The above images all speak to some part of Prufrock's personality. The etherised patient, for instance, reflects his inability to act while the images of the city depict a certain lost loneliness. The observation of Prufrock switches to the "yellow fog that rubs its back upon the windowpanes" in the second stanza. Although the fog is suggestive of chimney smoke, the associations with a cat are obvious through words like ‘muzzle’ and ‘curled’. The fog/cat seems to be looking in on the roomful of fashionable women "talking of Michelangelo”. Unable to enter, it lingers pathetically on the outside of the house, and we can imagine Prufrock avoiding, yet desiring, physical contact in much the same way but without the stealth possessed by a cat. Eliot again uses an image of physical debasement to explore Prufrock's self-pitying state; the cat goes down from the high windowpanes to the "corners of the evening" to the "pools that stand in drains", lets soot from the high chimneys fall on its back, then leaps from the terrace to the ground. While Eliot appreciated the dignity of cats, this particular soot-blackened cat does not seem so dignified. Rather, the cat appears weak, non-confrontational, and afraid to enter the house just as Alfred is.
Prufrock agonizes over his social actions, worrying over how others will see him. He thinks about women's arms and perfume, but does not know how to act. He walks through the streets and watches lonely men leaning out their windows. The day passes at a social engagement but he cannot muster the strength to act, and he admits that he is afraid. Anxiety is foremost a concern with the future, and Prufrock continues to show his inability to advance in time this is displayed by him stating that he has ‘measured out’ his ‘life with coffee spoons’ meaning he has already planned how he will live and is in no worry to change anything now due to his fears of rejection. This is also another example of his inferiority complex as a coffee spoon is of smaller size than a teaspoon and he feels his life should only be measured out in small insignificant doses.
As detailed as Prufrock's eye is, he feels the effects of the penetrating social gaze far more deeply, "Sprawling on a pin" refers to the practice of pinning insect specimens for study, suggesting Prufrock feels similarly scrutinized and judged by what people think of his appearance.
Prufrock descends the stairs, and as he watches smoke rising from pipes and lonely men "leaning out windows" just below, he feels he "should have been a pair of ragged claws, Scuttling across the floors of silent seas". This final alliterative image of debasement is the third animal association for Prufrock after the cat and insect connections and it paints a pathetic portrait of Prufrock, but the suggestion of a crab is perhaps an allusion to Shakespeare's "Hamlet," in which Hamlet mocks Polonius (Eliot later explicitly references "Hamlet," making this more understandable): "for yourself, sir, should be old as I am, if, like a crab, you could go backward".
The movement in the final section of the poem swings from fairly concrete, realistic scenes from the social world - "After the cups, the marmalade, the teas, After the novels, and the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor" to fantastic images of mermaids "riding seaward on the waves, Combing the white hair of the waves blown back". Prufrock is the second-in-command at best, and he comes off as a mock-hero; and his declaration that I "Am an attendant lord" bespeaks his lack of ego. The numerous pauses from commas and semicolons in the stanza underscore Prufrock's anxiety and paralysis.
When Prufrock finishes the poem by pronouncing, "We have lingered in the chambers of the seas, Till human voices wake us, and we drown", he completes the vertical descent Eliot has been deploying throughout the poem. He has plunged into his own abyss and, through the use of "We", he forces the reader to accompany him - hoping, that we will not be able to return to the mermaids on top and shame him by repeating his story. Prufrock does not even have an unattainable ideal love. He has unattainable, frustrated, paralysed desire for all women who reject him; they are all inaccessible, and any reminder of the social world and especially "human voices" drowns him. He will be alone for the rest of his days.
Harriet Walker