Poetry Friday - A Prufrockian existence

There are times when I feel quite frustrated with my life: that it is not what I wanted it to be or all it could be and, worse, that it will stay the same because I haven’t been courageous enough to change it. I don’t actually think I am an especially cautious or hesitant person, or one opposed to change, but I like this adjective when I am in those moods:

Prufrockian

Marked by timidity and indecisiveness, and beset by unfulfilled aspirations.

After the title character in T.S. Eliot's poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock". Prufrock, the aging hero of Eliot's 1915 poem, is haunted by his cautious, hesitant approach to life and his conforming existence, "I have measured out my life with coffee spoons".

Many of you would be familiar with the poem, and it is long, so I will just post segments of it. You can read it all here.

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

...

Do I dare

Disturb the universe?

In a minute there is time

For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

For I have known them all already, known them all:—

Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;

I know the voices dying with a dying fall

Beneath the music from a farther room.

So how should I presume?

And I have known the eyes already, known them all—

The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,

And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,

When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,

Then how should I begin

To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?

And how should I presume?

...

And would it have been worth it, after all,

After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,

Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,

Would it have been worth while,

To have bitten off the matter with a smile,

To have squeezed the universe into a ball

To roll it toward some overwhelming question,

To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,

Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”—

If one, settling a pillow by her head,

Should say: “That is not what I meant at all.

That is not it, at all.”

And would it have been worth it, after all,

Would it have been worth while,

After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,

After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—

And this, and so much more?—

It is impossible to say just what I mean!

But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:

Would it have been worth while

If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,

And turning toward the window, should say:

“That is not it at all,

That is not what I meant, at all.”