Baudelaire attempts to reach the Ideal through life’s pleasure, namely women, opium and alcohol, and under these influences, his poetry becomes more sensuous, often focusing on smells and his description of women. This short moment in the Ideal is represented in ‘Prufrock’ in the lines, ‘Arms that are bracelated and white and bare/…downed with light brown hair!)/Is it perfume from a dress/That makes me so digress?’ As well as being an allusion to Marvel’s ‘To His Coy Mistress’, the line, ‘And indeed there will be time’ is also a reference to Baudelaire; the line reminds us and Prufrock of our inevitable demise, as well as the need to love and make love while we are still able to. It also reminds us of the fact that we can reach the Ideal and this feeling of eternal life through love and women. In the poem Eliot describes the relationship between Prufrock and a woman, ‘Let us go then, you and I’, and noticeably, ‘Time for you and time for me’. Through this relationship, Eliot describes a failed attempt in reaching the Ideal: ‘Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels/And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells’. Contrasted with this tragic, yet slightly more spontaneous type of love is something as routine as the ‘taking of the toast and tea’. This line is almost poignant as now we realize that it is too late for this relationship to blossom into something more meaningful and powerful, something that could provide them with but a few hours of relief from time. I find this stanza tragic, as although ‘there will be time’, they don’t seem to have made the most of it. After all this, time as the enemy is still present, edging us slightly closer to our inevitable end: “With a bald spot in the middle of my hair - /(They will say: ‘How is hair is growing thin!’)” The line ‘I have measured out my life with coffee spoons’ is tragic in the same way as the taking of the toast and tea, as he has not been able to reach anything more meaningful then the banal and monotonous measuring out of coffee. This idea of monotony is emphasized throughout the poem through the repetition of certain phrases, for example the ‘yellow fog’ that rubs and slides its way through the streets, again through the routine of, ‘the taking of the toast and tea’, and later ‘’After the cups, the marmalade, the tea’. We are reminded of the fact that the narrator grows older, ’Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald)’’. This builds to the line ‘I grow old… I grow…’ The way in which the phrase ‘I grow old’ is repeated naturally suggests the senility of Prufrock, almost as if he has forgotten what he’s saying. It also evokes the image of an old man reflecting on what he has become, wistfully thinking of his youth.
Of course it’s not just in Prufrock that we can see various different elements of Baudelaire’s influence on Eliot’s poetry, but Eliot in this one poem Eliot combines many of Baudelaire’s philosophies. His Baudelairean cityscapes are present in nearly all of his poems, and in ‘The Waste Land’, Eliot actually quotes Baudelaire: ‘Hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère!’ Eliot stresses the fact that the reader is just as much part of the Waste Land as the people in the actual poem – ‘You! ‘Hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère!’, and this technique is similar to the one used in ‘‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’. As well as implying the company of a woman, Eliot includes the reader in his description of Prufrock’s progression from young man into senile, old ‘Fool’: ‘Let us go then, you and I…’
by
jacquescockell (student)
