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
(Stanza 1, lines 4-8).
The literal meaning of this passage is showing the speaker with another person traveling through an area resembling the city, and this specific city does not seem very populated, and it is fairly lower class, as the passage mentions its “cheap hotels” (line 6). I chose this passage mainly because it was a key factor in the passage, it helped me to understand the setting of the poem by describing the city-esque scenery, and since it appeared in the first few lines, I think this was an important aspect that set the tone of the poem. For this poem, I chose to look up the words tedious and muttering, to provide better clarity to read the poem. Tedious generally means incredibly slow and uninteresting, and muttering means a complaint or unpleasant feeling that is expressed privately (both definitions were taken from Oxford Languages through Google). Eliot employs imagery to express the setting that the speaker and unidentified person embark on, he uses this to describe a somber, quiet city area where they spend time together. He also uses a simile to describe how ongoing the streets are in the somber city. These lines connect to the overall idea of the poem because the scenery is described from the perspective of the speaker, and this is used to convey his overall underwhelming and somber attitude towards life, particularly concerning him not having a wife in his older years in life, and his lack of effort and ambitious intent toward correcting that. I still don’t understand who this “you” is when the speaker talks about going to the city with this person.
As your analysis suggests, these lines do more than simply establish the setting of the poem. They also contribute importantly to its mood and give us a feeling of Prufrock’s loneliness and inertia.