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Michelangelo

The famous refrain from “Prufrock” references the great artist of the Italian Renaissance, Michelangelo (lines 14–15 and 35–36):

     In the room the women come and go
     Talking of Michelangelo.

This refrain functions, in part, to suggest the speaker’s sense of alienation. Prufrock depicts the women as remote from him. They are going about their own business and talking amongst themselves. The remoteness he feels here connects to similar feelings he describes elsewhere in the poem, as when he imagines a woman reclining in his bed and insisting that he’s misunderstood her completely (lines 97–98 and 109–110). But what of Michelangelo? This reference to a painter and sculptor may initially seem confusing, given that most of the other references in “Prufrock” are literary in nature. However, this disjunction arguably enhances our sense of the speaker’s alienation. As a man of letters, Prufrock may feel incapable of engaging in discourse about the visual arts. But regardless of whether he feels up to this specific task, the reference to Michelangelo also has a more general symbolic importance. Like Dante, Shakespeare, and Marvell, all of whom the speaker references, Michelangelo represents a luminous tradition of European art that, in Prufrock’s modern context, now seems irretrievably remote.

Yellow Fog

When Prufrock imagines walking through the city at the beginning of the poem, he conjures an elaborate image of yellow fog that covers everything in sight (lines 15–22):

     The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
     The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,
     Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
     Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
     Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
     Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
     And seeing that it was a soft October night,
     Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

In describing this yellow fog, the speaker presents an archetypal image of industrial modernity. Essentially, he’s saying the city is polluted with smoke from local industry, and that this smoke is backlit by electric lights that make it glow yellow. The image has an eerie quality, made yet more strange by the way Prufrock endows the fog with a feline nature. Like a cat, the fog moves fluidly through the city, getting into every nook and cranny. The fog is therefore everywhere, affecting everyone and everything in the urban environment. In addition to posing health risks to everyone who breathes it, the fog also obscures visibility, and its pervasiveness produces a general atmosphere of unease. These various effects help illustrate the more abstract meaning of the fog, which Eliot uses to symbolize the toxic and isolating conditions of modern existence. Just as it blankets the city in a shroud of eerie gloom, it produces a form of intellectual haze that figuratively fogs up Prufrock’s mind.

The Overwhelming Question

Twice in the poem Prufrock references an “overwhelming question.” The first instance comes in the opening stanza, when the speaker imagines going for a walk in the city (lines 4–10):

     Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
     The muttering retreats
     Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
     And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
     Streets that follow like a tedious argument
     Of insidious intent
     To lead you to an overwhelming question ...

Prufrock doesn’t clarify what he means by the phrase, “overwhelming question.” In fact, he immediately dismisses any request for clarification: “Oh, do not ask, ‘What is it?’” (line 11). But despite this dismissal, Prufrock circles back to the enigma some eighty lines later:

     Would it have been worth while,
     To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
     To have squeezed the universe into a ball
     To roll it towards some overwhelming question

In this passage (lines 90–94), Prufrock again refrains from specifying what he means by the “overwhelming question.” Yet the dramatic phrasing, combined with his repeated reference, clearly indicates that this question is one of existential and maybe even theological proportions. Arguably, then, the “overwhelming question” symbolizes the major questions about the nature of meaning and existence. These questions are “overwhelming” for Prufrock, since he feels there is no way for him to answer them with certainty. Because modern life has imposed conditions that irreversibly fracture perception and experience, it’s barely possible to ask the overwhelming question, much less answer it. Intriguingly, the unanswerability of this question places it in relation to the many rhetorical questions the speaker poses throughout the poem, and which further demonstrate his uncertainty.

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