The theme of aging in the poem J. Alfred Prufrock - Thesis Example

The theme of aging in the poem J. Alfred Prufrock: This poem by T.S. Eliot discuss many times and many ages and a specific time and a specific age, that of the protagonist, who is a slim, bald man in his middle years, singing about the travails of love, both with God and man. During this dramatic monologue and to borrow a term from the theatre__ soliloquy, the medium he uses to develop many diverse motifs and themes including that of age and the human natural phenomena of aging both physically and psychologically. J. Alfred Prufrock has come of an age.

An age dominated by the vagaries of the war on the one hand and the industrial revolution on the other. Prufrock is the spirit that permeates the waste land. Prufrock, an effeminate, urbanized thinking and feeling soul has delayed his confession of love to his beloved that now he thinks that his time has passed, and the little that is left he plans of spending the same way. Decisions, revisions and more revisions are yet to take place. While the time ticks on with the coming and goings of women in a room, where they talk of nothing else but Michel Angelo, he is the inhabitant of shadowy streets, breaths smog and is conscious of the whole delay and with it the accompanying decay.

Writer 2 Being an educated man he paints the enlightened picture of the decay of an unnamed city can be any be any big metropolis in the developed northern hemisphere. The yellow fog that envelopes the whole city, the streets with serpentine nature, plus the feline touch gives the whole atmosphere a symbolist character and taste. Prufrock and essentially Eliot is satirically sad at the whole scenario stretched before him. The whole canvas is laid bare in truth because Prufrock sings the song to himself and for himself.

It is his last concern whether anyone else may learn a lesson from it or just laugh it off as a routine happening. Prufrock has seasoned with his age a time he could not well adopt to or was in any sense adept at living. He never claims so, in fact all he needs is some space and time to him. Some time to get rid of the scars that need time and a necessary to get his wounds healed before all is silent. He visions himself walking on the beach alone with his pants rolled and the only though in his mind to be a crab at the base of the bottom less pit of water.

Which too is polluted although it I a well-known fact that it is water that was and is the birth place of all life. From the portrait he draws of himself with words is in some way reminiscent of the Picture of Dorian Gray, by the master sculptor of words Oscar Wilde. But poor and now aging Prufrock has not earned for himself any laurels, he claims he was never destined to be a prophet or a prince but a worth-while foil he might have been to many different men, he could at least have been a Horatio to a Hamlet.

His problems persist that even at this advanced age he is yet to decide the right course for himself. Writer 3 A point that must be learnt from his days is that man is just a plaything at the hands of the space, time, environ, society, the parameters he sets for his thought and his actions, rather acts of omission or commission. Prufrock has a soul that realizes albeit belatedly that no mermaid sings for him no any comforter is beside him. Loneliness has been a major factor in his age, depression, stress some genuine and a major portion of it is to accompany the rest of his life.

He hankers for company, especially female companionship. But as always they come and go into rooms and talk of nothing else but Michel Angelo. Prufrock laments and reminiscences over all that has taken place during his younger days, and recollects that he today pays a price for his follies and foibles of the past. T.S.Eliot wrote this poem when he himself was a young man with virility and exuberance of youth and his wit still about him. He is not mad but his cognitive faculties are not as sharp as they used to be.

A more appropriate title of the poem would have been the life and times of J. Alfred Prufrock and not the love song of J. Alfred Prufrock. Writer 4 Work Cited. Eliot. T. S. The Waste Land and other Poems. (NY: Signet Classic). 1998. Print.