J. Alfred Prufrock – The Highly Sensitive Introvert

Let us go then, you and I …

The famous opening line of what is possibly T.S. Elliot’s most well-known poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”

The speaker of the poem, J. Alfred Prufrock, can be nothing but a highly sensitive person.

He remarks on his keen observations, things that only a highly sensitive person would tend to notice:

… Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,

The muttering retreats

Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels

And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:

Streets that follow like a tedious argument

Of insidious intent

To lead you to an overwhelming question …

He even likens the streets of London to an argument … a tedious argument at that, which is what every highly sensitive person thinks of an argument – tedious and undesirable.

… In the room the women come and go

Talking of Michelangelo …

Few things tire a highly sensitive person more than draining conversations about nothing in particular, a.k.a. small talk.

… There will be time, there will be time

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

Time for you and time for me,

And time yet for a hundred indecisions,

And for a hundred visions and revisions …

How carefully do we HSPs sometimes have to “prepare a face” to meet the outside world?

How many decisions run through the mind of a highly sensitive person every day?

And how often do we envision dozens of possibilities, real and imagined, revising them, fretting over them, and wondering what will come to pass?

And indeed there will be time

To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”

Time to turn back and descend the stair,

With a bald spot in the middle of my hair —

(They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”) …

(They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”) …

Yes, these questions of a highly sensitive person … these concerns of what people are thinking and saying behind our backs.

… Do I dare

Disturb the universe? …

Sometimes we HSPs even worry our place disturbs the universe at large.

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?

Sometimes a highly sensitive person feels like an old soul. Like they have somehow been around the block of feelings and knowledge and deep emotions more than their young years can prove, just like J. Alfred Prufrock.

… I should have been a pair of ragged claws

Scuttling across the floors of silent seas …

And what HSP hasn’t wished, at some random moment, to be a creature of the ocean, beneath undulating waves, so far from the harsh rays of sun and sound?

To simply flow with the ocean’s endless tides.

… But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,

Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter,

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 …

As HSPs, we fear many things, yet somehow garner the courage to pursue and continue on in the face of our fears.

… Would it have been worth while,

To have bitten off the matter with a smile,

To have squeezed the universe into a ball …

If one, settling a pillow by her head

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

That is not it, at all.” …

The things we say are often not the things we mean, but it is so difficult to express all we feel and sense as a highly sensitive person.

… Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?

I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each …

Amidst the trying questions of what we dare and dare not do, again, this HSP speaker longs for the peace of the ocean’s depths.

… I do not think that they will sing to me …

Our fear, however, is that the voices and the peace they represent are not for us.

… I have seen them riding seaward on the waves

Combing the white hair of the waves blown back

When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea

By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown

Till human voices wake us, and we drown …

As highly sensitive people, we might feel as though we are drowning among the human voices that surround us.

We picture with a sense of peace and joy the idea of the mermaids heading toward the sea, lingering peacefully among the waves and weeds of the ocean.

“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” ends suddenly, as if his thoughts are cut short by those human voices cutting in on his reflective moments of peace and contemplation.

But the words of the speaker, and of the poet, T. S. Eliot, remain verses that endure and speak deeply to readers, poets, students … and of course HSPs.

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Tag: J. Alfred Prufrock

HSPs in Literature – J Alfred Prufrock