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I enjoyed this Conceptual Art because initially I didn’t know what to do. It was challenging. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock is a beautiful poem but doesn’t easily translate into a picture. I’ll describe what happened in more detail than usual.
I thought of the opening lines describing a soulless and forlorn city. Some years ago I took night photographs in Manchester I thought would express the idea, albeit it’s evening in the poem more than night. But evening then becomes night. Evening is where night begins, and “cheap hotels” become relevant for the poem.
The night buildings didn’t give me any creative idea so I looked at the poem again and the mermaids are important. Who are they? What do they represent? I’ll leave that for you to decide. But structurally, you can say there’s a tension between the opening narrator and the concluding mermaids. The poem happens in between.
Years ago again, I took photographs walking in the South Downs and at Beachy Head. I’d added the night buildings to the view, then the mermaid, the Michelangelo painting, then got stuck. What next? That lasted an entire day, trying to get an idea.
I didn’t feel my overnight dreaming came up with answers, although it’s possible.
The next day it started to flow as I looked again at the poem and identified interesting images. There’s a line of domestic detail flowing down from Alfred, on an operating table where people are etherised. This contrasts with the sea and cliff view, with the smoke filled city behind.
We have lives of small concerns while there is a bigger more meaningful world. Mary Oliver says the same thing.
Alfred wonders if it’s worth eating a peach, correlating a minor act with disturbing the universe. He’s not noble Hamlet, but shares his indecision. Prufrock has the mermaid. Hamlet has Ophelia, for a while at least, leading to more Conceptual Art and I include her in the picture.
The poem’s epigraph is important, from Dante’s Inferno:
If I believed that my answer was
to one who would never return to the world,
this flame would have remained without further shocks.
But since
no one has ever returned alive from this depth, if I hear the truth,
without fear of infamy I answer you.
Dante meets a character called Guido da Montefeltro, condemned to the eighth circle of Hell. Like Guido, Prufrock thinks his story is hidden, and we read this as a comment about society. “That is not it at all” when you try to tell your story, and no one hears. The poem is like a soliloquy, Prufrock addressing himself, but inviting us to join in with him.
Guido is in Hell, Prufrock is in London, and neither can escape. You can actually, by walking in nature, or imaginatively with poetry and art.
The final line of Prufrock connects Eliot’s poem with Hamlet. This was not his intention but I’ll make it mine, because it works.
Ophelia drowns.
Eliot writes “Till human voices wake us, and we drown” inverting the expected meaning.
It’s the chatter of society which overwhelms, denies, and doesn’t see individual people. Art, contemplation, walking in nature, are when we awaken.