The Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot

            In “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, I feel that T.S. Eliot makes the reader feel distant from the speaker by not stating Prufrock’s first name in the title. By opening the poem up with lines from Dante’s Inferno, the reader gets the sense that this poem is not going to be a “lovey-dovey” poem, but more of a pessimistic attitude for a poem that has the words “Love Song” in the title.

            T.S. Eliot used plenty of personification and similes in this poem.

·      Personification- the attribution of a personal nature or character to inanimate objects or abstract notions, especially as a rhetorical figure.

·      Simile- a figure in speech in which two unlike things are explicitly compared using “like” or “as”.

In the first stanza, T.S. Eliot describes the setting by saying, “When the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherised upon a table;” (2-3). This is comparing the speaker’s night to a passed out body, which gives the reader the feeling of a very dead night. To show an example of personification, T.S. Eliot says, “The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes, / The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,” (15-16). This is giving the fog human-like, or rather cat-like, qualities. From lines fifteen through twenty-two, Eliot uses great personification by giving the fog human or cat-like qualities.