Rhoda Rabinowitz Green, author of “Aspects of Nature” (2016) writes about her connection to T.S. Eliot’s The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock, life, love, aging, and the passage of time.
Toward Dusk Sunset
I am not well versed in poetry (pun intended), but I do know when a poem sings to me. T.S. Eliot’s The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock is one. I read it long ago for a university Survey of Literature class, but it is only now that I can begin to know it in the sense of deep knowing. Only now can I begin to walk the beach with Prufrock and murmur along with him, I grow old . . . I grow old . . . I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. Not that I have yet reached that moment of such resigned despair. Still, who among us, approaching the bottom of the inning (60-65) of what is now considered middle age, or gone past, does not immediately and viscerally understand the dark insinuation beyond the literal image; hear the dread in its whisper; the tread of the eternal Footman; or, looking back over a lifetime, comprehend without further explanation, Prufrock’s bewildered: That is not what I meant at all. That is not it at all.
The genius of this poem is that it captures so visually what are abstractions: longing, aging and despair; loneliness, futility and faint-heartedness; inevitability, unrequited love, world-weariness; melancholy; fear. And yes, even impotence. But it is Time, which, like mercury, slidders through our fingers; Time, which is relative; which our own poor consciousness must measure by the clock, never noticing it slide by — as Prufrock (or Eliot) does, standing outside himself, the spectator — the yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window panes; slips by in a minute of a hundred indecisions . . . decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
Were I forced in the middle of the night at the point of a gun to choose the lines that reverberate, pour moi, most profoundly, they would be: (For I) have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons, I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.
So simple. So chilling.
– Rhoda Rabinowitz Green, author of Aspects of Nature (2016)