Empoword

Additional Readings 436 overarching and unnamed “overwhelming question” (10) to the oft-quoted “Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach” (122), the clearest recurring element of the poem is Prufrock’s equivocation. The ambiguity of consequence is too dangerous for Prufrock. He is concerned that his participation in society shall “disturb the universe” (45) and so chooses rather to retreat into his tangled web of hypotheticals. Eliot symbolizes the society Prufrock so fears in the third stanza as a yellow fog, invading the descriptions of the architecture and appearance of the city. The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes, The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes, Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening, Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains, Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys, Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap, And seeing that it was a soft October night, Curled once about the house, and fell asleep. (15-22) The description of this yellow fog is animalistic and untamed. Its presence is quiet but oppressive, weighing heavily on the tone of the poem with the sort of gaseous intractability and inescapability of our fluid and chaotic social formation and the hegemony that it relies upon. The yellow fog figuratively permeates the entire piece, ubiquitous and stifling, but most evidently as it encroaches on Prufrock’s discussion and distortion of time, beginning in the following stanza. While the third stanza most overtly draws attention to Prufrock’s temporal hyper- awareness (using the frequent repetition of the word “time”), Eliot constructs an underlying theme of impermanence as early as the epigraph and first stanza of the poem. The original speaker of the epigraph, Guido da Montefeltro, reminds us of the imprisoning and irreversible flow of time, and signal words like “one-night” (6) and “tedious” (8) in the first stanza highlight a hyper-awareness of time. In spite of Prufrock’s implied worldview that genuine social interaction is dangerous, impossible, or even futile, he is painfully aware of the disappearance of opportunity within his hesitation. He admits, “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons” (51), “I grow old … I grow old …” (120), and, reflecting on his imprisonment, wonders, “[H]ow should I begin / To spit