"Let us go", demands Prufrock at the start of his 'Love Song'. Ostensibly decisive words, however closer reading reveals otherwise: he repeats the demand a stuttering three times in the first stanza. Indeed, as the "yellow fog" of an "October night" curls about his house and falls asleep, one wonders whether Prufrock himself changes like the season he describes, falling asleep like the "smoke" rather than traversing "half-deserted streets" to a mysterious "room" where mysterious "women come and go".
By the poem's fourth stanza Prufrock acknowledges his own indecision rather than masking it in mock decisiveness. "There will be time", he states four times in six lines before echoing the word "time" on a further four occasions within the stanza. As the reader skips continually over these ticking repetitions he senses the "hundred indecisions", the "visions and revisions", to which Prufrock admits.
What is it that makes Prufrock so afraid to "go"? So afraid to ask the obscure but "overwhelming question" that he keeps burning within him? Eliot seems to hint that a sense of inferiority and corresponding fear of mockery are to blame. The women are "talking of Michelangelo" - an artistic genius - with whom Prufrock perhaps feels he cannot compare. This intellectual inferiority is echoed physically. Despite his sartorial garb of "morning coat" and "necktie" two sets of scathing parenthesis invade stanza five. Both begin "They will say..." and end with the adjective "thin!". Prufrock's hair is thin, his arms and legs are thin, and consequently his willingness to "go", to "dare", to "meet", wanes too.
Eventually he asks himself:
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
The first line is emphasised simply by merit of being the shortest of the poem so far. Indeed the pause created by its striking enjambment seems to draw further attention to Prufrock's indecision, just as the plosive alliteration that penetrates this curt interrogative adds a self-mocking tone to his ironic words. It is not a universe that he will disturb with his "overwhelming question" but a small social circle with which he is seemingly bored: "I have known them all" he tells us.
This fear of disturbing his universe recalls the poem's epigraph. Eliot opens with lines 61-66 of Canto 27 from Dante's Inferno. In the depths of hell, Guido would refuse to speak:
"S'io credessi che mia risposta fosse
A persona che mai tornasse al mondo"
(If [he] thought that [he] was replying
to someone who would return to the world)
This is surely describing Prufrock's ideal listener. An interlocutor upon whom he can unburden himself without fear of his confessions becoming part of the murmured gossip concealed "beneath the music from a farther room".
Given the poem's cryptic quality it appears that we are not such a listener. For Riquelme, the poem is comprised of "scenes that can with difficulty be imagined based on the minimal details provided". It is not just the poem's visual scenes that are obscure: we do not even know the question Prufrock so desperately wishes to ask, or indeed to whom he wishes to ask it!
We see her - and perhaps other women - only in synechdochic fragments scattered across five stanzas: "eyes", "arms", "long fingers", "skirts". While the "eyes" formulate him, put him in his place in the social "universe", the arms and their "light brown hair" distract him. Williamson sees them as an "erotic symbol", and this is consequently the clearest hint at Prufrock's intentions.
Indeed, when reflecting on 'what might have been' later in the poem, he wonders whether it would've been worthwhile to have "squeezed the universe into a ball". There is a definite echo of Andrew Marvell's 'To His Coy Mistress' in this phrase: Prufrock clearly wishes to seduce a woman into an erotic encounter. He does not want to be one of the "lonely men in shirt-sleeves" that he has (imagined) passing on his way to this room of "tea and cake and ices".
Inevitably though, he will be just that. He will never have the "strength" to "force the moment to its crisis" and ask his "overwhelming question". Even in his stanza ten rehearsal of his 'seduction' speech he gets no further than three lines of verse before an ellipsis signifies his inability to act on his desires.
"I should have been a pair of ragged claws", he laments, "scuttling across the floors of silent seas." By the poem's conclusion this is where he seems to end up. He will "grow old" and "walk upon the beach", but even here an internal crisis of confidence ensures women will converse entirely without him, just as they do in the "room". Echoing John Donne, Eliot writes:
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
Prufrock's assertion that he is "not Prince Hamlet" shows an astute self-knowledge. Despite the Danish Prince's initial hesitation he eventually learnt to act decisively. Prufrock never does. It is not only his refusal to engage with women that is indecisive. Even the most minor detail causes a frantic question: "Shall I part my hair behind?", he wonders, "Do I dare to eat a peach?".
As the poems final stanzas begin to break down in length, so Prufrock's life begins to break apart too. Indeed the final stanza acts almost as a mise-en-abyme for the entire poem. He admits he has "lingered in ... chambers" rather than acting as he perhaps should. He has been close to "sea-girls" yet remains separate from them, before eventually appearing to die or "drown".
