A Stream of Consciousness-like Response to "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T.S. Eliot

“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” sounds like an enormous warning to me. Between the cautionary yellow fog, the eternal Footman holding your coat, and swimming freely then realizing all was a dream and drowning upon awakening, it all sounds like one big wake-up call (slight pun intended) that time is way shorter than we humans seem to think of it being. According to this poem, we should do all that we can in our time allotted (meaning the time in which we are alive), or it could run out on us. In this precious time that we have, we should confess to the person we love, we should go for and get our dream job, and we should check off every goal on our bucket lists. “Do I dare to eat a peach?” You’d better!

T.S. Eliot warns of the disillusionment that time can be held onto forever in this poem of his. Sure, “in a minute there is time/ for decisions and revisions”, but if we constantly hesitate and procrastinate, not one of the possibilities in those decisions will ever come to fruition—we will be wasting time, and that’s what Eliot is getting across.

Does that not panic you?

Eliot’s not the only one who’s attempted to get this message of limited time out. The first story that comes to mind related to this is the movie It’s Kind of a Funny Story, where in the end, the main character is going on about enjoying and actually living life. My personal weekday routine consists of school, maybe marching band practice, homework, sleep, and starting all over again the next day. On the weekends, I attempt to catch up on sleep and more homework. I am basically measuring my methodical life in something like “coffee spoons” because there is no real variety in what I do. I am not truly “living” while I can and therefore wasting time. Maybe Eliot’s poem isn't completely about ‘living’ or lost time either, but it terrifies me to think that I might “wake up” from my dreamlike state of thinking that I had all this time to use and “linger” when I actually didn't,  and I “drown” in reality. Have I been “etherized” all this time?

Another movie (can’t help it) relating to this topic is A Beautiful Mind. In the movie, the protagonist is diagnosed with schizophrenia after others around him realize that he had been perceiving and responding to people that were made up in his mind and weren't actually there. Since I have both watched this movie and read Eliot’s poem recently, the ideas from each have started to blend a bit in my mind. What I've gotten from both stories is that there is an actual possibility that, as I experience life, what I am now perceiving and interacting with on a daily basis is not real. There is no proof that I am not the schizophrenia patient; I may be just a little more controlled or mild. I could even just not exist myself. Who’s to tell me I do? Everyone shows up how I perceive them to be, right? So how should I presume?

I suppose that’s another part of Eliot’s poem. There is a great illusion by humans that there is always more time, so they should act and make decisions while they can. However, there is also the question of how do we go about making those decisions? We know we have a time limit, but what if life is meaningless after all? What if my desires and goals that I wish to accomplish aren't even worth it? We wouldn't even be able to know whether they were until we decided to act upon them. So how can we muster the confidence to go after something we have no way of ensuring will turn out good for us? Do we just go for it, anyway? Yes? Then, how, Eliot? He does not seem to give this question a clear answer.

It’s interesting to see how much actual uncertainty about life is reflected in this poem of Eliot’s, which is fitting for a modernist writer who is all too familiar with disillusionment and disorientation. 

More on "Adventure"

During the recent Lit Circles we had in class, my group and I were in charge of discussing the short story "Adventure" in Winesburg, Ohio. Here are just a few more things I noticed in the story, but didn't get to talk about:

Adventure.

Because the title of the story is "Adventure", it calls back to mind George Willard's "adventure" that he has in the story "Nobody Knows", where he impulsively acts to find Louise Trunnion. Furthermore, after finishing the book, George's following decision "to meet the adventure of life" is present in "Departure". Thinking of these two adventures, it is noticeable that Alice's adventure follows the same kind of trend: a small event occurs with or around the character, but the impact of the event is huge and significant. As seen at the end of the chapter with Alice’s heavy scene in the rain, this is held true.

Darkness.

Darkness is a strong motif in "Adventure". On every page of the story, darkness has either a direct mention or is implied through connotations (e.g. “evening”, etc.). When reading the story, I picked up how darkness seemed to follow Alice throughout her life. From the time when she was young and dating Ned Currie—with the words “evening” and “under the trees” giving off a shadowy feeling to their relationship with their union “in the moonlight”—to her older self, almost a decade later—with her head that was so large it “overshadowed her body” and walking back home with Will Hurley at night, wanting to invite him “to sit with her in the darkness on the porch before the house”—darkness had always surrounded Alice Hindman. Not until after her 27^th birthday does she finally acknowledge the darkness. Alice interacts with it “with staring eyes” and “her imagination, like a child awakened from long sleep” plays about in it. It is not until she feels “deep within her [the] something that would not be cheated by phantasies and that demanded some definite answer from life” that she truly begins her “adventure”, which also takes place during the night under a cloudy, raining sky. Perhaps this is saying that not until Alice actually goes to “the dark side” is able to see the truth of things—and for her, this truth is “the fact that many people must live and die alone, even in Winesburg”.

Ned Currie

To Alice, Ned Currie is the representative entity of love and emotions, the one who—in her mind, at least—takes away “all of her natural difference and reserve” and awakens the “continual ferment” and “passionate restlessness” within Alice that tortures her later after his departure. To the reader, Ned is an indecisive bum who takes away this once sweet and “pretty” girl’s virginity (with her supposed consent, but still) and then abandons her, confused and infatuated. I think the latter is the true character of Ned, and luckily Alice is able to see this herself by the end of the story when she matures and “she no longer depended on him”. Ned is not only an unsavory guy because he abandons Alice, but also because he promises to come back and doesn't  With some close reading, we see that he was probably lying about coming back in the first place. We read how after Ned was not successful in Cleveland, he travels west to Chicago in hope of better luck. According to Thomas Foster in his novel How To Read Literature Like a Professor, when a character goes west, it is usually to find a fortune or new life, head out on a frontier, take advantage of new opportunities, or the character is headed for destruction.  We read later that Ned is in fact “caught up by the life of the city [where] he began to make friends and found new interests in life”, and he ends up forgetting about Alice back in Winesburg. The reader doesn't know if Ned’s life in Chicago was full of glamorous opportunities or if he was headed towards his own demise, but because he decided to travel west, figuratively, the reader can be certain that he wasn't going to come back after all. Ned is a bum.

Bible and Ned & Alice’s relationship

After the two lovers form their union in the field before Ned leaves, he tells Alice, “Now we will have to stick to each other, whatever happens we will have to do that”. Whether Ned was aware of it when he said it or not, he and Alice were binding on a much deeper level. In the Bible, when one man and woman come together sexually, they are considered afterwards to be of the same “flesh”. So, after their union, Ned and Alice are “sticking” to each other in more ways than one—on a figurative level, they are now of the same whole body.

Of course, this makes it much easier to see how Ned and Alice’s relationship is parasitic. Being “of the same flesh”, after Ned’s departure, Alice becomes the host while Ned is the parasite. Even in his absence, Ned sucks away any chance of Alice having a regular life without him—he confused and delighted her just enough to keep her fixated on him while he is away from her out west. With her fixation, Alice allows the “fear of age and ineffectuality” to take possession of her, and her youth is spoiled by her sickness, her loyalty to Ned. It is not until Alice is finally maturing that she tries to heal herself, first religiously-speaking by becoming a member of a church, but also mentally-speaking, when she “was trying feebly”—suggesting she had been previously weakened in the parasitic relationship—“at first, but with growing determination, to get a new hold upon life”. Fortunately, Alice is able to wash away her loyalty to Ned, and with it her wild and passionate temperament (her fever, in a sense), in the rainstorm in the end of the story, where she is cleansed, with the implication of baptism.

"A Dream Within A Dream"--a wake-up call from Poe

"A Dream Within a Dream" by Edgar Allan Poe

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow—
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand—
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep- while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

~~~

Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “A Dream within a Dream” features a speaker who struggles with the idea that the reality that we know may actually be unreal or significantly imagined. If, in fact, all that we experience is “a dream within a dream”, there is an implication that there is no true moment of ‘waking up’ to face reality; we are stuck forever in an illusory setting that is twice-imagined by our minds. This creates a very wide chasm in between what we believe to be real and what is actually real.

In the beginning of the poem, the speaker addresses an unnamed listener, to whom he agrees with in that his days have in fact been a dream. He kisses then leaves the listener with the central focus of the poem:  “All that we see or seem/Is but a dream within a dream” (Poe 10-11). In the second stanza, the speaker has moved to a different setting, one where he is surrounded by the loud crashing of waves beating against a “surf-tormented shore” (13). In his hands, he desperately attempts to hold onto the grains of sand he has collected from the shore, but the grains slowly fall between his fingers into the ocean. Seeing this, the speaker cries out in dismay, wondering why he is unable to hold onto the sand, and he ends the poem with the question “Is all that we see or seem/But a dream within a dream?” (23-24).

In the poem, I as the reader noticed a shift between the first and second stanzas. Where the first stanza has the speaker and his listener present in an unclear setting, the second stanza describes the speaker alone in a more concrete setting on the violent shore of a beach. However, the sentiments present in the first stanza seem to be mirrored in the second, on a more figurative level. The “hope” that leaves the speaker in the first stanza can be symbolized in the fleeting grains of sand that he desperately clings onto in the second; the bestial “surf” and “wave” that surrounds the speaker in the second stanza would then be symbolic of the same force that causes the hope to fly away in in the first. If reality is considered to be a conscious level, this shift to a more visual and physical setting could represent how the speaker departs from the innermost to the outside dream level located between the “dream within a dream” and reality—he has ‘awakened’ somewhat, but he still cannot see reality for it is. Understandably, this exasperates the speaker, who weeps at how he is still unable to have any control over what is happening, just as one cannot in a dream. The speaker is moved to ask the question now whether if all that once experiences is only a dream within a dream, and him asking a question rather than repeating his previous, similarly worded statement seems to show how he no longer wants to accepts this as a truth. The speaker wants to be able to be lucid and experience things for how they really are. I believe Poe thinks this is a shared human desire, from the way that the question is worded “Is all that we see or seem/But a dream within a dream?” (23-24). This opens up the question’s topic to more than just the speaker himself, and Poe asks the reader to consider the answer.

"Tintern Abbey" allusion in Shelley's Frankenstein

"The sounding cataract

Haunted [him] like a passion: the tall rock,

The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,

Their colours and their forms, were then to [him]

An appetite; a feeling, and a love,

That had no need of a remoter charm.

By thought supplied, or any interest

Unborrow’d from the eye."

― “Frankenstein” by Mary Shelley (ch. 18, pg. 139)

Mary Shelley alluded to many works in her novel Frankenstein, including Wordsworth’s poem “Tintern Abbey”. With this poem, the allusion is strong because Shelley pretty much quotes eight lines from it verbatim, changing only a few punctuation marks and a couple of words to fit her story. She writes these lines towards the end of the eighteenth chapter, after Victor gives a wordy description on his love and appreciation for his friend Henry Clerval. Shelley most likely quotes these lines to draw a comparison between Wordsworth (the speaker of the poem) and Clerval.

During those eight lines of “Tintern Abbey”, Wordsworth is reflecting back on his connection to nature when he was younger―according to him, he was very uninhibited five years ago when it came to nature. He describes “the coarser pleasures of his boyish days” in the stanza as more visceral, with him exploring the hills “like a roe” might bound through them (Wordsworth, lines 67-69, 74-75). The younger Wordsworth loves nature with more of an eager craving or “appetite” (line 81) as an animal loves meat. When the passage in Frankenstein is studied in comparison, it is easy to tell that Clerval is being put in the same intellectual condition as the younger Wordsworth: Clerval also has a deep love for nature, and is described as having “a wild and enthusiastic imagination” with a soul that “overflowed with ardent affections”. For Clerval, the “scenery of external nature, which others regard only with admiration, he loved with ardour” (Shelley 139). In comparison, Clerval is just as uninhibited as the younger Wordsworth was when he first viewed the abbey.

So, if Clerval mirrors the younger, enthusiastic Wordsworth, could Victor be meant to mirror the older, more mature Wordsworth that revisits the abbey? Probably. After all, the passage reflecting on Clerval is written in Victor’s voice, and considering how it is the older Wordsworth that reflects on the younger Wordsworth, one can see a structural parallel between Victor and the older Wordsworth arise. If this is true, then Victor sees himself as the more mature friend between himself and Clerval. Shelley wants the reader to see how Victor imagines himself to be the one who has “learned to look on nature, not as in the hour of thoughtless youth, but hearing oftentimes the still, sad music of humanity” (Wordsworth lines 89-92), the one who has grown past the earlier, frenzied state and has developed “elevated thoughts” (line 96). Between himself and Clerval, Victor thinks himself to be the one who has gained the ability to understand more of nature, most likely because he believes himself to have “conquered” it with the conception of his Creature.

However, the reader is also able to discern the irony of Victor’s thoughts. Victor thinks he is more mature than Clerval when the real situation is actually the opposite. After all, it had been Victor who was foolish enough to deem himself worthy enough to attempt to surpass the divine; it had been Clerval who nursed Victor back to health when Victor realized the horror of his actions and became overwhelmed. Victor, in reality, is immature compared to Clerval, but he does not realize this. So overall, not only is Shelley showing how Clerval and younger Wordsworth and also Victor and older Wordsworth are alike in Victor’s eyes, but she also reveals how confused of a person he is―he does not see himself to be the juvenile, overreaching individual that she and the audience know him to be.