Describe “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” as a Dramatic Monologue.

Describe “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” as a Dramatic Monologue.

Eliot’s Love Song of Prufrock is one of the finest examples of dramatic monologue in the history of English Poetry. To know it clearly, we should firstly understand the term ‘dramatic monologue’. A monologue -is a long speech by a single person and `dramatic’ means conversational language of a character in a play that utters a monologue expressing his or her private thoughts. A dramatic monologue is not an element in a play, but a type of lyric poem. It was perfected by Robert Browning. The dramatic monologue has the following features: (1) A single person who is patently not the poet, utters the entire poem in a specific situation at a crucial moment. (2) This person addresses and interacts with one or more other people and (3) of what the lyric speaker says is the speaker’s unintentional revelation of his or her temperament and character.

The poem is actually the lament of a being divided between passion and timidity. It is an interior monologue where Prufrock, theprotagonist speaks to himself in a kind of daydream. It opens with a command to the self (you) to accompany the physical him (I) to a distant room. Literally, the ‘I’ and ‘you’ of the poem are not two persons but rather two aspects of the same person — the public personality and the ego. In addition to contributing to the effect of monologue, the use of the pronouns creates the impression of a man talking to himself in the mirror. When we hear the very first line, “Let us go then,, you and I”; it seems to us that we are to watch a dialogue-based poem.

It has been said in the introductory paragraph that dramatic monologue is a literary device in which a speaker speaks to himself in a critical moment revealing his secret thoughts unintentionally. And in this Love-Poem, Prufrock the speaker speaks to himself in a critical moment that is, to propose love to a lady revealing his own self. The ‘you’ of the poem is instructed not to ask “What is it?” bet to “go and make our visit”. The visit suggests the decorous quality of Prufrock’s personality.

The most significant characteristic of a dramatic monologue is the unconscious revelation of the speaker. The speaker, Prufrock, wishes to be in love with a lady and at the same time his present physical condition does not support him .to declare love to the lady. In this situation, he tells himself many things. And unintentionally, he reveals his temperament and character. He says:

The Yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window panes.

Here, we see that Prufrock imagines himself as a cat. The image of the fog as cat reminds us another reflection of his mental state: desire, which ends in inertia. If the cat image suggests sex, it also suggests the greater desire of inactivity...................................................

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