T. S. Eliot’s poem of 1917, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” begins with an epigraph from the Italian of Dante’s Devine Comedy.  The poem begins in the spirit of this engagement and progresses to further the narrator’s identification.  Prufrock becomes disabled of decadent responses as he meshes with temporalities of indecision antithetical to the roles of individuality or singular expression. Found throughout is reference to the metaphysical dimensions of authorship concurrent to expression, where a tendency of abstraction finds grotesque bodies and equivalent remaining shapes of the naturalistic, mirage-ridden by time as by the cunning of mermaid’s ways.  An honest voice purports through a sequence of images – a significant tune whispers in the role of the drain plug.

What mermaids by the end of this poem deny Prufrock of totalizing vision, those who he’d seen “riding seaward on the waves / Combing the white hair of the waves blown back / When the wind blows the water white and black” (126-128), weigh against the physical corporeality tied to humanistic vision – against the “human voices [that] wake us, and we drown” (131).  Their effect lends supplement to the instability of previous description – when he had “heard the mermaids singing, each to each” (124).

While the importance of J. Alfred Prufrock’s indecision is not found through the irrelevance of any one cloak or object, he is divided of the identity compromised in the sustaining of his voice.  “The yellow fog,” and “The yellow smoke,” conduct a house of objects in an early stanza:

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).

Actions are described upon a scene of repetitive motion and inquiry, sensitive to the rearranging of objects, definitive of condition not form.

What is the answer of this yellow smoke?  The meaning of the human gestures? From a translation of the epigraph by John Aitken Carlyle, the image of a flame is aroused.  “If I thought my answer were to one who ever could return to the world, this flame should shake no more; but since none ever did return alive from this depth, if what I hear be true, without fear of infamy I answer thee.”