Are your school days out of sight? When you took English, art, and math, what's your favorite Fahrenheit? How sour are the grapes of wrath? Do you need a challenger? Poor disgusting Salinger. Do you love the written word? What happened to the mocking? Our show is just beginning So find a place to sit These questions will be on the test It's time for Sophomore League
Welcome back to Sophomore Lit, where we reread your 10th grade reading list. I'm your host, John McCoy, and with me is returning co-host Lisa Schmeiser. Thank you for having me. I really love just the premise of this podcast, and I'm always really excited to participate. Thank you for coming on and thank you for agreeing to do one of the more dense episodes. This time we are doing the love song of J. Alfred Prufrock.
first published in Poetry Magazine in 1915 by, of course, T.S. Eliot. But before we do that, why don't you introduce yourself to everyone out there? All right. That's a daunting task. Wow. And the way I've responded is almost proof Rocky. And which role do I assume? Do I tell you who I'm not? My name is Lisa Schmeiser. I am a contributor to The Incomparable and have co-hosted a couple.
regular podcasts that are either on hiatus or have come to a natural and fruitful end and when I am not busy trying to find a podcast editor for the next project I want to get off the ground I work during the day as the editor-in-chief of a tech news publication. No jitter. And we cover the communication collaboration technology space.
In other words, if the technology in question is concerned with capturing information and moving it from one person to another, so either party can act on that information, we own it. Or rather, I should say, we own that technology coverage. I put out a call for co-hosts with a list of works that I hadn't yet covered. And...
You were pretty eager to jump at T.S. Eliot. Sometimes it's hard to get people to talk about poetry on this podcast. I'm not exactly sure why. So you want to talk a little bit about your history with this poem? Um, well, you know, I actually ran into it in junior lit and not sophomore lit. And my teacher, Mr. Edwards, took us through a tour of American poetry.
Roughly starting with the transcendentalists and ending around the beats. But we did spend a lot of time lingering on the love song of J. Alfred Prufrock. And he assigned us a research paper where we were supposed to. identify a theme or an insight in the poem and then do research to support it and write about it. I remember in 11th grade, I spent a lot of time talking about the imagery.
of light and how light is used to indicate shifts in mood or it's used to indicate the proof rocks interstate or things like that. And when I was in high school. I really just loved the elegance in... Eliot's lines. And I loved the richness and the denseness. Even if I couldn't get the references, it kind of gave me something to aspire to, to want to be the kind of adult who could immediately pick up the references in an Eliot poem.
So that attitude was super handy when I tackled the Wasteland in college. high school, my relationship to this poem was was just this kind of exciting, great undertaking of what I thought was a tremendously sophisticated work. And I thrilled to it on an aesthetic level. I didn't resonate with it emotionally, though. How could you? You know, you're 16 years old, your whole world is ahead of you. But there was still something in there for a high schooler where you could teach them about the.
The potency of language to describe different images or to have them learn about the value of paying attention and coming back and. understanding why the... the the imagery of the yellow fog and how it's like a cat that curls around the house how that comes back and it's a type of alien domesticity he's never really comfortable with like you can get all that on an intellectual level as a young person so
That's basically my history is for a very long time. It was just a really lovely poem to dive into because you've always found something new to appreciate about it in terms of construction and imagery and language. You mentioned right away the denseness of illusions in this poem. This is definitely a game that a lot of modernist poets like to play, which is...
trying to see if they're more erudite than you are, see if you caught that reference or not. And for people who like that sort of thing, it's a treasure trove. For people who don't, it can be a bit of a slog.
I think that when I was a kid learning this, I was aware that there were a lot of illusions being made. I only caught the... more obvious ones, you know, not now looking at, you know, reading it back through this time, I, you know, I, I was able to parse out more, but if you, if you like, if you, if you like to. uh look at the the whole of of western koi tradition and see if you can can spot the uh
If you can find Waldo in this. Spot the Easter egg, as the kids who love the Taylor Swift would say. I like what you say about when you're a kid. how much you relate to this because this is a um this is what i would call like a white guy problems poem oh my gosh is it ever
It's like a quintessential T.S. Eliot thing, though, because he really is kind of the personification of making his own life difficult in a lot of ways. He wants to be deep and he wants you to think he's deep. That's T.S. Eliot.
I used to be really fond of, I don't know if you know, there's a poem by Snodgrass called April Inventory. Snodgrass was a... what was called a confessional poet which were this this group of poets in like the 60s and stuff that wrote their innermost darkest thoughts and april inventory is like this poem, a poem written from the point of view of an over-educated, straight guy who's frustrated with life. I don't think it would fly these days to be...
Because a lot of it is about the character who is a college professor complaining about how good looking his young students are and how he just keeps getting older and older. No, I'm, I'm, I'm looking at it now and it's, it's, yeah. But as a kid, I don't know why I, I really, I really appreciated. the idea of people talking about their, their, their darker thoughts, their, their, their, or their, their less.
The less attractive thoughts and putting them out there and being willing to do that. You know, now as an older person, I see that as also kind of a game that people play. You're constructing another. another persona love song is told from the perspective of a an older highly educated man um who is frustrated with life. And what exactly he's frustrated with is, I think, an open question. When I was taught this in high school, it was made very clear to me that the plot of this is that
Prufrock wants to confess his love to this woman at a party and he can't bring himself to do it. And now that I'm an adult and I've had more experience and I've read more, I'm like, why did they... Why did they tell you that this, why did they tell me this was the only interpretation or this was the right interpretation of this poem? I don't even think that, well.
I think maybe it's an interpretation that's something that high schoolers can emotionally grasp because they're hitting a point developmentally and socially where trying to act on your feelings for another person. is something that's seen as an emotional inflection point, or an emotional growth opportunity. My reading of the poem, however, as a middle aged person is
He's trying to psych himself up to do this. And he's like, we all know how this ritual is going to go. We all know it's not going to give me the gratification I thought it was as a younger person. Do I go through with this ritual because I literally can't imagine doing anything else? Or do I let this slip away and become an even more attenuated version of myself? It's somebody who's like, why am I bothering?
Um, I feel like, I mean, I noticed when I was a young, when I, when I was a 16, 16 year old reading this poem, um, The first three lines of the poem, which I feel like I could probably safely excerpt without the T.S. Eliot statement coming, estate coming down on me like the hammer of God. But your first three lines are, let us go then, you and I.
when the evening is spread out against the sky, like a patient etherized upon a table. And that tells you who he is from straight from the jump, as they say, because it starts off with this.
invitation and the evening spread across the sky you can practically see the little pink clouds as the sky purples and then boom like a patient etherized upon a table and it's like his thoughts of morbidity and mortality creeping in like right there the romance is gone even if he wants it to be there it's just not and he can't summon it anymore and i feel like the rest of the poem just kind of progresses from those three lines And lets you know that no matter how much he tries to strive towards.
a state of emotional transcendence, or even a state of emotional gratification, there's some ugly little observer in his brain that just gives voice to all these these nasty, insecure thoughts of futility, and he's stuck there. There's this huge tension between the levels, the high and low of what he's talking about. He opens with this quote from Dante. And if, you know, I looked at it and I was like, oh yeah, this is Dante, isn't it? And then I had to like look up what it was.
Because, you know, I can recognize Italian and I know that it's like written in tercets. So I'm like, OK, this is Dante. But but starting on that. higher level, and then the evening is spread against the sky, you think there's going to be some sort of a Homeric... epithet here, you know, like the rosy finger dawn sort of thing. And then it immediately goes to this patient etheritis from the table. And then it goes, he follows, he...
He tells... Oh, he finds it all so squalid, John. He finds it so... Oh, the cheap hotels and the sawdust restaurants and the yellow fog. It's not even like beautiful white mist. It's the yellow fog that rubs its muzzle. There's pools that stand in drains and like he just can't get out of his own way. What he's drawing a picture of here is a kind of a picture of a squalor of London almost.
Eliot is an interesting guy because he was born in America, moved to England. So both America and England want to claim him as like, oh, he's an American poet or he's a British poet. I think if you asked him, he probably would have said he was a British poet. Oh, absolutely. He wanted nothing to do with America after a while. But yeah, everything is squalid. You know, he talks about...
sawdust restaurants with oyster shells. I recently had to, for my day job, I had to do some research on a painting called The Oyster Eaters. And I found out that at around this time, around the turn of the century, oysters were real peasant food. There was a point at which oyster production was so high that you could buy one oyster for a penny. And so they were sold in cheap bars as like a really, really cheap lunch, basically. They were street food. Yeah. And you didn't have to cook them.
When I was in London, there were when we went to the Tower of London, they did have. a mock-up of the types of oyster vendors that you would have inside the tower for, you know, the people who came and go in that castle, came and went, I should say. And then when I was growing up, I lived in...
Tidewater, Virginia, and of course, endless field trips to like Colonial Williamsburg or Jamestown or Yorktown. And you had a lot of crushed oyster shell roads because oysters were cheap. They were abundant. They were street food. And then you could. take the shells and use them as an industrial building material afterward. We start with this invitation to go on a trip with the poet. And the question is...
Who is Eliot talking to and why? And are we to assume that Eliot is talking to us, the reader? Is Eliot talking in his head? Or in this case, is it Prufrock?
talking to himself and uh you know i i'm not saying this as though there's an actual answer here i'm just saying this is these are the questions you get as you read this and we're immediately transported from a beautiful sky into the seediest, you know, it's like going into Whitechapel during the Jack the Ripper days, pretty bleak, you know, and the yellow fog.
It seems like a terribly unhealthy place to be. I assume we're talking about gaslight coming through fog. As amusing as I find the image of this man just endlessly wittering on. women who are completely tuning him out and not even listening to him. I do think this is somebody who's just kind of, I think the poem is about somebody.
and told from the perspective of somebody who is is just kind of noodling things over and has the time and space and opportunity for self-indulgence to Idly debate whether or not he's going to engage in social chatter with somebody, perhaps pursue an affair out of boredom or not. He feels both constrained by social ritual and comforted by it. I used to quote...
I've seen my life measured out in coffee, like paraphrase, I've seen my life measured out in coffee spoons because I really love that imagery. He's not really actually interested in pursuing love. The fact of the matter is, is there's a stanza later on where he talks about, wow, if I if I if I take my leap, if I take my shot, the way he describes it is.
And when I am formulated sprawling on a pin, when I am pinned and wiggling on the wall, then how should I begin to spit out the butt ends of my days and ways? And that's not romantic. Or that's not the lover's ardor at work there. He sees himself as vulnerable, as a bug to be speared by somebody else's caprice. And that powerlessness terrifies him.
It's him thinking his little meandering thoughts and wondering, what does this meandering say about me? And then I'm a middle-aged dude who's never really committed to anything. My days are predictable and boring. And it's... the world's most beautiful midlife crisis. Just sit down to some of the most elegant lines you're ever going to read.
But this is somebody who tells you again throughout the poem, he tells you who he is and who he is. And he tells you that he's not Hamlet. He tells you that he is he could be a Lazarus, but really he's just. a fool or at best he's an attendant lord who moves someone else's plot along and then sighs that he should have been a pair of claws silently scuttling down you know across the sea floor um just this whole i wish i were
I wish I didn't even have to think about this. I need to get up my own dumb head. And again, beautiful identity crisis. Absolutely fun to read. Lots of lines that you will find yourself muttering.
other wildly different contexts. The line of being a scuttling pair of claws is important because that's how every class in imagery teaches what... synecdoche is um which is the i should have been a pair of ragged claws which is synecdoche is the uh is a metaphor where the part of something stands for the whole this time when i was reading it through
I was entirely convinced that while there's many, many allusions in this, I feel like the major allusion... that this poem is making is to his coy mistress, Andrew Marvel, because there's all this constant refrain about there being time. Had we rolled enough in time. It's the inversion of Thomas Marvel. To his coy mistress, the argument being made by the speaker or the poet is...
Life is very brief. We don't have time. If we had time, we could take our time to do everything. You know, and basically he's trying to get this. Well, there's a woman to sleep with him, basically. It's like saying, you know, like, baby, we're young. But this is the inversion of this. This is saying. Yeah. There is time. And like you see, it's also a reference to Ecclesiastes of all the, like, there's a time for this, a time for that. You know, made into the bird song.
There's a sense in this, though, I think, that Prufrock feels as though his time is dull, it's predictable, and he hasn't spent it wisely or well. So when he talks about time... as though it's abundant and unvariegated and unending. Both he and Marvel use, towards the end of the poem, this line about curling everything up into a ball. Marvel talks about like at the end of his poem that since we don't have all this time, what we have to do is we have to take everything we have and...
give it our one shot, you know, like roll it up into this ball. But for Prufrock, the idea, the question is, do I... do I take myself, do I roll up the universe into a ball? And, and it's, this is why I, I, I'm a little bit dubious about the, uh, very, um, exact. one-to-one idea that this is a story, this is a poem about someone who wants to proclaim his love for a woman in as much as it's a story about someone who wants to make some
change in his life. He wants something significant to happen. It could be a meaningful relationship, but it could be something else. It could be... a meaningful relationship with life or with the universe. And he feels sort of unable to make that decisive curling up of a ball. I think you hit the nail. There's a stanza that that supports your theory. I am no prophet. And here's no great matter. I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker.
And I have seen the eternal footman hold my coat and snicker. And in short, I was afraid. And. He's somebody who's coming up against the limits of his of his character, of his strength, of his resolve. And like you said, he wants to do something different. He's not even sure where how he would start. And then I find. when we segue to the end of the poem, the changes he makes are so tiny and so grounded in moment-to-moment immediacy.
Do I dare to eat a peach? I shall wear white flannel trousers and walk upon the beach. And you can tell he's like, all right, this is how it's going to go. I'm going to have a completely unremarkable middle adulthood. I'm going to become an old man who looks a little odd to everybody younger than him as he walks up and down the beach. And then the poem slides into this unexpected moment of tragic transcendence, as it were.
with the mermaids and the recognition that maybe the only way he's really going to change is when he finally dies. There's that almost impotent desire to change, I think. I mean, we know by the end of the poem, he's not going to do anything like not not going to do anything that rocks his world. He's going to continue to measure his life out in coffee spoons. He's going to continue to look at women who are wearing silver bracelets and incongruously notice their arm hair when it's lit by a lamp.
He's going to continue to debate whether or not he wants to be sitting there with tea and cakes and ices. And he's going to become old before he notices. Well, what I like about that ending part with the mermaids is, of course. He's referring, he's making a reference here to the dark part of the mermaid myth, the idea of the siren calling people to their death, you know, calling, luring men to their death.
And he says, I do not think that they will sing to me. It's so pathetic. It's like, I can't even be pulled to my death by these roommates. Or he lacks the sort of impetuousness and complete lack of. awareness of consequences that all those sailors who clambered over to meet the sirens had. I really, that said.
I've never not swum in the ocean in my life without muttering to myself, 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. To me, the ending of the poem is still a little bit of a mystery because it shifts from this isolated first person singular and this acknowledgement of an old man walking on the beach with his trousers rolled up.
then it turns into a we. And who is the company of the we? I still wonder. Is he talking about this army of the invisible middle-aged and elderly? Or has he finally tried to wander out among the mermaids? I enjoy puzzling that out. Well, it's the return of the let us go, you and I at the very end. I also think the language becomes elevated again at the end after the pedanticness of the.
shall I part my hair behind part, which, you know, this time reading it through, I sat and I thought about the line, shall I part my hair behind? That's one of the things he's considering doing that will, to... To change himself. And I think to myself, how exactly do you part your hair behind? I don't. I think it's a comb over. I think it's the come over because, you know, he does allude in an earlier verse about they'll say how his hair is growing thin. And so maybe there's that. Another.
So I did not know about the love song of jail for proof rock is a child, obviously. But when I was in middle school, one of the books I read was Madeline L'Engle's book, The Moon by Night. The plot of that book involves a teenage protagonist taking a cross-country trip with her family. And at a series of campgrounds, she keeps running into the same boy who's, of course, the bad boy of the book.
He represents the parts of adolescence that make people uneasy, like temptation and psychologically separating from your family and not always making good choices. And at one point, they're having a debate.
about something. I don't remember the precise subject of the debate, but he does mutter. I grow old. I grow old. I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. And she asks him what that's from. And so like the poem was kind of gently pinging on my radar from adolescence on. And I had honestly thought.
it was the kind of thing that clever adolescents would quote to each other. And now I'm like, It's honestly kind of a miracle that no American pharmaceutical company has set any part of this to music for a medication that's targeted towards the retirement community. Well, it's interesting you bring up Madame Langeau because I recall a reference made to this in another book for kids that I read when I was a kid, which was Robert Kormer's.
the chocolate war there's um the the main character has a poster on the inside of his locker that says uh do i dare disturb the universe and uh in that book. The question is posed In that carpe diem sort of way of like, are you going to, are you going to, you know, what will you do with your one wild and precious life? As Mary Oliver would ask you. And yet I don't think that that's.
how it's offered up actually in this poem. I think it's so much sadder in this poem in a way. Because it's like this little clockwork material universe made up of polite social gatherings and... When he says he can measure out his life in coffee spoons, he's probably thinking of the interminable social gatherings he goes to where he's making polite chitter chatter. And he's supposed to find a socially acceptable woman.
with whom he can, you know, partner and live a socially respectable life. And the question he's asking is do His life is clearly stultifying and emotionally unsatisfying. And so when he's asking, do I dare disturb the universe? He's like, do I dare leave this, this comfortable contained world I live in because it's leaving me empty on the inside. It's not one of these, am I going to change the world? I think it's a mistake to put too much stock in an artist's life as a...
as a key for understanding their work. But I do know Elliot had a very unhappy marriage. And he also fell in love early with a woman that he didn't end up with. Oh, was this the kerfuffle over the archives recently? The letters that got released? I don't know. Was there a kerfuffle recently? I have not heard of this. It was a couple of years ago. I'm...
trying to remember the particulars because it involved, uh, really angry love letters. Um, um, in, oh yeah. Cause, um, part of his estate, um, I believe, got to be was unsealed in 2020. The Princeton University Library has a collection of letters from T.S. Eliot to Emily Hale, who is a woman apparently regarded as, quote unquote, his muse. And Hale, Emily Hale donated his letters to her with the stipulation they'd be unsealed 50 years after the death of both parties.
And it was like a tempest in a teapot for a bit. I know that he that he was in love with Hale and she. was a writer and editor herself and kind of helped with his development as a poet. But then he moved to England and he married this woman, Vivian. Highwood Elliott. And unfortunately, she seemed to have had mental health issues and to have been very high strung. And at that time, of course, if you...
were high-strung and had mental health issues, you got sent to asylums. And yeah, so she was committed and eventually died. And so he had a kind of an unhappy relationship with women. Well, and suddenly J. Alfred Prufrock makes so much more sense, doesn't it? It's that push-pull of it all. But, you know, he's writing this... before all that happened. So now there's a really good piece in Slate, which unpacks some of the petty things that he.
outlines in his letters to her, such as how it infuriated him that she would take communion in the Anglican church as a Unitarian because it was deeply improper. And I'm like, that is like the most T.S. Eliot thing to write a bad letter about. Well, you know, he would go on to write, what is it, Murder in the Cathedral. It's one of my favorite plays. Yeah, Murder in the Cathedral was one that we actually, if you ever did the podcast Senior Lit, I remember having to read it.
dissected my senior year of high school. And the movie actually does it quite a bit of justice. I saw a really great production of that when I was in college and we, I spent a semester in London and it was one of those. hippy-dippy things you do in college where the whole course was go to see as many plays as you can and learn to write about them. I was taught by the theater critic of The Guardian.
So I got to see a lot of London theatre in 1986. So I got to see some great productions. I don't know anything about London theatre since then, but... I think I have no idea actually how many high school English teachers are listening to this podcast, but I do want to convey that I think it is such a gift for high school teachers to. Have their students tackle things like the love song of J. Alfred Prufrock, because.
It opens people's minds to the possibility that you can engage and re-engage with a work of art through the course of your life, and you'll find something new in it every single time. That doesn't negate what you found in it as a younger person. It's just another way of looking at it. And there's something kind of beautiful and exciting about being able to have a history with a poem where.
You fell in love with it for one reason. And then when you keep coming back to it, you keep finding new things to appreciate or new tragedies that tug at the heartstrings a little bit. Like I said, I'm middle-aged now, so this poem hits really differently than it used to. I also have to say, I think that this poem is remarkable because it's exactly the right length. And by which I mean...
You can read The Wasteland, for example, and that could be a bit more of a slog if you're not willing to, if you're not really into American modernist poems. You know, Ezra Pound is not taught much anymore because he turned out to be a fascist. Although, you know, maybe in today's political climate, he would. Maybe he'll come back into style. I always found very difficult to try to read.
It just felt like it was way too, too much. And this feels like it's just right. You know, I feel like it's just, it, it's, it's dense, it's meaty. But. Depending on what edition you read it, it runs like five pages long. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's... My dad, when he was at the... Conservatory of Music in Chicago. I believe one of his semester-long projects was to try to set the wasteland to music.
Almost immediately thereafter, he went over to serve in Vietnam. And I suspect that might have actually been a relief after what he had tackled. It's a really, really challenging poem. Yeah, I agree with you. This is, again, it's such a gift to be able to. spend time with this poem because like you said, it's not too long. It's just dense enough where if you've got any sense of curiosity, you're going to try to figure out.
what all of the different illusions are from prophets to fools, to Lazarus, to Hamlet, you know, are the sirens. referencing greek myth who can say maybe they are maybe they aren't depends on your teacher um but it's it's something you can come back to again and again and that is just kind of a joy because it's a way of having a dialogue with your past self and your future self at the same time. Thanks again to guest host Lisa Schmeiser.
If you have an idea for a book, a story, a poem, or anything else to cover on a future episode, or if you've got a suggestion for a guest host, Or if you simply like to say hi, you can write me at sophomore.literature at gmail.com. The Sophomore Lit theme song is by Malcolm Nygaard. This podcast is brought to you by the Incomparable Network. More funny, smart podcasts are available at theincomparable.com.
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