Imagery of T.S. Elliot Poetry

1. Imagery
T.S. Elliot’s
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

2. By: Ann MacAulay
English 230
Intro to Literature

3. Imagery in Poetry
• Using a different
language provides
illusion and wonder
S`io credesse che mia
risposta fosse A persona
che mai tornasse al
mondo, Questa fiamma
staria senza piu scosse.
Ma perciocchè giammai di
questo fondo Non tornò
vivo alcun, s'i'odo il vero,
Senza tema d'infamia ti
rispondo.

4. Elliot uses images like “half-deserted streets,” “cheap hotels”
and “sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells”
“Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question…”

5. “Yellow smoke” and “Window-panes” is repeated in poem
“The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle
on the window-panes”

6. I have measured out my life with coffee
spoons;

7. Elliot speaks of time and indecisions/visions and revisions
“There will be time, there will be
time”

8. Elliot compares the male and female
images
• Male (himself/narrator
of poem)
-this arms, baldness
-growing old
• Female (lover/wife)
-white arms
-perfume

9. “Arms that are braceleted and white and bare”
“But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!”
Is it perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?

10. The narrator longs to be understood.
“That is not what I meant at all,
That is not it, at all”

11. Growing old and thought of as a fool.
“Almost, at times, the Fool.
I grow old…I grow old…
…and we drown.”

12. T.S. Elliot
1915