and he continued to do so in future works, continued to wield the words and bend them to his will, sometimes failing, but always knowing that it was worth it after all. Prufrock, then, is only a shadow, a thing that would have been had Eliot not been a poet and a man. I will grant you that I'm bringing some fairly large assumptions to my formation of this hope-filled reading of the text, but I stand by it just the same.

Or at least I would have until today.

Today I met Prufrock. I met a man who in the face of the overwhelming question chose not to dare, who resigned himself to being an attendant lord, a scuttling pair of ragged claws, pinned against the wall, but no longer wriggling. And the saddest part was the resignation itself. "It's not depressing," he said. "It's realistic." And he found some comfort in that, I think. A comfort that to me seemed more like misery.

I realized as he spoke that though we both love this poem, it is really two different poems that we love. I caught a glimpse of his version, and I do now see the sadness others have always told me was there. Sadly I think I will always see it now, and while part of me resents him this effect, I also see that I owe him my compassion. He has decided the mermaids will not sing to him.