BackThat is not it, at all
T.S. Eliot's metaphors were gritty because the age had turned gritty; he was writing about a reality that was melancholy and ugly
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Let us go then, you and I,
As you sip your morning chai
This newspaper spread on your breakfast table
Let us go, through tales of horror,
The deepening squalor,
Of death and greed in towns and cities,
Or timid obedience in universities,
Tweets that pretend to be tedious arguments
Of intemperate intent
To lead you to the defining question:
Oh, don’t yet ask, “What the hell?"
Let us pause: there is a story to tell.
Thomas Stearns Eliot wrote a far better poem than what I have attempted above, and he called it The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock. It was published a 100 years ago this month in a magazine called Poetry. Eliot had begun writing the 131-line poem a few years earlier, and it appeared in different forms elsewhere. In June 1915, it was published in this format, and it has not only survived a century, but remains relevant to our age, indeed, any age.
Over time, the poem has come to be regarded as the harbinger of modernity in English poetry.
Old alliances were crumbling in Europe as it had stumbled into the Great War. Decades later, academics continue to dissect and analyse its text for hidden symbols and meanings, setting the stage for the bleak universe the poem witnesses.
The end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th saw not only political ferment but also cultural transformations in Europe.
As Carl E. Schorske’s magnificent book, Fin-de-siècle Vienna notes, the ascendant middle class cultural aristocracy faced its crisis at that time. Impressionism, an art form which emerged partly to reclaim visual art from the growing popularity of photography, had reached its zenith in the late 1880s. Fauvism emerged from that almost as a defiant act in the early 20th century, but a bolder and starker challenge came from Pablo Picasso’s 1907 canvas, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, which pulled the world of art into the 20th century, lifting it from illuminating colours of Impressionism.
Eight years later, Dadaists would use typography and modernity to infuse humour in art. Architecture too would make way from the ornate, decorative motifs of art nouveau to the starkness of Bauhaus.
It was in that cultural milieu that Europe fell apart, sending tremors across Asia and Africa, and it was at just such a time, of uncertainty and desolate pessimism, that Eliot wrote his masterpiece.
It would do to poetry what the artists and architects were doing to their forms—Eliot gave a new voice to verse, pulling poetry from the grip of 19th century romanticism and the innocence of the Georgian lyric to the harsh landscape of an industrialized society, where an evening spreads out like a patient etherized upon the table; where streets follow like tedious arguments of insidious intent; where the yellow fog licks its tongue into the corners of an evening; where Prufrock measures his life in coffee-spoons.
Eliot’s metaphors were gritty because the age had turned gritty; he was writing about a reality that was melancholy and ugly, about life as it was, and not as it had been imagined. Prufrock, as the poem came to be known to generations of students, is one of the finest examples of the dramatic interior monologue, of a man growing older, hesitant and diffident, aware that the world is moving past him, that it is beyond his control, that he must live out his life of quiet desperation, now certain that his attempts at recognition will be unrewarded and thwarted, that his desire for love remain unrequited.
I grow old…I grow old…
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
Eliot’s poem has been immortalized in popular culture, even parodied. In Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 film about the Vietnam War, Dennis Hopper, playing a photographer who has lost his mind, says, as if in trance:
I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
(The film also has another great Eliot poem—when Marlon Brando recited The Hollow Men towards the end of the film). Earlier in Woody Allen’s 1975 film, Love and Death, Boris Grushenko, played by Allen, who prefers philosophy to violence, becomes a reluctant war hero, and at one point reads aloud the same lines and then dismisses it as “too sentimental".
A century later, its appeal endures.
In the rooms, women come and go, talking of Michelangelo. And we continue to squeeze our universe into a ball, and roll it toward some overwhelming question, convinced of our certainties. But more often than not, the one, “settling a pillow by her head," says: “That is not what I meant at all; that is not it, at all."
Salil Tripathi is a writer based in London.
Your comments are welcome at salil@livemint.com. To read Salil Tripathi’s previous columns, go to www.livemint.com/saliltripathi
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