The Loveong Of J Alfred Prufrock Rhetorical Analysis

“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” Essay In “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, T.S. Eliot creates a rather melancholy, resigned tone through the application of multiple literary devices including extensive repetition, the deliberate use of punctuation in conjunction with varied rhyme schemes and meter to both direct attention and generally slow the reader, and repeated references to a few central pieces of imagery that particularly exude this tone. It is evident from passages such as, “For I have know them all already, known them all: — / Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons, / I have measured out my life with coffee spoons” (3), that Prufrock feels an acute sense of monotony and boredom with the relentlessly repetitive nature

Throughout the majority of the piece, Eliot pairs nonadjacent rhyming lines within a stanza, and therefore the occasional adjacent rhyming pair attracts more of the reader’s attention, and so Eliot follows this pattern with many of his more impactful lines. For example, one of the more notable lines in the poem, “In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo” (5), which Eliot also chose to repeat, is further emphasized by the structuring it as an isolated rhyming couplet, which helps to set it apart from the irregular pattern of the longer stanzas surrounding it. The accentuation of this passage then in turn contributes to the creation of the melancholy tone with its diction such as “come and go” by tying back into Prufrock’s sense of

Most notably are the instances of imagery relating to the sea, which continually serve as a metaphor for Prufrock’s sense of intense isolation and disconnectedness. Eliot makes extensive references to this, and perhaps the most striking piece of this imagery was presented as, “I should have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas” (4), the key phrase therein being “silent seas”, which clearly references how alone detached from society the character feels. The adjective “silent” in particular contributes to the passive nature of Prufrock’s despondency that characterizes the melancholy