Study Guide. Previous Next. Prufrock continues to confuse the past, present, and future. He winds the clock back to the afternoon and then plays it forward to the evening, which is when we started the poem. The afternoon and evening are "sleeping," much as the cat-like fog was asleep outside the house in line The evening is "asleep" and "tired" — nothing is happening. But it might also be "malingering," or pretending to be tired.
Nice of you to mention us, Prufrock. Lines Should I, after tea and cakes and ices, Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis? Junior Member joined:June 12, posts votes: 7.
Holding his coat and snickering indicates that the writer has come close to death but got away with it. The snickering seems to say that they know they'll have him soon. Senior Member joined:Jan 22, posts votes: For me, the entire poem is about time. The "eternal Footman" is time itself.
Always there, at our service as we come and go, seemingly managed my us. But not. The context is fearful, so it does sound as if speaker is talking of death, but the poem is more about how and where to spend time while alive.
Life, not death, is the issue. And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully! Smoothed by long fingers, Asleep. Should I, after tea and cakes and ices, Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis? Note that Wikipedia says: Because the poem is concerned primarily with the irregular musings of the narrator, it can be difficult to interpret. Senior Member joined:May 6, posts votes: 0. Footman is a servant word, but since it is capitalized here it would be someone of importance who would meet you upon death.
Grim Reaper, St. Peter, Jesus, Charon The snickering alludes to the fact that the narrator, Prufrock, thinks his life is meaningless and that everyone around him believes the same. He worries that upon death he will be reminded about his worthless existence. Senior Member joined:Aug 12, posts votes: 0. Just got a cold chill. This is good though That is pretty much what I had in mind.
It is refreshing to hear your thoughts, and wyweb, I didn't mean to. Moderator from US joined:Dec 10, posts votes: Wow, what a blast from the past! We read Prufrock in high school.
I had the same teacher for a creating writing class a semester later and I think I submitted a parody of Prufrock for one of the assignments.
Hard to argue that, stout, except that this is replacing one extended metaphor for several others. This poem is about procrastination. Death also enters again in the last line, where Prufrock mentions his own death. He imagines himself old, wearing white flannel on the beach, then transitions to a sub-marine setting consorting with mermaids. The very last line of the poem is "Til human voices wake us, and we drown".
It seems like it should be the mermaids causing Prufrock to drown, but instead it is human voices. These could be the human voices "waking" Prufrock from his mental reveries, causing him to drown because he does not know how to deal with people in real life, outside of his mental universe.
The concept of "waking" insinuates that the whole of Prufrock is simply a dream, explaining why time and location seem, at different points in the poem, concrete yet vague, fixed and non-fixed. Why Hypertext? About Samuel Beckett About T. His sense that Death "snickers" at him relates again to his own feelings of unimportance; he does not consider himself truly "great," being neither a prophet or as he later says a prince.
Death snickers at him because he has not accomplished anything of significance so far in his life.
0コメント