No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous--
Almost, at times, the Fool.
-from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, by TS Eliot.
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock has been a kind of extended mantra for me. You could say it's a poem of an introvert's despair, but I don't find it depressing, I find it comforting. Stanzas play in my head like a favorite song. So I was thrilled this weekend when I picked up a copy of Susan Cain's Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking and found references to Prufrock and other Eliot poems right there in the introduction! It's going to be a good read.
Today a colleague and I were sharing a laugh about my jumpiness, which even I will not deny must be hilarious to observers, and I thought to myself, at times, indeed, almost ridiculous. But the stanza stuck in my mind. No! I am not Prince Hamlet.
I looked at the poem. Politic, cautious, and meticulous. That's me, and that's my tragedy, boring, perfectionistic, critical, unambitious by general consensus, and yet you could not teach me to hate the politic, cautious and meticulous in me any more than you could teach me to despise my bones.
It's all right, Prufrock gets it. Eliot was the same as me, and he gave me Prufrock who can shrug at me and say, "Let us go then." I can read the poem and feel like less of a ghost.
But today something about this stanza shook me up in a way it never has before. Because before I had Prufrock, when I was 17 and Eliot still read like a jigsaw puzzle with most of the pieces missing, before I had Prufrock I had Hamlet.
Can anyone deny Hamlet is the Great Introvert of Literature? His great frustration is an inability to translate his thoughts into an outward manifestation. It's not only an inability to act (though that is a part of it, for him and Eliot and perhaps all introverts). It's an inability to bring other people close to understanding the things that he is close to understanding. It's an inability to deny the truth, that fully understanding is impossible. It's an inescapable grief over the observation that the people around him do not seem to wrestle so fiercely and endlessly with the complexities of right and wrong, life and death, love and hate, beauty and corruption.
Hamlet never really avenges his father. In the end, he is caught up in a final scene of outrageous coincidences, which turn like the cogs of destiny to kill everyone who ever mattered at Elsinore.
Prince Hamlet: he grieved, and died.
It isn't such a remarkable story when you boil it down. A traumatized teen, depressed, with no one to turn to. He was brilliant, though, and he lets us say, when introverts despair, our minds are as wide as our grief is, our hearts are as deep.
Why, then, should Prufrock declare, with such pitiable defeat, No! I am not Prince Hamlet?
In other words, what does it mean for us introverts when we cannot even be Hamlet? He grieved and died. But he was wide-minded, deep-hearted. Can't we, at the end, have that much?
I think we can. I say you can have that much. I would tell Prufrock that he is wrong, that he is Prince Hamlet, and so am I. And I would read him the words of Hamlet, which mirror his own. I would show him how Hamlet counts himself inferior, and calls himself names, and continually fails to figure out and explain what it all means.
... What would he (a talented actor) do
Had he the motive and the cue for passion
That I have? He would drown the stage with tears,
And cleave the general ear with horrid speech,
Make mad the guilty, and appall the free,
Confound the ignorant, and amaze indeed
The very faculties of eyes and ears. Yet I,
A dull and muddy-mettled rascal, peak
Like John-a-dreams, unpregnant of my cause,
And can say nothing; no, not for a king,
Upon whose property and most dear life
A damn'd defeat was made. Am I a coward?
Who calls me villian, breaks my pate across...
... Hah, 'swounds, I should take it; for it cannot be
But I am pigeon-liver'd, and lack gall
To make oppression bitter.
-Hamlet, II.ii.560-578
They are the same soliloquy, the same thoughts. It's likely Eliot meant it that way. I hope so. I hope Eliot could realize that to call himself incomparable to Hamlet was only self-abuse. I hope he could say, "I think I am Prince Hamlet, I think I can grant myself that much."
Hamlet had Horatio, one true friend to whom he could say, dying, "Tell my story." But even Prufrock has someone - has me - to whom he can say, "Let us go then, you and I."
