Poetry Analysis - Pound & Eliott

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Seasons change and repeat, and no change is lasting. The choppy strucure of the poem and the stillness and emptiness of the images emphacise the repetitiveness of this cycle (because there is nothing else to notice), allowing the reader to feel a sense of entrapment in a cycle that has existed “since the beginning of time until now” (line 2). He also uses repetition to highlight this feeling of cicularity. For example, the speaker climbs “towers and towers,” (line 4) perhaps referring to people looking for change in their life and find themselves going through the same desperate routines over and over again; the repetition of “towers” is key to conveying this feeling.

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock also uses repetition to emphacise repetitiveness. For example, he repeats the stanza “In the room the women come and go / talking of Michelangelo” periodically throughout the poem. In addition to giving a sense of cyclicality to the structure of the poem itself, this repeated stanza highlights the staleness of our daily lives because Prufrock frequently hears the women having the same conversations with one another, not adding anything new or important. This corus stanza makes Prufrock’s whole life seem like an ongoing cocktail party where seemingly progressive and intellectual ideas grow meaningless through endlessrepetitopn. Although it has no repeating words or phrases, the line “I’ve measured out my life with coffee spoons,” (line 51) conveys the same sense of redundancy as it likens the process of living to the pointless routine of measuring liquid with a spoon.

Even though Eliot’s has more of a personal narrative than Pound’s, both poems use modernist devices such as fragmentation, repition, and juxtaposition to convey similar reactions to modern life. Although they both talk of lonliness and isolation, perhaps both speakers’ trust in the fact that we have common experiences, demonstrated by their confident use of fragmentation, unite the readers.