Seeing Mermaids

The Mythical Ending to T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

(Full poem text available here.)

The ending of T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” presents a challenge to the reader because it appears in paradoxical contrast to the rest of the work, capable of breaking the poem’s artistic and organic unity. Up until the poem’s conclusion, the speaker, Prufrock, is overwhelmed by the mundane. Images of modernity are littered throughout the poem, and the trivial everyday things of life pile one upon the other until they almost seem to suffocate Prufrock, who is hyperconscious of himself and his ordinary existence. This combination of Prufrock’s excessive awareness of himself and the apparent meaninglessness of things around him squeezes the life out of him and forces him into a state of intellectual and emotional paralysis. The modern nature of Prufrock and his problem is highlighted even further by the poem’s setting, which seems to be in a modern city. Thus, images of modernity and everyday things pervade the poem. But suddenly, as if from nowhere, we are struck by line 124: “I have heard the mermaids singing each to each.” This line comes as something of a shock, for it is a sudden jump from the ordinary and familiar to the magical and fantastic—the mythical ending. However, surprising as this shift may be, it does not constitute a disruption of the harmony of the poem or an affront to the poem’s unity. Eliot has been weaving together the mundane and the fantastic throughout the poem, though subtly, and indeed this duality is at the heart of the work; it gives the poem much of its haunting energy.

In order to understand the paradox of the poem, we have to understand Prufrock’s initial problem: he suffers from an inability to communicate and to be understood. “It is impossible to say just what I mean!” he complains in line 104, and the women to whom he speaks (at least in his imagination) always respond, “That is not it at all / That is not what I meant at all” (lines 97-98, 109-110). They are incapable of comprehending him and his “overwhelming question.” As J. Hillis Miller puts it in Poets of Reality: Six Twentieth Century Writers, “If each consciousness is an opaque sphere, then Prufrock has no hope of being understood by others… The lady is also imprisoned in her own sphere, and the two spheres can never, like soap bubbles, become one. Each is impenetrable to the other” (139). This inability to communicate, this inability of Prufrock’s to say what he means, finds its metaphor in the strings of mundane and meaningless objects that Prufrock seems hyperconscious of throughout the poem: plate, toast, tea, stair, collar, necktie, pin, cakes, ices, novels, teacups, skirts. Prufrock summarizes the connection by saying, “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons” (line 51), suggesting how his life has been marked only by the dull and frivolous little things of ordinary life. He cannot find meaning in his subjective existence, or at least, he cannot communicate it. It is almost as if, in his inability to commune with other conscious beings and to reach out and touch the universal, he is forced to focus on the immediate and local, the empty routines of daily life—“the taking of a toast and tea” (line 34). The “tedious” of line 8 serves as the perfect adjective for Prufrock’s life and state of mind. The result is paralysis, which “follows naturally from this subjectivizing of everything” (Miller 139).

In addition to the imagery of the everyday items, the poem presents us with various snapshots of modernity: “half-deserted streets” (line 4), “one-night cheap hotels” (line 6), “sawdust restaurants” (lines 7), “the yellow fog,” (line 15), and “lonely men in shirtsleeves leaning out of windows” (line 72). All of these are rather dreary pictures of life in a modern city, the backdrop to the little domestic failures and futility of the cakes and ices. This is the world in which Prufrock lives (or, rather, fails to live). The opening image of a “patient etherized upon a table” (line 3) is a fitting metaphor for Prufrock himself: a man paralyzed within the artificiality of the modern city. In an essay from A Profile of Twentieth Century American Poetry, Roger Mitchell says, “J. Alfred Prufrock is not just the speaker of one of Eliot's poems. He is the Representative Man of early Modernism. Shy, cultivated, oversensitive, sexually retarded (many have said impotent), ruminative, isolated, self-aware to the point of solipsism” (43). If we accept Mitchell’s assessment of Prufrock as the archetypal Modernist it is only fitting that this man live in a clearly modern city. So that is the setting Eliot places him in.

The tediousness of the modern city and Prufrock’s life as well as his inability to find meaning is reflected in the form of the poem. Most of the poem consists of rhyming couplets, i.e., “Let us go then you and I / When the evening is spread out against the sky” (lines 1-2). This barrage of couplets falls into a repetitive and predictable rhythm, like Profrock’s life. There is a kind of tedium to this mundane rhyme scheme. But then, at certain points in the poem, a line will stick out, refusing to be part of a couplet, such as line 10: “To lead you to an overwhelming question...” This line doesn’t rhyme with the line before or after it. Thus, just when the pattern seems to be understandable and recognizable, it proves elusive. Like Prufrock’s attempts “to force the moment to its crisis” (line 80) or “disturb the universe” (line 46), or even like the overwhelming question itself, the pattern and structure of rhyme remain just out of reach, somehow unquantifiable.

Throughout the poem, then, Eliot places images and structural reminders of the ordinary, the repetitive, the modern, and the mundane, but then comes line 124 and following, which seem to stand in direct contradiction to the rest of the poem and its representation of the commonplace. Eliot juxtaposes an image straight out of a dream or myth with all of the familiar and modern imagery that has gone before:

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. (Lines 124-28)

At first glance, such a sudden shift in tone and imagery seems to fracture the poem, to create a contradiction. Eliot appears to have abandoned the original intention of the poem, which was to represent the excessively ordinary and its effects on the human mind. It was a poem about the real, about the modern, about the dull. What, then, are these mythical beings, the mermaids, who are anything but ordinary, doing in the poem? Has Eliot lost his own sense of continuity? Has Prufrock simply gone mad? What connects the body of the poem with this surprising ending?

Contrary to appearances, the mermaids are a part of the organic and unified whole of the work, and they have properly been prepared by previous allusions and metaphors. The primary reason that the mermaids are not out of place is that Prufrock’s monologue is really all about transcending the mundane—or at least attempting to. To use the words of Stephen Spender in his book T.S. Eliot, “Prufrock is a searcher, and his quest, like that of other individuals in Eliot’s poetry, is for a grail. The grail, however, is fantasy, artefact, not the real supernatural. The mermaids are related to the grail of Parsifal or to Siegfried conversing with the Rhine Maidens” (35). Prufrock seems to long for the extraordinary, and hints of the mythical or fantastic have been present all along, only in a veiled manner.

We have, first of all, the extended metaphor of the yellow fog as an enormous animal appearing in lines 15-22. The animal in question registers as definitely feline in character and quite large, suggesting possibly the sphinx or a related mythical creature. Then, in lines 45-46, Prufrock asks, “Do I dare / disturb the universe?” and this becomes one of the poem’s central hyperbolic questions. We begin to see what Prufrock’s dilemma really is: he is caught between the natural and the transcendent, the ordinary and the extraordinary. As Spender has it, “Eliot is haunted by the contrast between the modern world of distraction…trafickings in values purely material, money making, work-routines, which form a surface…and, underneath, the real life” (40). This is the reason that Prufrock imagines himself as Lazarus come back from the dead to “tell all” (lines 94-95), to tell the world that there is something more than “coffee spoons.” Prufrock imagines himself breaking out of the empty formalities and hopelessly limiting circumstances of his life, to shock the world around him with some prophetic vision or supernatural revelation. But Prufrock questions whether such a thing is possible, and whether he would have a prophecy to reveal. “Would it have been worth it?” (line 99). Other hints at something beyond the ordinary are scattered throughout the poem: the figure of death as the eternal Footman in line 85, the magic lantern of line 105. All of these mythical or magical entities play around the borders of the poem, just out of reach, almost teasing, like Prufrock’s own desire to escape inertia. And he is drawn to them, haunted by them. By the end of the poem, he even sees them: “I have seen them riding seaward on the waves” (lines 126). But he cannot reach them, cannot touch them, cannot hear them (“I do not think that they will sing to me [line 125]”), or if he does, it will prove fatal: “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” (lines 129-131).

It is clear, then, that Eliot fills his poem with ordinary and modern things, which become almost objects of revulsion for Prufrock. Prufrock is isolated, unable to communicate, unable to find meaning in these modern objects and settings. Prufrock longs for the extraordinary, the fantastic, though he can never reach it or grasp it. He desires simultaneously to escape inertia and escape the ordinary. Thus, when the mermaids suddenly appear at the end of the poem, they do not constitute a break in the organic unity of the poem. The poem remains unified because the appearance of the mermaids simply represents the shift of the mythical from subtext to text. Hints of the fantastic and Prufrock’s longing for it have been present throughout the poem.

This question is important because the blending of the mythical and the contemporary constitutes much of the poem’s uniqueness and energy and is at the heart of Prufrock’s own dilemma. The mermaids appear because they represent that fantasy which is always flickering beyond the realm of the normal, scientific, and modern—and just beyond Prufrock’s reach. The problem of ordinary versus extraordinary does not find a clear conclusion, however: the unsettling ending Eliot leaves us with seems to suggest that attempting to mythologize soul-less modernity may prove ineffectual. A more radical transformation or conversion must take place first, perhaps, before the extraordinary will become visible once again in such an environment. At best, the mermaids will not sing. At worst, they will lure Prufrock into a dream state, from which awakening will prove fatal. The deadly sea-girls suggest to us the sirens of classical mythology, so further investigations of the poem might center around Prufrock as a type of Odysseus figure. Viewing the poem as a kind of Odyssey could yield interesting interpretations.

Works Cited

Miller, J. Hillis. Poets of Reality: Six Twentieth Century Writers. Harvard University Press, 1965. Google Books.

Mitchell, Roger. “Modernism Comes to American Poetry: 1908-1920.” A Profile of
Twentieth-Century American Poetry, Jack Myers, David Wojahn, ed. Southern Illinois
University Press, 1991, pp. 25-53. Google Books.

Spender, Stephen. T.S. Eliot. Penguin, 1975.