Nature verses degenerated morals in the love songs of J. Alfred Prufrock and The Waste Land

Pages:50-51
Shiveratan Godara and Sandhya Saxena (Jagdishprasad Jhabarmal Tibrewala University, Rajasthan)

character, a timid, middle-aged man. Prufrock is talking or thinking to himself. The epigraph, a dramatic speech taken from Dante’s “Inferno,” provides a key to Prufrock’s nature. Like Dante’s character Prufrock is in “hell,” in this case a hell of his own feelings. He is both the “you and I” of line one, pacing the city’s grimy streets on his lonely walk. He observes the foggy evening settling down on him. Growing more and more hesitant he postpones the moment of his decision by telling himself “And indeed there will be time.”