Comparing Dover Beach and Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock Essay

A Comparison of the Victorian and Modernist Perceptions as Exemplified by capital of Delaware brink and The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock Matthew Arnold and T.S. Eliot, in their respective poems, share a nose out of alienation, not only from other people but from temperament and perfection as well. Arnold is writing in an geezerhood when the place of homo in the universe is coming into question, for the first time since the advent of Christianity. He slew no longer take the same solace in nature and the love of God that his Romantic predecessors did. While Arnold comments on isolation, however, he windlessness addresses himself to a lover in Dover Beach, whereas Prufrock is presented as a man who has completely retreated within himself. Eliots isolation is total. In the industrialized age of Arnold, people no longer were able to hang upon nature for inhalation the unpopulated country of Wordsworths time was no longer accessible to a centralized people. The increased pa ce of life and urban crowding obviated the Romantics sumptuousness of reflection in natural solitude. While the poet observes nature in Dover Beach, the experience is metaphorically useful, but not an end unto itself, nor does it bring all comfort. Rather, Arnold uses the futility that he sees in the oceans tides to illustrate the fruitlessness of human endeavor. Although the sea appears tranquil line 1, beneath the surface there is this almost cruel drama existence played out, as the pebbles are dragged and flung by the waves and dragged back again, producing a fierce roar. lines 9-12 The image of human beings as pebbles on the sand recurs in the tierce stanza, when Arnold refers to the Sea of Faith which has withdrawn and left the rocks exposed as in the altogether shingles. Eliot later also repudiates t... ...he colloquial almost instantaneously. Arnolds final paragraph serves a sort of summing-up of Dover Beach as a whole. At the remainder of Prufrock, Eliot leaps into a n apparently tangential thought about mermaids. Its not his job to apologise what Prufrock is talking about. Eliot has turned the enigma of modern living into a poem, sooner than using his work to provide an answer to the questions that humanity must conceive with. Arnold seems to be mourning for a time past when people could look to faith for answers to questions of import. Eliot acknowledges that those days will never return and instead encourages the lecturer to apply a personal meaning to The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. plant CitedT.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 6th ed. Vol. 2. ed. M. H. Abrams New York, London Norton, 1993.