S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse
A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma percioche giammai di questo fondo
Non torno vivo alcun, s’i’odo il vero,
Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.
If I believed my reply were to one that was ever to return to the world,
this flame, without further shaking, would rest;
but since never before from this abyss has man returned alive,
if I hear true, I answer without fear of infamy.
What the reader makes of the epigraph will undoubtedly color his or her understanding of Eliot’s poem. The epigraph is an excerpt from Dante’s Inferno, Canto XXVII, 61-66, where Guido Da Montefeltro, a soldier turned friar, reluctantly confesses to Dante that he is damned because he accepted an absolution without repenting for an evil deed he committed. He confesses only because he does not believe Dante will be allowed to return to the world to tell about it.
If the epigraph is meant to somehow “mediate between poet and poem,” and that it “formally subsumes its hero’s problem with expressive language to the poet’s problem with textuality,” as Mutlu Konuk Blasing asserts, then the poem likely suggests that the poet is sealed “in the prison of literary ‘truth,’ which cancels out his life and tells someone else’s ‘lie.’”
Also, since the entire poem echoes of line 104—“It is impossible to say just what I mean.”—it is certainly not out of the question that the epigraph is, in the modernist vein, a “preformulative” allusion to Eliot’s plight of feeling he is “locked in the ‘room’ of literary ‘talk,’ too late to ‘tell all’ or to ‘sing.’” However, this theory seems improbable as being his original intent, since in the earliest manuscript, “the March Hare Notebook, [the poem] had no epigraph.”
In light of the fact that the epigraph was supplied later, it seems more likely Eliot selected it to evoke in the reader an initial sensory impression that would enshroud the poem in a yellow fog of its own. The reference to Montefeltro might evoke shame or embarrassment, raising the idea that what Prufrock cannot confess is to him too embarrassing or shameful.
Alternatively, perhaps Eliot meant to provoke the reader to anticipate some knowledge from the underworld. Along with the many other allusions to the underworld in the poem, in lines 94-95 the narrator says, “To Say: ‘I am Lazarus come from the dead, | come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all’—” However, the narrator is interrupted before he can give his message, and the reader is left uninformed and anxious.
The reference to Lazarus is obviously a biblical one. In the New Testament there are two characters named Lazarus. One is the brother of Mary and Martha, whom Jesus raises from the dead; the other is a character in Jesus’ parable about a rich man who dies and finds himself in hell and a poor man named Lazarus who is comforted in Abraham’s bosom. The rich man asks Abraham to raise Lazarus and send him to his family with a message of repentance and hope.
For Prufrock to say he is Lazarus come from the dead with a message, puts him in the company of the divine messengers; but to be a messenger incapable or unable to give his message, he is an impotent messenger. The implication of the epigraph seems to suggest the narrator has something big to say, something monumental and life changing perhaps, but whether it is for reasons related to shame or embarrassment, or for some other unknown reason, he is unable to get it off his chest.
It is with this sensory impression coloring our reading glasses that Eliot has prepared us to enter the poem proper.
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