Eliot displays imagery in ‘The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock’ by using devices such as similes, metaphors, zoomorphic imagery and poetic structure. This gives the reader an understanding of the way the narrator is both feeling and thinking about his life. Through these devices he is able to embellish reality, creating obscure imagery that has the reader re-evaluating their mortality.
Within the first few lines of Prufrock, Eliot displays enjambment and caesuras to help in creating his imagery. This gives the poem pace but also causes pauses within the structure of the lines. The reader is able to understand the feeling of Prufrock through these changes from regular to slow tempo.
“Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;” In Eliot’s first stanza, he presents imagery by using a simile. He talks of an expansive night sky with Eliot comparing its tranquillity to an unconscious person lying on an operating table. The patient, under the…show more content… He sees the dirty industrial smog curling around the houses, as a cat would rub itself up against the buildings. The narrator reinforces this feline imagery by almost repeating the line word-for-word, stating that the smoke ‘rubs its muzzle on the window-panes’. He later talks about how the fog ‘curled once around the house, and fell asleep.’, again creating the image of a cat turning in circles to prepare a resting place. The imagery of smoke and fog that Prufrock mentions shows the condition of the industrial landscape but also shows the dreariness of Prufrock’s life, where he has no clear idea of his future. The use of ‘yellow fog’ links to the idea of sickness as yellow represents the colour of jaundiced individuals. The use of an animal as a metaphor also could indicate that Prufrock feels he is not as worthy as other