On my last day of junior year, the year I had been introduced to The Great Gatsby, my AP Lang teacher, a lover of all things Gatsby, had us read two pieces of work by T.S. Eliot. The boy beside me rolled his eyes, wondering why we were still learning when the AP test had come and gone. I, instead, sat up in my seat, knowing my teacher and literary criticism coach well enough to know this would be a lesson of a different kind.
Of course, we read “The Waste Land,” a poem we had discussed while studying the book and its depiction of the Valley of Ashes. It is a beautiful poem and holds the type of weight that only Eliot’s work can, but we moved passed it swiftly for it acted as merely an introduction to what we read next.
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”
A girl in the back lifted her head and asked, “Who is he?” as my teacher introduced our next poem, a so-called love song to a man we didn’t know, and, in retrospect, I am surprised she didn’t answer her with a simple, “He is you.” Leaving class for the final time, that is the conclusion we would all be left with, but she didn’t. She only responded with a smile and urged us to read.
We did and lifted our heads up with with confused looks on our faces. Eliot was quite a lot for us to take in, especially with summer and the impending senior year looming in front of us. Our teacher let out a chuckle and assured us that it was alright we didn’t understand. She said it was her job to help us do that and started off with asking us about our first impressions of the poem. How would we describe it?
“Long,” one person said and we all nodded our heads. We had yet to take AP Lit, were not conditioned to reading poems, and that was the first thing that came to mind for most of us. “Weird,” another said and we again nodded in agreement. Heavy with allusions and symbols we could barely wrap our heads around, weird was another thing we attributed to the poem. “Sad,” a last person said and, by the nod of our teacher’s head, it seemed that was the word she was looking for. Sad– simple but a gateway to much more.
Our teacher narrowed her eyes at us in a challenge to go on. “Why is that?” She asked. A thoughtful silence ensued.
“Well,” A girl said after a long moment, hesitant to break the silence, “He wastes time thinking there will always be time.”
And indeed there will be time…
Things started to connect in my brain and I bet it did in others. I raised my hand and tried to put it all into words.
“He gets caught up in his thoughts, his worries. He tells himself there will be time as an excuse to hesitate, to let his thoughts win.”
“And by the end?” My teacher asked, and this time a girl to my right answered.
“He is wrong.”
Again our teacher nodded her head, a slight smile on her face. It seemed we had understood more than we initially thought.
“How so?” She asked us all.
“In the end there is not time. All is lost and we are left to drown.”
Though it was a simple interpretation, constrained to what we could, at the time, reasonably understand, it was one that fell heavy upon us. It displayed to us the fruitless end fear of the future and the neglect of reality could bring us to. In a moment so burdened by thoughts of the future, we saw ourselves in J. Alfred Prufrock. In the silent introspection that followed the answer to our teachers question, we came to realize that he was us.
Right then, time was slipping away from us (in more ways than one) and the bell was about to ring, to threaten our silence and signal our transition from juniors to seniors.
With he urgency of a person who had just noticed the time, our teacher went on with a start.
“All I ask as you go into the next year is that you remember Prufrock and keep the lesson of his love song in mind. Don’t allow your thoughts and emotion impede action, instead take it.”
As this blog nears a close, I find this an important reminder. For Gatsby and for us all.