The significance of the title in T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock lies in its ironic and multi-layered interpretation. It reflects the poet’s complex commentary on modern anxieties and human existence. While it initially promises a conventional love poem in the tradition of Romantic or Elizabethan lyrics, the title ultimately reveals its irony. It highlights the breakdown of romance, communication, and love in a fragmented modern world.

Significance of the Title: Irony

The name “J. Alfred Prufrock” is central to understanding the poem’s irony. The grandness of “Alfred” evokes nobility, recalling figures like King Alfred, while “Prufrock” feels mundane and awkward. The formal initials “J.” and “Alfred” also suggest a detached, overly cautious persona. This ironic contrast reflects Prufrock’s unheroic, insecure nature.

Interestingly, Eliot borrowed the name “Prufrock” from a furniture store—Prufrock-Littau, which he had come across during his time in St. Louis. This mundane and commercial association adds to the name’s irony. It juxtaposes the lofty, lyrical connotation of a “love song” with a name rooted in the everyday, utilitarian world of furniture.

Eliot may also have inserted autobiographical elements here. Like Eliot’s own formal name, “T. Stearns Eliot,” the name “J. Alfred Prufrock” critiques the alienation and duality of the modern self.

Subverting Romantic Traditions

Traditional love songs often celebrate intense emotions, idealize the beloved, and triumph over obstacles. Eliot’s poem, however, dismantles these expectations. Instead of devotion or passion, Prufrock’s “love song” becomes a monologue of hesitation, self-doubt, and unfulfilled communication. His rhetorical question, “Would it have been worth it, after all?” is followed by an immediate negation: “That is not what I meant at all.” The poem thus becomes a lament, reflecting Prufrock’s inability to love or be loved.

The Disturbing Invitation: A Love Song Begins in Paralysis

Eliot overturns the convention of tender, passionate invitations in love poetry with a startling opening:

“Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherized upon a table.”

This image of an etherized patient evokes paralysis and emotional numbness. Instead of intimacy and beauty, the tone is unsettling and bleak. The metaphor sets the stage for a love song devoid of passion and vigor.

Alienation and Decay

Prufrock’s surroundings reflect disconnection and disillusionment. The “muttering retreats” and “tedious arguments” signify alienation. Even sensory images such as the “yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes” suggest suffocation rather than sensuality. Eliot’s modernist imagery deconstructs the romantic ideal of love, replacing it with a landscape of decay and emotional stagnation.

Complexities of Identity

The name “Prufrock” contains symbolic undertones. The word “frock” hints at femininity, challenging traditional masculine assertiveness expected in love poetry. Meanwhile, “rock” may evoke religious imagery, such as the Biblical rock on which Christ builds His church (Matthew 16:18). The interplay of grand and mundane, masculine and feminine, religious and secular in the name mirrors the contradictions of Prufrock’s identity and his fractured world.

A Song of Discord

Songs traditionally suggest harmony, but Prufrock’s world lacks this quality. Even the music he encounters feels distant and unattainable, described as having a “dying fall.” Prufrock imagines himself as a crab, “scuttling” away from meaningful connections. His fantasy of hearing mermaids sing is undercut by his own admission: “I do not think that they will sing to me.” Exclusion from beauty and harmony highlights the alienation at the heart of the poem.

The Drowning Finale: Subverting the Sonnet Tradition

In the closing lines, Eliot borrows the iambic pentameter of traditional love sonnets but subverts their themes. Instead of celebrating immortal love, the poem concludes with annihilation and drowning:

“Till human voices wake us, and we drown.”

Here, the momentary escape into a dreamlike world of mermaids is interrupted by the harsh reality of human society, leading to despair rather than transcendence.

The significance of the title lies in its subversion of the expectations of a love song, transforming it into a meditation on modern alienation, indecision, and disillusionment. Rich with irony and contradiction, the title captures the themes of fragmentation and loss that permeate the poem, making it a profound commentary on the human condition in the modern age.