The False Promise of Being a Main Character…
<p>I adore “<a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/44212/the-love-song-of-j-alfred-prufrock" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock</a>.” It’s a canonical mainstay that an English teacher has probably tortured you with, and that teacher might very well have been me.</p>
<p>One of my favorite parts of the poem (besides the glorious sibilance of “scuttling across the floor of silent seas” or the oft-quoted line about the coffee spoons) is the following stanza:</p>
<blockquote>
<p><em>No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;</em></p>
<p><em>Am an attendant lord, one that will do</em></p>
<p><em>To swell a progress, start a scene or two,</em></p>
<p><em>Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,</em></p>
<p><em>Deferential, glad to be of use,</em></p>
<p><em>Politic, cautious, and meticulous;</em></p>
<p><em>Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;</em></p>
<p><em>At times, indeed, almost ridiculous —</em></p>
<p><em>Almost, at times, the Fool.</em></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Any professor worth their salt will teach about how this stanza is rife with the poem’s themes of alienation, desire, anxiety, and disappointment. Sound familiar?</p>
<p>They don’t call Eliot’s cadre “Modernists” for nothing. It’s easy to imagine Eliot alive today, reading our current headlines.</p>
<p>If this were written today, we might interpret this stanza as Prufrock’s disappointment that he’s not a Main Character, a term much bandied about. Instead of a Prince, Prufrock worries, what if I’m only there to start <em>someone else’s</em> scene? The words he dwells on, “politic, cautious, and meticulous,” are the words of (dreaded) bureaucracy.</p>
<p><a href="https://nicole-d-peeler.medium.com/the-false-promise-of-being-a-main-character-5513e1e4efd6"><strong>Read More</strong></a></p>