Human Voices in Silent Seas A Reading of Eliot's Love Song英文清晰.pdf

Human Voices in Silent Seas: A Reading of Eliot's Love Song The intensity of its appeal suggests that below the striking imagery and allusions in T. S. Eliot's first published poem, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1915), there lies a unifying message. Yet to uncover the "insidious intent" (line 9) of this message may prove a challenge. Taking into consider- ation, however, Eliot's remark from "The Music of Poetry" (1942) about the presence, in poetry, of "possibilities of contrapuntal arrangement of subject matter" (114), a certain opposition of domains of such subject matter becomes apparent in the poem. Through jarring and easy transitions, Eliot contrasts the privacy of observation, insight, and dream with the social functioning of man, his appraisal by others, and his appraisal of himself as reflected in "the eyes" (55), thoughts, and words of others. What unifies these opposed entities is human experience-the repeated instances of the present perfect tense ("I have known" [49, 55, 62] and "I have seen" [82, 84, 85, 126]); the "overwhelming" (10, 93) desire to share the "impossible" (104) unity in the moment of its perfected completion. A reading of Eliot's poem would reveal two major themes intertwined in it, each having a temporal (evening and afternoon) as well as a spatial (external and internal) aspect. It is in the second aspect that the search for direction in the context they create also becomes perceivable as a quest for belonging, the examination of which could yield the message of the poem and the ultimately optimistic idea of love, as the title suggests, lurking behind the apparently tragic finale. But before scrutinizing the juxtaposition of themes, the reader must consider the possibility of existence for the eponymous "song" itself and for the very text as such. Examining