‘The Evenings, Mornings, Afternoons’: Prufrock and Other Observations

Abstract

Poems articulate experience, experience which may include not only event, feeling, mood or emotion but thought. Speaking of the metaphysical poets, Eliot remarked that for them a thought was an experience. Yet the poems in Prufrock and Other Observations are not primarily or even significantly expressions of thought. The major poems in particular—‘Prufrock’, ‘Portrait of a Lady’, ‘Preludes’ and ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’—express mood, sensibility, human feelings and reactions to a specific kind of world. They are mainly characterisations, often dramatic, and, unlike the speakers of Ash-Wednesday or ‘East Coker’, the characters do not meditate on philosophy or religion. These early poems evoke particular experiences and emotions, and they do so largely through symbolist techniques of juxtaposition, irony, image and symbol.