I was reading an essay in the journal, First Things, "Spiritual Literature for Atheists," by Francis Spufford. His beginning paragraph is immediately relevant to understanding Prufrock: "To say, as people do from time to time, that science is the only source of meaning available to human beings is to consign large swaths of everyday experience to insignificance....The implication of the maximal claim for science is that anything that can't be brought within the reach of hypothesis-experiment-conclusion is to be ignored. I've heard Richard Dawkins, on a stage, respond to someone asking why people's conviction of the presence of God doesn't count as data: 'Oh, all sorts of funny things happen in people's heads. But you can't measure them, so they don't mean anything.'"
Almost the entire poem takes place in Prufrock's head where he believes his subjective experiences of love, beauty, and desire are, as in Dawkins' glib dismissal, meaningless, and yet he has them, as do we all. All of the details in the poem are reflections of the external world through which Prufrock moves, from the streets in the beginning, to the house, to the stairs, to the room, to the beach and to the ocean at the end.
I understand the task of literary criticism to be essentially twofold: first, we explore the work in order to understand the experience we had when we read the work. I experienced The Love Song as a beautiful, intriguing work of art that puzzles and delights me. Reflecting on the poem is an attempt to see it from the inside first, to understand Prufrock's perspective. Second, we also are not Prufrock; therefore we also look at the poem from the outside, so to speak, as an object of art. Looking at the poem, for example, I see a number of patterns in Prufrock's language. The images of sleep and dream and sickness and water meet us almost immediately in the beginning, and they are there throughout the poem and present at the end, "Till human voices wake us, and we drown." Another element I see that is extremely important is the presence of pronouns: the "us" and the "you and I" in the beginning and "us" in the end, almost as if some unity has been achieved in the experience, dividing the us in the beginning, very deliberately, and reuniting them in the end, integrating them, so to speak.
If Prufrock is indeed talking to himself in the beginning, as I believe, and if he truly suffers the dissociated sensibility of our modern age, witness Dawkins, then the "I" surely reflects the scientific, analytical aspect of the human mind, while the "you" refers to the subjective, emotional, imaginative aspect of the human self, that cannot be examined and measured and thus gets dismissed as meaningless in this "modern," twentieth-century world. Prufrock, however, is eventually "singing" a love song, perhaps having discovered something real in his experience, though it may have led to his death by "drowning"; those final lines, nevertheless, are lyrical and wonderful and well worth the cost.
The first stanza, lines 1 through 12 as the "I's" perspective, reflects Prufrock's sense of the emptiness and meaninglessness of his experience, "half-deserted," "muttering," "restless nights in one-night cheap hotels." He isn't grounded anywhere or in anything, and the "restless" immediately echoes, at least for me, Augustine's "our heart's are restless till they rest in Thee."
The "sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells" remind me a bit of Logan's in Richmond. The steaks are good but the atmosphere is grim; there it is not oyster-shells but peanut shells on the floor, with neon signs and a kind of barrenness to the place with its hardwood floors, etc.
In any case the most important element in this first stanza is that these mean streets present to Prufrock a "tedious argument/of insidious intent"; tedious suggests that this is not the first time that the argument has presented itself; insidious suggests that the argument is evil and destructive: a student once suggested that the argument could be simply, that if life is essentially meaningless, why not take your life, commit suicide? At this point it would be good to notice again that the "I" and the speaker in the epigraph presumably go together. Guido counseled the Pope on committing fraud to defeat his enemies; Prufrock is counseling himself, "to lead you to an overwhelming question," not to face that overwhelming question. In effect the "I" tells the "you" to let it go. "Oh, do not ask, 'What is it?'/Let us go and make our visit."
This poem is a "love song" in a world apparently without the reality of love; Prufrock's visit then must be for a woman, in a brothel, perhaps, at a tea party, either real or metaphorical. In any case there is a woman, but the "you" is cautioned not to think about the meaning of the experience toward which "they" are moving. The significant action in the first stanza of the poem is the refusal to face the meaning of the experience of relationship, meeting, the meaning of being alive and conscious in a meaningless world.
The two-line stanza, "in the room the women come and go/Talking of Michelangelo." Suggests that which Prufrock is moving toward, a meeting with a woman. He is not there yet, but the stanza reflects where he is going, and its catchy rhythm and rhyme suggest its hollowness, like a breakfast cereal ad, with a picture of an athlete slapped on a box of wheaties. The context immediately undermines the power of Michelangelo as an image; the talk at the tea party is pretentious and trivial. Ours is not an heroic age.
The refusal to face the overwhelming question has thus an immediate consequence in the following stanza. If the "I/eye" is the seer (pun intended) in the first stanza, the "you" is the actor in the second major stanza, wherein I would suggest, the action of the first stanza is simply re-inacted.