On first reading, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" isn't a love song at all. The poem speaks of the loneliness and longing of a man who has lost his direction and certainty in a world that for him seems to have become sterile and cold.
It begins with an excerpt from Dante's Inferno, in which Guido da Montefeltro decides it is safe to confess his life story to Dante, as he believes Dante will be unable to return to the world from Hades to tell anyone else. When I think of "love song," I typically expect it to begin with a description of rosy cheeks, or budding flowers... not with a paragraph from the Inferno that basically says "I'm in hell, and so are you."
From there, we are invited to join Prufrock in "restless nights in one-night cheap hotels." But like a bad host, we end up hearing about Prufrock's thinning hair, and his frustration and violent fear of taking any action in his life, asking "Do I dare / Disturb the universe?"
He claims to have known intimacy before, and to "have known the arms already, known them all-- / Arms that are bracelet and white and bare," but I do not believe him. Something about this poem leads me to believe that Prufrock has been isolated from any type of love for most of his life, and his claim to have "known them all" is as thin as the hair upon his head. Maybe it's his name that makes me think this way in my reading. Or perhaps it's his repetition of "In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo."
He admits that indecisions have made him lower than Hamlet, and as he grows old he mourns the joys of life that he has missed out on and begins to doubt that its mermaids will ever sing to him. And it was in reading this final section of despair and hopelessness that I realized this poem couldn't be anything but a love song.
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