Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have read the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
(Line 122-125)
This passage means that the author feels he grows old and thus he should behave like an aging man, wearing “white flannel trousers” and walking “upon the beach”. As he grows old, he is even more anxious about his unattractiveness. He is attracted by those beautiful and youthful mermaids, but he thinks they will not sing to him. I choose this passage because I think these four lines are parallel with the main idea of the poem by showing his anxieties, his longing for love and beauty and his thoughts that imagined life is superior than reality (Course Hero, 11:39-12:00). I looked up the word “mermaid” in the dictionary, and mermaid means “an aquatic creature with the head and upper body of a female human and the tail of a fish” (Mermaid, Wikipedia).
I also learned online the symbol of “peach” has meaning beyond the fruit in the text. In An Analysis of the Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. ELIOT, the passage shows that “peach” can mean “marriage and immortality” in China, “two things Prufrock desire” and it can also mean “female genitalia” to show Prufrock’s “feelings of sexual inadequacy” and “ his worry that his balding head and thin physique earn him the scorn of women”. And, from this point, this passage is connected to the central concern of the poem by showing his fear of feminine and his wishes of living in imagined world with mermaids rather than real females.
Yanyan, Thanks for sharing what you discovered about these lines of Eliot’s poem. It’s great to explore scholars’ and commentators’ ideas about the poem, but it is even more important to try to come to your own understanding of what’s going on in a text. This is one of the most frequently quoted parts of the poem, particularly Prufrock’s question “Do I dare to eat a peach?” Setting aside any ideas about the possible symbolism of the fruit, this line can also be read as referring to the simple idea of partaking of life’s sensory pleasures – which can be as delicious, but also as messy as eating a ripe peach.