The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Let us go then, you and I: the poem opens like an invitation, the evening spread above the half-deserted streets like a patient etherised upon a table. What follows is the inner weather of a man circling one overwhelming question he cannot bring himself to ask, deferring it past the toast and the tea, past the women who come and go talking of Michelangelo, until the asking has become impossible. Every reader who has stood at a doorway polishing the perfect sentence and then walked away having said nothing recognises him exactly. It is built almost entirely of dread: the thinning hair noticed by others, the coffee spoons in which a whole life is measured out, the eternal Footman holding the coat and snickering. T.S. Eliot wrote it barely out of his early twenties and somehow already knew how a self can congeal into gesture. The verse that opened modern poetry ends among mermaids singing far out at sea, a music he is certain is not for him, and the soft horror of waking into the ordinary and going under.