Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
Prufrock wrote these lines to emphasize his feelings of losing time and go through life day to day. Coffee spoons in my view aren’t that large , so in my perspective Prufrock uses this to symbolize how life is going through him. Day by day , every hour and minute is passing him yet, he is not living like to the fullest. In reference to the previous line he is letting each day pass him he saying he is feeling lost in the mix of everyday like feeling out of the flow of daily life. Everyday just being strung along through other people’s interactions and conversations with him. Yet, not having a fulfilling day counting the coffee spoons til it is his last day. Similarly to how people feel during this quarantine , the only real reason we are somewhat on top of what day it is, is because of jobs or school but even then it could be may but it feels like just another month not like summer because we can’t go out , we can’t do anything , it really does feel like life if passing by us and we are just letting it pass through us waiting for this pandemic to be over.
Patricia, This has always been one of my favorite lines in Eliot’s poem, and I agree with you that it takes on special meaning now when most of us are living what feel like very small lives at home, experiencing a strange sense of monotony as the days accumulate, each one pretty much the same as the one before it.