So here I am assuming that the title "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is saying that the poem *is* the love song.
It's about love, so that criterion is basically taken care of for me. The problem is "song". It's *kinda* a song, in that it's lyric, but if I define any given sort of poetically/lyrically written text as a "song" then that feels like it's going to make "song" a super wide category that includes all poems as well. Which chafes the pedant in me who says "we have a word for that already".
Maybe "love song" is a phrase I should be reading more as a single unit, kind of like how people say that a film is a "love letter to" old Hollywood or a particular genre or whatever. Or maybe the title is not so much a description of the poem as a description of the topic Prufrock is trying to address.
Hmm.. That's interesting, the idea that a 'love song' is something different from 'a song about love', and a 'love song' might not need to be either a 'song' or 'about love'. I actually think that's what prompts the most immediate rejection of the title for most people, because we have preconceived notions of what a 'love song' is and Prufrock does not look anything like them. I think that's actually a bigger problem than your 'song' objection- for me, song is in fact a super-wide category and I have no big problem with labelling a lyrical verse as a song as a genre identifier, even if it does not necessarily have a particular melody associated with it. This might be because of my familiarity with the Hebrew concept of the Shirah, the lyrical verse poem, possibly to be sung, that is a fundamental mode of Scriptural delivery- examples include the Israelites' Song at the Sea, Devorah's Song after defeating Sisra, the Song of Solomon, etc....
One solution to my problem is to suggest that the poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is not the titular 'love song', but just a narrative verse about the singing of the (genre-conventional) love song. Perhaps the love song referred to is that the Mermaids sing.
It reads to me like Eliot or his protagonist sat down to write a love song, and that poem is what came out. So the title strikes me as ironic, perhaps in the sense of "This is as close to a love song as you're going to get from me." Especially because of the inclusion of the name (perhaps a deliberately mundane-sounding name) in the title.
Interesting, apparently the chorus of "The Love Song of Har Dyal" is "Come back to me, Beloved, or I die!"
Generally speaking, I read the title as informing the rest of the poem. You can't sing a love song without a belief in love, and so the fact that Eliot identifies his poem as a love song colors the rest of the poem for me... it forces me to read it as a love song. I tend to see a lot more optimism and hope in the poem than a lot of other people I've talked about the poem with.
I think it's meant to be Prufrock's best attempt at a love song and intended to clearly not be a successful attempt. (I also do think it could be singable; for freeverse poetry it has a very strong rhythm to it.)
Yes. Though, er, J. Alfred gets easily sidetracked. And it's not a love song I would enjoy being aimed at me (which is, of course, part of the point).
...I never really thought about the "song" part of it that much. Huh. Now I want to set the thing to music. There would be at least one part where J. Alfred would sing hilariously and quaveringly off-key.
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(no subject)
Date: 2016-03-14 01:05 am (UTC)EDIT: That said, I'm not sure how I would define a song. Now this is gonna bug me.
(no subject)
Date: 2016-03-14 01:23 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2016-03-16 07:46 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2016-05-05 11:48 pm (UTC)It's about love, so that criterion is basically taken care of for me. The problem is "song". It's *kinda* a song, in that it's lyric, but if I define any given sort of poetically/lyrically written text as a "song" then that feels like it's going to make "song" a super wide category that includes all poems as well. Which chafes the pedant in me who says "we have a word for that already".
Maybe "love song" is a phrase I should be reading more as a single unit, kind of like how people say that a film is a "love letter to" old Hollywood or a particular genre or whatever. Or maybe the title is not so much a description of the poem as a description of the topic Prufrock is trying to address.
(no subject)
Date: 2016-05-06 02:59 pm (UTC)One solution to my problem is to suggest that the poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is not the titular 'love song', but just a narrative verse about the singing of the (genre-conventional) love song. Perhaps the love song referred to is that the Mermaids sing.
(no subject)
Date: 2016-03-14 01:39 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2016-03-14 05:37 am (UTC)Ah, this is interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Love_Song_of_J._Alfred_Prufrock#Title
(no subject)
Date: 2016-03-14 02:47 pm (UTC)Generally speaking, I read the title as informing the rest of the poem. You can't sing a love song without a belief in love, and so the fact that Eliot identifies his poem as a love song colors the rest of the poem for me... it forces me to read it as a love song. I tend to see a lot more optimism and hope in the poem than a lot of other people I've talked about the poem with.
(no subject)
Date: 2016-03-14 01:57 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2016-03-14 03:38 pm (UTC)...I never really thought about the "song" part of it that much. Huh. Now I want to set the thing to music. There would be at least one part where J. Alfred would sing hilariously and quaveringly off-key.
(no subject)
Date: 2016-03-15 09:27 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2016-03-15 09:59 pm (UTC)