Do I dare to eat a peach?

‘And how should I begin?’ asks J. Alfred Prufrock. We might begin by considering questions. There are fifteen questions dotted throughout T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’. Not one of them is answered. There is also an ‘overwhelming question’ that Prufrock wants to ask but never does. What is this overwhelming question? And who is Prufrock, who is he addressing, and where is he going? The poem seems to spawn more questions. It is infuriating, often troubling; it is also superb.

I first read ‘Prufrock’ more than twenty years ago. I was certainly a young man at the time. Of this initial encounter I can recall only my struggle to make any sense of the poem amid its unsettling aura of weirdness. So much of its imagery seemed disturbing:

‘When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall’;

‘I should have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas’;

the evening sky (or maybe ‘You and I’) ‘Like a patient etherised upon a table’;

the women repeatedly talking of Michelangelo;

‘Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter’;

‘There will be time to murder and create’.

I put the poem away, perhaps not daring to engage with it for fear of what I might discover.

Many years passed before I looked at the poem again. I no longer knew whether I was a young man or not, only that some sort of crisis was attending the cusp between youth and middle age. Second time around I lingered on the poem; or, perhaps, I became entangled in it, reluctantly. Over several days I read and re-read it, I singled out lines for reflection, I dwelt on the epigraph from Dante’s Inferno. ‘Prufrock’ now seemed like some sort of warning:

‘I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker’;

‘I grow old… I grow old… / I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled’;

‘I have measured out my life with coffee spoons’;

‘And time yet for a hundred indecisions, / And for a hundred visions and revisions, / Before the taking of a toast and tea’;

‘Time to turn back and descend the stair’;

‘No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be’.

I came to detest Prufrock, his pathetically unrealized erotic life, his hesitancy, his aging, his inarticulacy, his nothingness. He was everything I did not want to be; the warning was that I might become him. I performed an act of catharsis: I wrote three short prose-poems on my hatred of Prufrock, enclosed them within the romantic correspondence I had just begun with a literature student, and enveloped myself in the brief but passionate fling which followed. I could put ‘Prufrock’ away again.

Nearly a decade has passed since then. I am now undeniably middle-aged. The poem itself was first published one hundred years ago; it ages better than I do. A radio discussion marking its centenary prompted me to return to it. ‘Prufrock’ now seems less like a warning and more like a prophecy realized. Where once I used to interpret the ‘you’ of the first line (‘Let us go then, you and I’) as referring to a nameless, mysterious woman, now I read it as a direct address to me. Prufrock ushers the reader towards a journey. He may be leading us through the streets, rooms and atmosphere of a place or he may be guiding us through the frustrations, longings and failings of his own soul—it can be read either or both ways, but always we are to understand that the journey is really through a circle of hell. Dante’s epigraph tells us that nobody ever returns from this hell; Prufrock’s reverie of mermaids and sea-girls in the final lines may seem like an escape, until the final line itself: ‘Till human voices wake us, and we drown.’

I was right to be fearful of the poem when I was young, to resist it when I was almost no longer young, and to inhabit it now that middle age is upon me. ‘Prufrock’ is the finest poem I know about middle age (which makes it all the more extraordinary that Eliot was such a young man when he wrote it). Without doubt it conjures a certain sort of experience of middle age, but surely not an uncommon one: the experience of observing how time has borne a life relentlessly on the back of the all the things never done or said, the questions never asked or answered, the person we imagined we might be but never became. The poem invites a crisis, almost certainly the only means to redemption, but one that will surely not be realized:

‘Should I, after tea and cakes and ices, / Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?’;

‘Do I dare / Disturb the universe? / In a minute there is time / For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse’;

‘After the cups, the marmalade, the tea, / […] / Would it have been worth while, / […] / To have squeezed the universe into a ball / To roll it toward some overwhelming question’.

‘Do I dare disturb the universe?’ can, of course, be asked at any age. And the not asking and not answering questions, the decisions to turn back and descend the stair—they too are not limited to middle age. But it is a poem about time, and how there comes a time when the questions will never be asked or answered, when the stair will always be descended and the room never entered. It is about the fear (and certainly the poet’s anxiety) that some truth we believe we hold, whether about love or life or the universe, will never be understood by others; twice Prufrock says (or imagines he says) ‘That is not it at all, / That is not what I meant, at all.’ And it is about the dawning awareness of not being ‘Prince Hamlet’ but

‘an attendant lord, one that will do / To swell a progress, start a scene or two, / Advise the prince; no doubt an easy tool, / Deferential, glad to be of use, / Politic, cautious, and meticulous; / Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse; / At times, indeed, almost ridiculous— / Almost, at times, the Fool.’

And finally it is a poem about self-consciousness, love and sex. The last question asked by Prufrock is: ‘Do I dare to eat a peach?’ Does Prufrock dare to make a foolish spectacle of himself, juice dribbling down his chin, his tie, his shirt? Does he dare to taste forbidden fruit? Does he dare to experience the erotic? (One hardly needs to reference ‘Peaches’ by The Stranglers to understand the erotic resonances here.)

Prufrock ends on the beach, the peach perhaps not far from his mind while he tells us that he has ‘heard the mermaids singing, each to each.’ But: ‘I do not think that they will sing to me.’ It is an astonishingly sad and pathetic line. I want to yell at Prufrock (and perhaps also at myself), ‘Eat a peach! Disturb the universe!’ But the poem asks, I think, two further questions: Would it make any difference? Would anyone notice? The sadness of one possible answer to those questions—and our fear of that answer—lies just beneath the surface of the entire poem.

Rilkean beginnings, or, loving the questions

I should begin with Rilke. As well as his poetry, his Letters to a Young Poet are well worth reading. The 'young poet' was Franz Xaver Kappus, a military cadet with poetic leanings. Kappus sought advice from Rilke, about poetry, about the choice of poet as a career—and about love. The turbulent nature of Rilke's own relationships might suggest that he was not the ideal advisor on the subject of love; reading his poems and letters soon dispels such suspicions.

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926)

Love, according to Rilke, is 'hard':

The fondness of one person for another—it may be that this is the most difficult task that we are set, the most extreme, the ultimate trial and proof, and the task for which all other tasks were no more than a preparation. (Letter VII)

For this reason, he writes, the young are not 'capable' of love; they are still, like apprentices, to learn how to love. The characteristic of young lovers—their most grievous mistake—is to 'hurl themselves at each other when love overcomes them and scatter themselves abroad in whatever state they may be—in all their prodigality, confusion, madness'. In doing so, 'each is lost for the other's sake, and loses the other'; what will come of it is ultimately 'aversion, disappointment and deprivation'.

Far from seeing the essence of love as the union of two people, Rilke emphasizes the importance of retaining the individual self in love. There is a logic to this that escapes some of the most common presentations of love. To fall in love is to fall in love with the other person—ideally we love that person for who they are, just as they love us for who we are. To become a union with that person is to change and to lose two selves, precisely the two selves who loved each other in the first place. Love, in Rilke's view,

is a high occasion for the individual spirit to ripen and to develop into something in itself, to become a world, to become a world in one's own self for someone else's sake: it is a great, immoderate demand upon the self, choosing and summoning it to far-distant places. (Letter VII)

Perhaps that (youthful) quest after union is really a search for answers to the troubling questions that love inevitably arouses. For Rilke, the young should abandon this pursuit of answers, as he urges Kappus:

You are still so young, so uncommitted, and I do entreat you as strongly as I can, my dear Sir, to stay patient with all that is still unresolved in your own heart, to try to love the very questions, just as if they were locked-up rooms or as if they were books in an utterly unknown language. You ought not yet to be searching for answers, for you could not yet live them. What matters is to live everything. For just now, live the questions. Maybe you will little by little, almost without noticing, one distant day live your way into the answers. (Letter IV)

To love and live the questions, and by doing so, to live one's way to the answers: this could be the basis for a philosophy of life. It resembles the idea of mindfulness—to live attentively in the present. It resembles too the philosophy of Socrates and its seemingly interminable questioning without ever fixing on an answer.

I have taught many students over the years and most of them are eager to rush towards answers, in life as well as their studies. They regard this time in their lives as the acquisition of answers. Rilke reminds us that first it is necessary to live and explore the questions—and that this is a long and difficult, but ultimately rewarding, process.