T.S. Eliot and Billy Collins

Perhaps in an (indirect?) nod to Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot uses titles to disrupt typical expectations in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Love Song will do something like this this to the reader of his poem-- and Eliot appears to be aligning this poem with all those other poems in the history of Western poems about love. Before reading the translation, even the poem’s epigraph (in the “romance language” of Italian) seems to enforce this idea. The third moment where the reader’s expectation is brought to its height is in the poem’s opening couplet:

“Let us go then, you and I, / When the evening is spread out against the sky”

only to come crashing down on the next line:

“Like a patient etherized upon a table.” 

Formally, Eliot is aligning himself with the poetic conventions of end-rhyme (I and sky) setting himself up to make the perfect love-song metaphor. Unfortunately, comparing the evening to a numb human body kind of ruins the mood.

What follows is perhaps more depressing, but a lot more interesting than a typical love poem. Prufrock is paralyzed with self-consciousness. The poor guy can’t make a decision to save his life, and that’s because he’s sort of talking to himself, Hamlet style, about how pointless it is to try to articulate or realize his internal desire. I think Prufrock wants to disturb the universe, but he’s scared. In the end, he can’t even claim Hamlet's greatness because he’s “Deferential, glad to be of use, / Politic, cautious, and meticulous . . .” Prufrock’s Love song ends with death:  “till human voices wake us, and we drown.”

Billy Collins writes another unconventional love poem, but in a slightly less dramatic register. “Litany” begins with an epigraph from Belgian poet Jacques Crickillon:

 “You are the bread and the knife, / The crystal goblet and the wine.” 

The first stanza continues to use this model, comparing the beloved next to the morning dew and then to the sun. The speaker begins to run out of steam in stanza 2, when he seems to become disturbed by all the things his beloved cannot be compared to.

“However, you are not the wind in the orchard… and you are certainly not the pine-scented air, / There is just no way that you are the pine-scented air.”

His digression (very Prufrock) eventually leads into a profession of his own identity: “It might interest you to know, / speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world, / that I am the sound of the rain on the roof.” In the last stanza he finally brings the poem full circle, wandering back to the initial object of the poem. “But don’t worry, I’m not the bread and the knife. / You are still the bread and the knife.”