So far, the critics are fairly unanimous about my monologue. They don’t like it very much.

I’m doing better, but am not yet there. So here goes again, I’m asking for advice and listening to it. I mean to do this well, and it is hard for me for many reasons. But that is no excuse.

The read this famous dramatic monologue well, it’s important for me to understand something of the poet – T.S. Eliot – and of his meaning in writing it.

I was surprised to learn that Eliot was in his early twenties and a philosophy major at Harvard when he wrote “The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock,” seen as examination of human insecurity and frailty.

I’ve loved this poem for years, and always assumed it was written by a much older person, it reads like an old man’s sorrowful rumination on his own timidity, and his realization of mortality. (In my monologue for my acting class, I only ready about one-fifth of the poem.)

Learning that Eliot was just a kid when he wrote it makes me love it all the more. Eliot started the poem in 1909 and finished it while travelling for a year to Munich and Paris. When asked about it, he said it was partly a
dramatic creation of a man of about 40, I should say, and partly an expression of feeling of my own through this dim imaginary figure.”

At the time, the poem was universally praised as strikingly original, the idea of writing poems as monologues in the voices assumed personalities was radical. What Eliot had done was invent a prematurely middle-aged personal, and he admitted later in life that he had found a creative way of articulating something about himself.

One critic wrote that Prufrock is one of the great inventions of modern literary imagination, a symbol of over-scrupulous timidity, paralyzed by an overwhelming anxiety about getting things wrong. He is so nice and fastidious that he can hardly ever arrive at a decision, let alone action.

Then there is mortality. When I read the poem, I thought of a man who was running out of time. Did he dare to eat a peach? Go running into the water? In Eliot’s time, 40 was considered much older than it is considered today.

When I read the poem – I am 72 – I think of a man who is considering what to do with the rest of his life, and hoping to do better than he has been doing. I also do not want the anxiety of aging to interfere with the joy of life. When I read “I am old..I am old,” I always want to cry.

So the poem gets much more personal for me.

When I read the phrase aloud, I sound as if I am reading a weather forecast sometimes. Even the Mansion residents though I wasn’t putting enough feeling into it, not showing enough emotion.

I don’t yet know how to do that without sounding contrived and false. But for me, creativity is about stretching my comfort zone, and the monologue is sure doing that. Do I Dare To Show Emotion? Time To Turn Back And Descend The Stair? Disturb The Universe?

It’s hard for me to show emotion on command.  It’s easy for me to show emotion when I’m writing.

So the only thing to do is to keep trying, which I will do. And to keep thinking about why it’s important to me. When I read the monologue to Maria this morning, my voice cracked a couple of times. Perhaps I’m getting closer.