The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

    In The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, a man lives in a state of indecisiveness. Not sure whether or not to go to a party, he's very conscious of his surroundings while contemplating. He refers to a cat on a windowsill as 'yellow fog'. The fog could allude to the idea that he doesn't really have a clear idea of what he wants. The importance of the color yellow could mean different things. One being that it completely contrasts with the idea of fog so that you can truly understand that the man is really unsure. The second, is that yellow could mean he's being a coward for the reasoning behind not going to the party. The cat symbolizes the man who looks into the party from the outside. The cat who slips from the window and then cowardly "curled once around the house" to the safety of himself.

    The man in this poem you can tell is very timid and cautious of women. He claims things like he has 'known the eyes already' or 'known the arms already' - 'all of them'. So you can tell that he's more of a stand-off-ish kind of man who seems to observe more than actually act on any of them. The older man is self conscious about his appearance because he knows that he's balding and is very thin. He even claims he's more like Polonius than Hamlet in the ways that he's less charismatic and resolute. Even though he's afraid of women and making a fool of himself, he still wants to find someone to love and to love him back. This makes him troubled.

    "I grow old... I grow old..." He realizes that time is passing and he's running out of time. He alludes to Homer's Odyssey in the final last lines by believing that he'll never be able to make up his mind about going to the party, or going after any woman in general. "I do not think that they will sing to me..." 'sea girls' sang to hypnotize the sailors, and keep them there until they died. She, in a way, made up the sailors mind. The man doesn't believe he's going to make up his mind or have any woman help make it for him. He'll be indecisive until the day he dies.