A Poem that Mirrored my Mind

By Jaidyn Eardley

Though I had always loved literature, I tended to avoid poetry as something silly and insubstantial-- until I heard a poem that resonated with me.

I sat encased in a room of dusty red curtains, glossed wooden floors and beams. It was a building that came from another time, filled with people who wished that they did too.  A girl stepped to the podium with a mixture of abashment and confidence. Her poem, unlike the previous readings, was too well-known to be particularly interesting to very cultured people. Thankfully, I was not one. As she began to read, I was entranced. “Let us go then, you and I...”

You and I. Me, my freshman year of college: good enough at everything but not good enough at anything. I take classes that spark interest but not passion, and find myself part of the unseen and unheard majority of college freshmen; I don’t know what to do. 

Have I painted a good picture of myself? I began college relatively directionless, and I remained that way for a while. During that time, I had several encounters with literature that fueled the gravitational effect that it had on me. One of these was a poetry reading that a roommate invited me to. As the girl at the podium read, I realized that I was listening to one of the first poems I’d ever really liked. It is called “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” by T.S. Eliot.

Eliot’s words drew me in and stayed with me long after the poetry reading. I had caught the beauty in the work, as opposed to others I had been exposed to. And unlike other poems, this one didn’t embarrass me– it felt honest. 

The writing is replete with recurring words, and that may have been why it stuck with me so well. It is as if the poem is talking to itself– the narrator repeats the same phrases again and again in what could either be a frenzy or a stupor. The rhythm, smooth even in its disjointedness, mimics the thoughts of a person under great stress or subject to great uncertainty. 

“There will be time, there will be time

To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;

There will be time to murder and create,

And time for all the works and days of hands

That lift and drop a question on your plate”

My 19 year old self was caught between bitterness and tranquility, passion and apathy. “Love Song,” in its obsessive self-reflections and “indecisions” and “revisions,” felt like a mirror of my mind, but it was more than that; it was a written acknowledgment of how I felt. As such, it soothed me.

It also did what good literature should do: it took me to a certain place and time. It created a world that I was able to belong to, if only for a while. It set a scene. Or should I say, it set a table. We constantly encounter phrases such as, “before the taking of a toast and tea,” “measured out my life with coffee spoons,” and “cups, the marmalade, the tea.” Certain patterns of images mold the setting, and like a paint-by-numbers, a picture gradually emerges of some social scene where manners are measured in a glance and conversation confined to murmurs. 

My world is different. It is triumphantly casual. I sip soft drinks in fast-food restaurants late at night, I wear jeans with rips in the knees and sometimes thighs, I speak about adults as if I am not one. Eliot’s world can only ever be a dream to me. But alongside the ethereal image of the eternal tea party is another scene, one more “realistic:” a town that has surrendered to its degradation, a town of “certain half-deserted streets, the muttering retreats, of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels.” 

The juxtaposition of the two settings is a major factor in shaping the tone of the poem. With that in mind, it is fitting that “Love Song,” was my first significant introduction into the world of poetry, because some of my favorite novels share the same contrasts of setting and character, which lead to a similar jaded tone. “The Great Gatsby,” discovered on one of my grandmother’s many bookshelves, was a major influence on me. The pages were covered in yellow-highlights, relics of some college kid. I read them in wonder and horror and thought about the last line for far too long. “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” The book, along with others such as “The Age of Innocence,” shows the dark side of an upper class with too much money and not enough; too much time and not enough. 

And I was drawn to these works! I resorted to them like they were my last light, when in fact they expose the darkness of human souls. It makes sense, looking back. As a teenager, I felt deeply uncertain about the future. Part of me worried that one day I would stumble and collapse, that my life would somehow reach an unsalvageable state. The literature I liked reflected my fears but made them beautiful and placed them so far into a fictional world that they could never reach me. 

Though the fear could not reach me, I saw it play out in the life of the poem’s narrator. Eliot begins with an invitation, “Let us go then, you and I,” and then spins the readers down a mental spiral staircase. Everything that happens leads back to the narrator’s great inner struggle. 

He describes his falling-apart, his tone growing more desperate and cynical as the poem goes on. I could sense the physical decay of his body and mind. 

“I am no prophet — and here’s no great matter;

I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,

And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,

And in short, I was afraid.”

In the wooden room that took me back in time, I could feel the fear-stemmed sorrow because I could understand it. Several years later, reading “Love Song” again, I didn’t understand it in the same way. I am happier now than when I went to a poetry reading in hopes of finding a moment of reprieve from loneliness. My old friends, “The Great Gatsby” and “The Age of Innocence,” are on my shelf. I still love them, but I don’t need them anymore.

Now back a little way in time, from who I am to who I was. Back to the girl’s clear voice as she reads the final line:

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

With the last word, the human voice ceased and it was as if I had woken up. I had been drawn into a dream of winding repetition, a picture-perfect but crumbling world, and the easy rhythm of self-portrayed decay. I would always remember the poem; its final lines reverberated in my head as I walked the glossed wooden floors and stepped into the day.