John Berryman began an essay on "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by observing that the second half of the title tends to undercut the first, since "J. Alfred Prufrock" doesn't sound like a singer of love songs: he'd be too buttoned up, "too well dressed." The effect of the title, however faint, is then bluntly reproduced in the first three lines:
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky,
Like a patient etherized upon a table.
The first two lines create an expectation—they sound "poetic," there is a nice rhyme, the scene is picturesque—and this expectation is then smashed by the third line, a fake and brutal simile.
Berryman doesn't mention that Eliot's other famous poem, "The Waste Land," begins with the same kind of undercutting action. I'm pretty sure that April is National Poetry Month on account of the ebullient opening to The Canterbury Tales, the greatest work of English literature in the Middle Ages:
Whan that April with his showres soote
The droughte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veine in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendered is the flowr;
Whan Zephyrus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halve cours yronne,
And smale fowles maken melodye
That sleepen al thee night with open yë—
So priketh hem Nature in hir corages—
Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages. . . .
I quote it at length the better to convey the dull thud with which "The Waste Land" opens:
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter is like the etherized patient, unable to feel anything, a desirable state in the world according to TS Eliot since, unlike in The Canterbury Tales, you aren't apt to feel anything pleasing anyway. It's fun to think that Eliot, assuming he intended the sense of double take Berryman detected in the phrase "love song of J. Alfred Prufrock," may have been connecting himself to his antihero: WH Auden's first name was Wystan, and who wants to go by that, but Eliot's was Thomas. In an essay he described himself as "classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and Anglo-Catholic in religion"—sounds like a right-winger dressed up in tweeds, not Tom Eliot who was born in St. Louis. My inclination to dislike him is mitigated almost entirely by the suspicion that he was capable of self-mockery and also because he loved Mark Twain and Adventures of Huck Finn, which I once noted, here.
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