Daniel Zhavoronkin – The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

“The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes

The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes” (Lines 15-16)

In the most literal sense, I believe this is referring to the polluted fog in London. I believe that T.S. Eliot is referring to the fact that it has a thickness that gives it life, allowing it to ‘rub its back’ and ‘its muzzle’. This is a poem filled with eyebrow-raising lines, but this one in particular stood out to me because of its repetition, almost as if he was saying the same sentence twice but mixed up some of the words the second time. This is also the only time in the poem where he rhymes a word with itself, and further conveys an emphasis on window-panes and yellow smoke in lines 24-25. I didn’t know what a muzzle was, so I looked it up and apparently it’s the part of the face that goes past the eyes in animals such as cats, dogs and horses (for humans, this facial bone is called the maxilla). This has led some people to speculate that the smoke is actually a metonym for a cat. Looking further into Stanza 3, this claim is supported by other devices of ‘catification’ (personification but it’s a cat) such as licking its tongue, lingering and sudden leaps. The cat is never directly named, but it is referred to by a series of actions and traits, broken apart by an inconsistent sequence. This is a part of a greater literary technique in modernist poetry known as fragmentation. One of the overarching ideas in modernism is that the meaning of life is not handed to us in a picturesque, perfectly sequenced plot of events and interactions. Life is disorienting and esoteric, and its meaning comes to us in bits and pieces in the midst of chaos. This may further point to why T.S. Eliot has an inconsistent rhyme scheme, broken by  repetition and bouts of what appears to be free verse. As I was reading this aloud, there was no iambic pentameter to carry along a smooth rhythm of words. The poem paced feverishly and the repetition in these two lines adds to that, almost like the train of thought of someone having a panic attack. The confusion I had when I encountered these two nearly identical lines echoed itself throughout the poem, by more loosely described metonyms and stanzas of seemingly random lengths. I still have trouble understanding why he alludes to a cat, or why he repeats the stanza of women in a room talking about Michaelangelo. One of the answers I got when looking at a line-by-line analysis of this poem is that ‘One can take almost any approach, any assignation of meaning, to J. Prufrock and his world. One can make their own meaning from the clues that are provided by Eliot’s writing.’ Thank you, poemanalysis.com.

Some websites I looked at-

https://poemanalysis.com/t-s-eliot/the-love-song-of-j-alfred-prufrock (where I first read about the cat and fragmentation and the ‘open-ended’ meaning of the symbols scattered throughout this poem)

https://poets.org/glossary/fragment (further insight into fragmentation)

https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/poetry/love-song-alfred-prufrock/summary (hoped to get a deeper look at stanza three but it was just a watered down version of poem analysis, same goes for sparknotes)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Love_Song_of_J._Alfred_Prufrock (making sure that he did write this in London – don’t want to make false claim about London fog)