The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock

This past week, we just finished up our reading of T.S. Elliot's "The Love Song of J ALfred Prufrock" and James Joyce's "The Dead" which is the last reading for the term (yay...sorry Dr. Reed). The first time I read "J Alfred Prufrock" was winter term, during Dr. Brown's 20th poetry class and I did not take the time to read through it. I thought it was too confusing and only took the meaning at face value. After reading the poem again this term, I felt I understood the meaning a lot more, at least for certain stanzas. I also realized that this class had a completely different meaning than the one that our previous class had came up with. In the beginning stanza, we assumed that the speaker was going to visit a brothel, because of the line that says, "Streets that follow like a tedious argument/Of insidious intent." We also said that the speaker regrets growing old so fast and he asks, "Do I dare? Do I dare?" I took it as him asking do I dare to live my life before I have to die? He's testing himself and getting the courage to live life as he wants to. 

Joyce's "The Dead" was something that I would definitely have to reread in order to understand the plot. But I loved how he opened up with a comical line, "Lily, the caretaker's daughter, was literally run off her feet." I thought it was slightly unsettling when Gabriel came in and started asking her if there's any men in her life. When Gabriel's wife, Gretta was thinking about her first love and he mistook it as her thinking about him, I felt a little sorry for him, even though he was kind of arrogant and possessive towards her. Gabriel's possessive nature reminded me of a short story by Raymond Carver, called "Cathedral" about a man who feels threatened by his wife's close friendship with a blind man. In the beginning of the story, when he is recounting how his wife came to know the blind man, he was talking about her former fiancee, and he only refereed to the fiancee as "her childhood sweetheart" and said, "He was already her childhood sweetheart, what more does he want?". The very ending, where the snow was falling on the churchyard where Gretta's childhood sweetheart was buried, was like an added slap in the face to Gabriel, that even though he was married to Gretta and that Michael was dead, Michael still had Gretta's heart (or at least her thoughts).