10. A Clown, Perhaps, But An Aspiring Clown
I grow old …I grow old…
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered by the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
A
t first sight the form and title of the poem — ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ — suggest that it is, like one of Browning's monologues, an exercise in characterisation. But this soon turns out to be an error. Eliot's poem too insistently breaks down the boundaries between the main character, the writer and the reader: Prufrock is not a figure from the past but from the present, not someone ‘out there’ but someone uncomfortably ‘in here’, not someone with a story to tell but only someone who seems to feel the need to speak. It's true that the speaker is given a name and a comic name at that, but this is a lure, an attempt by the poet to isolate his anxieties by dramatising them, much as Hamlet ‘puts an antic disposition on’. In fact, we soon realise, the poem is really a kind of ode, like Wordsworth's Immortality Ode or Keats's ‘Ode to Melancholy’, a
poem in which the first person speaks for all of us and speaks in order not to instruct but to understand. And just as we have to take the pronouncements of Wordsworth and Keats seriously, so here, when Eliot/Prufrock says: ‘I have heard the mermaids singing each to each./ I do not think that they will sing to me’, we must take him as seriously as we would take the pronouncements of any poet. Were he prepared to roll up the bottoms of his trousers and walk upon the beach without self-consciousness all would perhaps be well. He would be a novelist, perhaps, or a minor poet, commenting on the seascape. Were the mermaids to sing to him as the Muses sang to Homer all would be well. He would write down their words and be the spokesman of the community. But no, he has heard the mermaids singing and so can never again return to his old life; but because they weren't singing to him but only to each other, he is in the unenviable position of having to live with the sense that what would give meaning to his life is there, but just out of earshot. ‘There is salvation’, as Kafka once said, ‘but not for us.’
In such a situation the very notion of a craft of poetry becomes a mockery. The two lines, ‘I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach’, and ‘I have heard the mermaids singing each to each’ form a perfect rhyming couplet, but the rhyme remains empty because ‘each to each’ turns in on itself and remains, semantically, in a different universe from that of the poet walking on the beach. Hence what follows is a line that cannot have a rhyme because it is a description of solitude and loss: ‘I do not think that they will sing to me.’
Of course the world of so-called culture (what Pound ironically Americanised as Kulchur) goes on its way, as it always does, blithely unaware that anything is amiss: ‘In the room the women come and go/ Talking of Michelangelo.’ Pope too used the rhyming couplet to signal the disjunction rather than the conjunction between the ideal world and the social world, but in Eliot the disjunction goes deeper because there is no sense that a change in the attitudes of society would set things right, only the bleak acknowledgement that things are not right. After such knowledge, how is lyric poetry any longer possible? (A question that Eliot is asking not only long before Adorno postulated it in the aftermath of Auschwitz, but even before the First World War, for ‘Prufrock’ was written in 1911.)
Yet the final lines do seem to salvage something from the wreck: the speaker will never be able to hear what the mermaids are saying, but, like Wallace Stevens in his great poems of the sea, he manages to convey something of its voice in his image of the ever oncoming and outgoing waves:
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
The final triplet, however, reminds us that our sense of what the mermaids are and what they may be saying is a precarious one, which will last only as long as we are reading (and the poet is writing) the poem: when we look up from it, in the end, ‘human voices wake us, and we drown’. We are left with the disintegrating vision and with the insistent and meaningless rhyme of ‘red and brown’/ ‘and we drown’.
Wallace Stevens was Eliot's older contemporary, but where Eliot was already famous by 1922 as the author of The Waste Land and The Sacred Wood, Stevens had not yet published his first volume, Harmonium, and even after the appearance of that wonderful collection in 1923, was not recognised as a major poet till he was in his fifties. With hindsight, though, we can see that the longest poem in Harmonium, ‘The Comedian as the Letter C’, is his version of ‘Prufrock’, his version of the portrait of the artist as a young man in our modern world. This time, though, it is a very American world.
Stevens here, as in so many of his poems, instinctively adopts what Kierkegaard called ‘the dialectic principle’: first you posit this, then you posit its opposite, then you see what happens. Part I, ‘The World Without Imagination’, tells how Crispin, on solid ground, trying to anchor his being in himself, finds himself overwhelmed by the sea:
Sed quaeritur: is this same wig
Of things, this nincompated pedagogue,