The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock Lyrics

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.


And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep … tired … or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me
,
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?

But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen
my head [grown slightly bald] brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet—and here’s no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.


And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,

To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”—
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say: “That is not what I meant at all,
That is not it, at all.”


And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while

After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—

And this, and so much more?—
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:

“That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all.”


No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,

Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.


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.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown

Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

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About

Genius Annotation

T. S. Eliot’s self-described “drama of literary anguish” portrays the social and sexual frustration of a man obsessed with his own inadequacy. Begun in 1910 (when he was 22) and published in 1915, “Prufrock” was Eliot’s breakout masterpiece and almost certainly an expression of his own anxieties: he reported that he was still a virgin at age 26. More than that, the poem reflects a search for authenticity, connection, and the courage to take control of one’s path in life. Arguably, it’s a poem about existentialism and the conundrum of our fate.

No definitive source for the title character’s name has been identified, although there was a Prufrock-Litton furniture store in St. Louis, Missouri at the time Eliot lived there. Comic and fussy-sounding, “Prufrock” seems to combine echoes of “prudishness” and the “frock” of a priest (suggesting primness, religiosity, or abstinence). A “frock” is also a type of dress. The poem’s claim to be a “love song” is ironic. It contains no mention or evidence of love, and “the women” it describes are distant, seemingly pretentious figures—reflections of Prufrock’s repressed sexual desire and of his failure to assert his authentic self.

The poem has had a major impact on subsequent literature and pop culture, from Nick Carraway’s anxieties about aging in The Great Gatsby to the Eliot quotations peppering Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now to the 1995 Crash Test Dummies hit “Afternoons & Coffeespoons,” all the way to John Green’s YA bestseller The Fault in Our Stars, in which Hazel Grace quotes the first and last stanzas. In 2015 one writer for The Atlantic even credited the poem with inventing the hipster.

Q&A

Find answers to frequently asked questions about the song and explore its deeper meaning

About how old is J. Alfred Prufrock?
Genius Answer

Though he is paranoid about growing old and running out of time to find romantic fulfillment, we don’t know exactly how old Prufrock is. He is a man who has given up on youth and is acting elderly before his time. As a reflection of Eliot’s own romantic frustrations, Prufrock may well be in his twenties, as Eliot was during the composition of the poem.

What did T.S. Eliot say about "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"?
Genius Answer

In a conversation with Professor Shiv Kumar from The Punch, Eliot commented on the sterile tone of his poetry, citing Prufrock among others:

[I]f [The Waste Land], The Hollow Men and The Love Song of Alfred. J Prufrock sound sterile to some readers, it is because I want to present the contemporary man in his true form. […] So you can say that my poetry holds a mirror to contemporary reality.”

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Release Date
June 1915
Songs That Interpolate The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
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