The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock was T.S. Eliot’s first officially published poem, appearing in the June 1915 issue of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, at the suggestion of his fellow American expatriate Ezra Pound. It was this poem, especially, that brought him to the attention of a wider literary circle.
Like most of Eliot’s better-known poems, there is no central narrative, and it has often been termed a ‘stream of consciousness’ poem. Even so, many critics and analysts have attempted to explore possible ‘influences’ for various sections of the poem. Some of these may, no doubt, have some substance but regarding the last eight lines of the poem, these suggested ‘influences’, it seems to me, are wildly astray.
Let us first look at the lines in question – the last 8 lines of the poem (involving 3 stanzas of differing lengths):
…
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
If you go to the Wikipedia entry on the poem, the suggested influences for the first of these lines are given as: ‘a poetic allusion to John Donne’s “Song: Go and catch a falling star” or Gérard de Nerval’s “El Desdichado”. The Wikipedia writer also hints that the line “Combing the white hair of the waves blown back’” is an allusion to old age and impending death. Other sources often quote even more obscure ‘possible influences’ for these lines. Even worse, none of the admittedly limited commentaries I have checked seem to agree with each other.
Before offering my own account of what influenced Eliot in these lines, lets first look at the Epigraph at the head of the poem. It is from Dante’s Inferno, and concerns a meeting between Dante and Guido, who is in the 8th circle of Hell. Dante has just come from meeting Odysseus in Hell, and here is the first clue. Not only was Eliot familiar with Dante, but he was also equally familiar with Homer. Recall, for a moment, those lines from The Waste Land where we meet Tiresias who ‘walks amongst the lowest of the dead’.
Let us now go to the Iliad and, specifically, to the episode in Book XVIII (The Grief of Achilles) where Thetis (Achilles mother) brings the news from the battlefield to all the ‘daughters of Nereus’ – the Nereid’s or sea spirits, later to be associated with mermaids in the Western Tradition. Homer lists 34 of these spirits (Hesiod has 50) and tells us that they reside in a deep sea-cavern. I owe it to Hilaire Belloc (I think in Hills and the Sea) for making a clear connection between the names of many of these Nereids and the various forms or ‘types’ of waves. Indeed, the very poem itself makes this clear. Here are a few lines from Pope’s translation:
Dexamene the slow,
And swift Dynamene, now cut the tides:
Isera now the verdant wave divides:
Perhaps the most familiar to us is Limnoria, who Belloc identifies as ‘the wave that runs up the shore’ (although others translate this as ‘wave of the salt marsh’). It has a particular character, running up the sand with a sort of hissing noise and pushing a fringe of foam before it. Its advance and retreat are graceful actions. It is in fact the last action of a dying wave, caressing the shore after a journey of who knows how far. John Keats saw it and gave this memorable description to a friend:
The rocks were silent–the wide sea did weave
An untumultuous fringe of silver foam
Along the flat brown sand. I was at home …
(Epistle to John Hamilton Reynolds, last stanza.)
In fact, many of the Nereids are the actual form of waves – whether Platonic Forms or Aristotelian ones does not matter here. So, Homer gives us a taxonomy of waves!
Return now to Eliot and those lines I quoted from Prufrock. Is it not rather obvious that he is referring, however obliquely, to Homer’s Iliad? We ‘linger in the chambers of the sea’ (the sea caverns Homer mentions) with these sea girls. He has seen them riding seaward on the waves/Combing the white hair of the waves blown back – precisely what we would expect of wave forms. Later in the Western Tradition, they become mermaids and they, of course, can drown us if we fall in love with them.
We know (because he told us in many of his writings) that Eliot’s take on The Modernist Movement hardly lined up with that of the admiring Bloomsbury crowd of his day. He explained his position in an essay entitled “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (published in The Sacred Wood, 1920):
Yet if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, “tradition” should positively be discouraged. We have seen many such simple currents soon lost in the sand; and novelty is better than repetition. Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.
That, for my money, is what those last few lines of Prufrock are all about.
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