Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

It is heartbreaking to see Prufrock struggle with himself to escape his world of monotony, conformity and falsity only to question himself and fall back in line. The poem starts off with Prufrock’s greatest desire, to go into the dark, dirty streets, away from the confining security of the indoors. But instead he remains inside listening to the absent-minded “women come and go talking of Michelangelo.” He has gotten to a point in his life where he can no longer stand the emptiness of his existence in this high-class, crowded world. No one in that world has depth or anything meaningful to say; at each party the same women come back and have the same unconscious conversation about Michelangelo without ever going beyond the surface. As Prufrock says, “It is impossible to say what I mean!” when he lives in constant fear of what his cocooned society will say about him.
Stanza 8 really stood out for me with its vivid language and the hopelessness of his situation. The people around him already have him pegged and no matter how hard he tries or what he does he will always remain that way in their eyes, “pinned and wriggling on the wall.” There is no way for him to move away from his past because he will forever be pinned there.
Also, the lines: “There will be time, there will be time/To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet” jumped out at me for the truth of its message. It reminds of a Beatles song where the character “Lives in a Dream/Waits at the window, wearing the face that she keeps in a jar by the door/Who is it for?” Many times people (especially people living in Prufrock’s world) put on a mask around others as a way to hide their true selves and avoid getting hurt. All in all it is a sad situation for Prufrock.