It was 3 a.m. on a Sunday morning and I was 17, sprawled across my cool bedroom floor, reciting lines from T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” to my bored cats.
For those who had a life as teens, “Prufrock” is Eliot’s first published poem—in it, the titular J. Alfred is isolated and lonely, incapable of making a decision or fully living in his life. He ends the poem watching sirens singing on the beach, but concludes that they will never sing to him, thus affirming his solitary existence.
The poem appeared in the 1915 issue of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, launching the career of one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century. Eliot would go on to pen classics like 1922’s “The Wasteland” and 1939’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, which was adapted to the Broadway stage in 1981 by Andrew Lloyd Webber—but we won’t hold Cats against him.
As an aspiring actress, I decided I wanted to learn all the words to Prufrock for audition purposes. And as suburban teenager, I found a thrilling sense of escapism in the words, even if they were not intended as such:
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
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
But it was not until recent years, when I began to glut myself on the works of Stephen King, that I actually understood the poem. It’s not reported anywhere, really, but Stephen King is obsessed with Prufrock. Lines from the poem crop up everywhere from The Shining to Under the Dome to the Detective Bill Hodges series. I’m not sure if King is conscious of this—I wasn’t able to interview him—but he’s spent decades parsing this poem, often turning to sad, desperate J. Alfred to sort out his characters’ motivations and what drives them to the horrors that populate his books.
King is certainly a fan of Eliot; the poet’s sprawling 1925 piece “The Hollow Man”—which tackles hope, war and marriage—also appears in his work: in Pet Semetary and Under the Dome. And “The Wasteland” plays prominently into The Dark Tower series, most notably in The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands.
Still, Prufrock gets the most love—perhaps because it’s the most like Stephen King’s own work. King’s novels exist largely in the context of small lives—a family, a writer, a teen—as does Prufrock. That’s what makes the scares so scary, the emotions more emotional. Prufrock could be a character in one of King’s own novels—for want of a poisonous mist or supernatural powers.
* * *
Back then on my bedroom floor, though, I was blissfully unaware of all of this. I saw the lines of Prufrock as a gateway to another world—a place I longed to go when I grew up, a place I imagined the highway out of my hometown of Mystic, Connecticut, led. Half-deserted streets meant adventure, romance. Sawdust restaurants with oyster shells were places adults hung out and drank and wrote poems.
Over the ensuing years, I feathered the nest of my personality with Eliot and Prufrock. My sister bought me a gorgeous print of a siren, composed of the words to the poem; my username was often “Mrs. Prufrock” (ignoring that, if there had been a Mrs. Prufrock, there would be no poem); and one bored afternoon in my thirties, I got “Hyacinth Girl” tattooed across my wrist, matching ink with a friend I don’t see much of anymore. I was versatile! I liked “The Wasteland,” too.
Still, Eliot only reentered my life in a meaningful way when I started my Big Stephen King Read of 2017-2019. I first noticed King’s proclivity for Eliot when I delved into Pet Semetary in 2018. “Oh, do not ask what is it; let us go and make our visit,” Louis Creed tells himself as he recalls carrying the stiff body of his daughter’s cat Church to the magical burial ground.
When I was a teen, that line was about possibility, in this context, though, it throbs with anxiety and horror. Creed doesn’t want to acknowledge what he did when he brought the moment “to its crisis,” when he “followed Victor to the sacred place,” as the Ramones put it. Church came back and now he owns that horror.
It was jarring to see my old friend Prufrock waving at me from one of the scariest books I have ever read.
It was jarring to see my old friend Prufrock waving at me from one of the scariest books I have ever read. But I understood what he was doing there—more than I did when I was 17. I understood that this line was about attempting to walk blindly into what scares you most. In Prufrock’s case, talking to women; in Creed’s, staring down death.
Death has always been a shadow presence in my life. Although I have lost people, I have never seen it; I’ve never even been to a funeral. So, it’s always been sad and neat, not-quite real. A few months before reading Pet Semetary, though, I watched my cat Edie die. I feel tempted to dismiss this section with “I know it was just a cat” because I know there are worse lives to lose, but, to paraphrase Ellie (and King’s daughter), “She’s my cat! Let God get his own cat!”
I got Edie when I was single and sad, living alone in Brooklyn and doing things like getting spur-of-the-moment literary tattoos. When I first got her, she was a wild, angry bodega cat who left scars on my hands. By the time I moved into an apartment in Queens with my now-husband, Morgan, she was the closest thing I had to a nonhuman best friend.
The night she woke me, shuddering, her breathing labored, was one of the worst of my life. Morgan rushed to call a cab to emergency animal hospital, and we all—driver included—held our breaths as Edie’s own stopped and started. The vet ushered us in ahead of a line of sad-looking cats and dogs and I cried helplessly in the lobby as they put her to sleep.
So I can begin, at least, to understand the desperation, the crisis, that led Louis Creed to take Church to the pet semetary. At that moment in the lobby, cried-out and tired at 3am, I would have done the same. I would have done anything to to bring Edie back, and I would have loved her even if she smelled of the grave and brought dead things into our bed.
* * *
Prufrock also appears among the throngs of ghostly guests in The Shining, King’s classic tale in which alcoholic writer Jack Torrance finally succumbs to the demons that lurk inside him. “In the room the women come and go… and the Red Death held sway over all,” Torrance thinks as he reflects on the gruesome history of the Overlook Hotel, where he is employed as winter caretaker.
For Prufrock, the women represent something that Jack longs for: sophistication, respect. They flit through some sort of party, talking of Michelangelo, beyond the reach of Prufrock as he debates, “Do I dare [join them]?”
Torrance flirts with a similar dare: will he ever actually finish a book? Or a play? Will he ever measure up to the rich kids he once taught before losing his job as a result of his rage? Writing and violence are intertwined in the character of Torrance; disappointment in his own abilities poke the monster within to action.
That disease also takes hold of Jack’s son Danny Torrance; not only does he end up in AA in Doctor Sleep, he also quotes our old friend T.S.: “Dan could see the Cowboy Boot patrons come and go, probably not talking about Michelangelo” as he convinces himself not to go in and get a drink.
I don’t think I ever really understood just how dejected Prufrock was. Or how dejected Torrance; in the Stanley Kubrick film adaptation, Jack Nicholson chews the scenery, going from zero to crazy with very little backstory. The terror in the book doesn’t spring from a mad man, though, it springs from a disappointed man. Prufrock isn’t scary, sure, but his life sure is. He grows old. He wears his trousers rolled. He can’t even muster up the energy to eat a damn peach.
* * *
Alfred shows up more than once in King’s Bill Hodges series: the tale of a retired detective who gets pulled back into the game to nail Mr. Mercedes, a crazed killer who dispatches of a crowd of innocent people with a classic car. The series, of course, goes off the rails (there’s a gaming console that drives people to suicide, a lost grip of writing by a murdered novelist, etc.), but Prufrock remains a constant: even if whose brain he occupies changes.
Hodge is contemplating life and death and sickness when a “snatch of poetry” wanders through his brain: “Oh do not ask what is it, let us go and make our visit.”
In Finders Keepers, Hodges goes to the hospital to visit Mr. Mercedes (a.k.a. Brady Hartsfield), who is in a coma after the retired detective and friends foiled the killer’s plan to blow up a boy band concert. Hodge is contemplating life and death and sickness when a “snatch of poetry” wanders through his brain: “Oh do not ask what is it, let us go and make our visit.” In this case, the ex-detective is doing literally that—with some trepidation, as he is visiting a serial killer he fears will one day wake up.
I’m not sure if this was intentional (knowing King, it likely was), but in the final novel, The End of the Watch, Prufrock jumps from Hodges’ brain to Brady’s. Brady has since woken up, although incapacitated, and worked out a way to convince people to commit suicide via a computer game. (You’ll just have to read the book to sort that out). As he zeroes in on another victim, “a fragment of a poem read in high school occurs to him,” and what do you know, it’s that same line that Hodges recalled in book two.
The fact that a killer and cop seize on the same line of a poem could speak to the cliche of hunted and hunter being one in the same, or it could be a slip-up on King’s part (I doubt it). Still, Hodges is far more of a Prufrock than Brady: retired, balding, deciding whether to shuffle off into retirement or get back into the game. Brady is likely a psychopath, though, so perhaps it’s fitting that he sees the poem more literally: “Hey, ho, let’s go,” to quote another King favorite.
* * *
There are more King novels that quote the poem than I have had occasion to read: The Dome, The Stand, and who knows how many written and unwritten. Prufrock is an unerring presence in King’s books, a reminder that—although this famous horror writer is the scribe of nightmares—he’s also enamored of small lives, of small characters. And by small I don’t mean “unimportant,” just real.
Whether he’s bringing the dead back to life, wielding massive transparent domes or tussling with more than one psycho killers, King always keeps his finger on that pulse: humanity, the smallest issues that can become the biggest horrors.
I’ll get to all these references someday. I have less time to sit and read than when I was 17, but I still do it. In the meantime, though, I can only answer that oft-repeated call, Let us go then you and I…
