Prufrock’s Helplessness

 

Prufrock is the poet persona in T S Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock’. Like most characters created by Eliot, Prufrock is a fragmented psyche.  He lives in a world where authentic personal commitments don’t seem quite possible. The “one-night cheap hotels” give you “restless nights”.  In more serious places you’ll meet women coming and going talking of Michelangelo. There are lonely men in shirt-sleeves leaning out of windows, not particularly curious about the meaning of the smoke that rises from their pipes. Prufrock has his own mask in place, ready to meet other masks.

Prufrock wants to commit himself to something deeper than the restless nights, smoking pipes, and discussions that sound intellectual. But he is helpless. “Do I dare?” He asks himself many times. He doesn’t. He can’t. He is helpless.

Imagine Prufrock in contemporary India’s half-deserted streets where dreams die by the second. There is the pandemic. And there is a government. Is there really? Prufrock wonders.

He can see the yellow fog that rubs its back upon the phantasmagorical walls of the Central Vista where the Prime Minister’s residence alone will have 10 four-storey buildings. He can see the evening dying slowly like an enfeebled patient upon a surgical table, beyond the Central Vista. That dying man had dared to question the government. A casual remark on a social media, may be. A cartoon in a periodical. A slogan in an andolan, perhaps.

Those who dared are dying. Do I dare? Prufrock’s fundamental question dies within himself. He turns back. He has no way ahead. The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle against the earth movers around India Gate licks its tongue into the corners of Prufrock’s twilight.

Prufrock wants to dare. But he cannot. His soul has been killed. Lynched on the roadside by voices that don’t sound human but claim to be nationalist.

PS. Written for Indispire Edition 377: We all have grown up reading many poems. which is your favourite poem? and why? #favouritepoem