In
his early poems T. S. Eliot gives a horrifying picture of the modern world. In
his two extraordinary poems “The Love Songs of J. Prufrock” and The Waste Land he projects a terrifying vision of our chaotic times and troubled lives.
The waste land scenario he portrays throughout these poems is one that reflects
the social anarchy and spiritual vacuity of modern urban life that drives the
individual to the deep crises of emotional and intellectual despair. Eliot
attempts to depict the total disarray and near collapse of Western civilization
in the early 1920s. During the years, immediately following the monumental
upheavals of World War I, European life-styles, social mores and moral values were
all changed drastically. Apart from the waste and decay, the life of modern
people also became very complex. Education made the modern people intellectually
superior, but their life became full of ennui and boredom.
The his poems “The Love Songs of J.
Prufrock” and The Waste
Land he gives us an
authentic impression of the mentality of educated people in the psychological
stump that took place immediately after World War I. It makes us aware of the
nervous exhaustation, the mental disintegration, the exaggerated self
consciousness, the boredom, the pathetic groping after the fragments of a
shattered faith-all these symptoms of “the psychic disease which ravaged Europe mercilessly like an epidemic.”
The poem in which Eliot, for the
first time, draws the problems of the modern people is “The Love Songs of J.
Prufrock”. Here in this dramatic monologue a character is speaking in a context
and analyzing his temperament and his experience of love. Prufrock, the speaker
of the poem, is in love with one of the ladies and wishes to declare his love. But
he is an irresolute person for whom the surliest decision is a matter of strain
speculation, and distress. He wants to avoid taking any responsibility. That of
taking decision is why he asks,” Do I dare disturb the universe?” because any
action that changes the pattern of things will disturb the universe that is the
opinion of him. He is so self-centred a person that an ordinary decision taken
by him will, in his view, have far reaching consequences for the whole
universe.
Prufrock is one of Eliot’s major
creations. He tries to give us a view of Prufrock. We get enough information
about him to imagine his situation as he proceeds through the soft October
sight to the drawing soon where the sophisticated women, one of whom he loves,
are taking tea and indulging in elegant conversation with music in the ground.
We know something of his appearance and dress. And we are made acquainted with
the agonies and intricacies of his confused meditation about the nature of things,
his hopes which he knows to be vain. In spite of these, however, the situation
as well as the mind of Prufrock remains shrouded is a kind of mystery.
Prufrock is a complex character.
Everything about him cannot be defined is a formula. He is like Hamlet. He
shows what a modern individual is and has a clash of his personality.
Hesitating, wavering are always is within him. We find Prufrock is a prison,
the prison of a divided self in the tortures of neurotic conflict. His long
song will never be uttered outside the inferno of his own mind, and the “you”
and “I” of his monologue are the impulses within him.
Prufrock has retreated into the
world of despairing introspection day-dream, and he experiences mingled
feelings of self-pity and self-disgust. The retreat and the feelings are
impressed upon our minds through the images of the tortures streets and the
fog-cat, the picture of his life as measured but with coffee spoons and the
symbols of his terror of social and sexual failure. He is unable “to force the
moment to its crisis”, he is not even a Hamlet who did at last muster the
courage to do something, and he is only an attendant lord: Unlike Hamlet, he
has no heroic quality. He can only back into trivial speculations whether he
shall not a peach or part his heir behind. He is very imaginative, escapes into
a fantasy world of unreal love with mermaids.
In the first half of the poem, there
is no hope of success. The sense of failure does not begin until the passage
beginning “And would it have been worth it, after all.” By this time, he has
seen himself enter the drawing-room, take tea, fail to ask his question, and
scenthe foot men “snicher” in; a superior way, and he has come away, afraid to
take the positive step which would made him “great” just because it was a step
which would have changed something. In the poem, he is not a hero properly. He
is the anti-hero that means he is the central character but it nothing heroic
in him. He is thought as physically impulsive and ugly so he has no dare to propose
his beloved because he fears ally not spiritually. As he mixed with many girls
but no girl is suffited to him. He is very intellectual that he only go for
knowledge. In the poem, he in not talking/ addressing to his beloved but he is
confessing to us.
In the poem, he was a pair of claws
scutting across the floors of silent seas. The claws represent the longing for
an uncomplicated existence. The claws siege the prey and carry it off without
the hesitation or wavering with which Prufrock is faced. The claws, like the
mermaids, are at home and free in the sea, and can settle at will. But at the
some time they cannot go forward or make any progress. Profrock laments, “ I
grow old-------I grow old,” but secretly he wishes only to regress to a safe
place where his inner universe is no longer disturbed by any tormenting human
problem.
Prufrock never reaches a decision,
never penetrate, beyond “the marmalade, the tea,” to a conclusion either with
the ladies in the room on with his surroundings. He accepts boredom from the
fear that worse may ensue from an attempt to probe too deeply. If he had asked
the question, the lady might have replied: “That is not what I meant, at all.
That is not it, at all. “Such a reply shattered his illusion. Prufrock’s sense
of boredom with the social round and his terror at the way thought of asking
his overwhelming question. His boredom and his indecision stand out in the poem
and these create an atmosphere of despair.
Prufrock is the representative of
the modern people. Modern people have become sophisticated in manner and way of
life, but at the same time their emotional life has become barren and chaotic.
Prufrock represents the life of these modern, urbanite people.
The greatest poem of the modern literature that
portrays the waste and boredom of the modern people is undoubtedly The Waste
Land. Throughout the poem there
are recurrent symbols of drought and dryness, decay and disintegration. The
reader sees, in Eliot’s own words, "a heap of broken images" made up
of dusty streets, dead trees, desert rocks, dry bones, rats scurrying in
sewers, empty cisterns and exhausted wells. Eliot skillfully evokes the picture
of a wasted world where universal symbols of life - such as earth, air, fire
and water - prove both sustaining and destructive.
Eliot seeks thereby to
recreate in his poem a truly compelling portrait of the drab life we lead in
our dreary modern cities. People work and live their whole lives in a
mechanical, almost robot-like fashion today. This is emphasized all through the
poem. Besides, Eliot constantly links the present with the past, showing as how
much more futile our existence is today. With the modern world being almost
rendered a total waste - by human greed and materialism, by industrial
pollution and ecological over exploitation.
The speaker is very much pessimistic about the existence of
the modern people and their way of living. The modern people lead a bored life.
Their pleasure is not spontaneous pleasure. London has become
enveloped in brown fogs and the crowds moving over London Bridge
are the spiritual waste dead citizens of the waste land going their daily round
of dull routine. In this unreal city sex has become a matter of intrigue and
has become a mere source of pleasure and lost its spiritual significance. The
sexual life has lost spirituality and it has become a work without any real
pleasure of both body and mind.
The picture of the vulgar sexual
life and low morality both of the higher as well as the lower classes are drown
in the Game of the Chess part.
The second seection of the
poem ’ A Game of Chess’ portrays two women-a Rich Lady at her boudoir and the
cockney women in the East-side pub. The two women of this section of the poem
represent the two sides of modern sexuality: while one side of this sexuality
is a dry, barren interchange inseparable from neurosis and self-destruction,
the other side of this sexuality is a rampant fecundity associated with a lack
of culture and rapid aging.
Thus, the
poems The
Love Songs of J. Prufrock and The Waste Land’ combinely evoke a ssense
of waste, ennui and boredom inherent in the life of the modern people.