A Brief Analysis of the Mermaid Metaphor in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

The final stanza of T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is a quintessential moment in recognizing the poem’s existential themes. Prufrock frankly narrates his intentions. He is plagued by the rapid increase of aging, and confronts loneliness despite access to a room full of peopme. Retiring confidence and shallow connection to others seem to falter a pursuit for companionship.

Prufrock’s dwindling self-assurance is heavily influenced by discernable classist hierarchy.  He reveals details of wealth by images describing either the party, the women, or himself. The party is a swarm of toast, tea, ice, cakes, marmalade and porcelain partaken with chatter of novels and Michelangelo. The Renaissance artist is worth discussion amongst braceleted, white, bare-armed and perfumed female guests. Prufrock is a man who is subject to the wealth of his class, hence invitation to this party. He does not seem to see himself as someone who must keep up with his class’s outward image of affluence. Rather, incidental picking at people for pastime is what scares Prufrock. On his way to the party, the insincerity of its people is acknowledged in line 27 for he has “To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;”. He wonders, “Do I dare?”(38). He knows “There will be time to murder and create”, but also that there is equal time to turn around (28, 39). He dares to enter, begging the monumental question of why. Why would Prufrock force himself to be around people who murder with small talk and create through rumor. If a woman in the same class is his driving force, then affluence and its consequential ailments are worth considering in tracking the relationship between Prufrock’s actions and thoughts.

His fascination and failure to connect with the women is captivated by his perception of mermaids. These women are almost more creature like in the sense that he has little in common with them. White gloves adorn their arms, evoking a statuesque portrait. Prufrock’s inability to efficiently connect to them is evident in his fear of them squinting at him as one merely does with an insect pinned to the wall (55-58). His frustration sparks faults in these creatures, from the hair on their arms to malodorous perfuming, and especially reducing them to a stereotype (64-66, 55). Lines 73 and 74 is premonition of this disconnection, as Eliot cues, “I should have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.” He is directly comparing Prufrock to a sea scavenger, offering several interpretations in his relationship to his world. His neglect to connect to anyone at this party supports the notion that he feels as removed as crabs at the bottom of an ocean are from most sectors of their ecosystem. Equally, this spectacle construes why the mermaids concretely resemble the women.

Prufrock fixates the unattainability of the women at this party as a dichotomy of mermaids to humans. The women in the room, coming and talking of Michelangelo parallels line 124,  “I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.”. The moments when the woman tells Prufrock he does not understand her at all reappear as the image of the mermaids who don’t sing to him; “I do not think that they will sing to me.”(125). The women speak a different language than he; the insignificance of a sea scavenger to a mermaid might be how he feels to the type of women he desperately longs for. Eliot’s illustration noting the sea-girls wreathed in red and brown seaweed conveys evocative youth, that they have and perhaps even the women (130).

Eliot structures the poem in Prufrock’s frustration as an aging bachelor. An affluent party and character provide the dynamic that socioeconomic assurance does little for loneliness. Hyper awareness of aging surfaces from baldness, skinny limbs and worries of fruit digestion. In talking to the woman, he can’t help imagining the eternal Footman laughing at him descending to the grave an old bachelor (79-86). The women he may be after might even appear as younger, the two most crucial instances being when the woman tells him he is misunderstood, and “sea-girls” as a latter reference to mermaids. Prufrock’s “we” in “We have lingered in the chambers of the sea” may be himself and the “lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows” (72, 129).  This dynamic raises the possibility that the sea, as does time, washes a person out of existence. The party only aggravates his fear, for the human voices will drown him (131).