Let us go then you and I.
When the evening is spread out against the sky.
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
In case you’re new to our merry band, and have only recently subscribed, I’m writing a short series of posts on T. S. Eliot’s, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” in an effort to pry open a basement window and gain access to Eliot’s entire corpus through one of his foundational works.
The opening rhyme with its focus on nature, “Let us go then, you and I, | When the evening is spread out against the sky,” feels like the beginning of a Romantic poem, but when the narrator takes a sudden turn with “Like a patient etherized upon a table;” the reader is jarred by the unnatural, melancholy image, and then further subjected to city-life imagery—“half-deserted streets,” “cheap hotels,” and “window-panes,” for example.
The first line indicates he has a companion, but the use of “you and I” instead of “us” suggests some disjointedness in the relationship or in the narrator.
Also, grammatically speaking, it should be “you and me.” This may be intentional for the purpose of rhyming with “sky,” but that seems unnecessary given the free verse structure. It probably adds to the feeling of disjointedness in the poem. There could be a lot of ways to read this, and as Eliot indicates in a letter to Kristian Smidt, there has apparently been some wild speculations, Eliot says, leading to “some quite astonishing over-interpretation of this poem.”
Eliot further asserts in the same letter that the “’you’ is merely some companion, presumably of the male sex, whom the speaker is at that moment addressing, and that it has no emotional content whatever.”
To spread something out is to prepare it for examination, like a map upon a table. Yet, this is a curious statement because there is a sense in which the evening, as far as it can be seen, is part of the sky. One gets the impression that the evening sky is somehow spread out to be examined. Similar imagery is used in lines 55-58 when the narrator feels like a bug pinned to the wall, as if to be stretched out to be examined.
In conjunction with the next line, the imagery works to create a sense of introspective melancholy. A patient is a subject of examination and a patient etherized is obviously under the influence of a strong sedative. One in this condition will be motionless, ineffective, and impotent. Together with the previous line, the reader gets a sense that time is still for a moment and the narrator is entering a reflective meditation, a dream-like state, perhaps.
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