paralleled with modern society ( Rainey p . 108 ). With sexual identity suspect we witness what was central now falling apart ― Tiresias , the blind prophet who was once a woman gives us ‘ a binary perspective ’ ( Brooker Bentley , p . 53 ) on the poem , he is identified by Eliot as the most important character in the poem due to his awareness of ‘ the substance of the poem ’ ( Eliot p . 53 ). But he no longer predicts with certainty and is reduced to a voyeur , indicating the eclipse of moral and spiritual values . Now what was once marginal is centre stage – sterile meaningless relationships and business represented by ‘ Stetson ’ ( Line 69 ).
Returning to “ Prufrock ” we can see elements of Eliot ’ s idealised once great past in the couplet ‘ In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo ’ ( lines 13-14 & 35-36 ), here is a world of form and beauty as represented by Michelangelo that has been cut off from modern society ( also literally detached from the poem it stands alone as a rhyming couplet ). This is in stark contrast to modernity where Prufrock struggles to embrace his existence in all its horror . As Prufrock continues his journey through the disorientating ‘ yellow fog ’ circling like a cat around the gloomy city we are reminded of Yeats ’ s ‘ gyre ’ symbol of “ The Second Coming ”. The repetition of ‘ there will be time ’ ( line 23 ) conveys this spiralling effect as he ascends the stair , reaches its apex and descends again . There are also echoes here of Nietzsche ’ s theory of Return and Recurrence , if our lives are repeated again and again then ‘ there will be time ’ takes on a logical meaning . This is echoed also in Eliot ’ s “ Little Gidding ” ‘ What we call the beginning is often the end / And to make an end is to make a beginning ’ ( V lines 1-2 ). Like Yeats Eliot is using the spiral to compare the intersection of the spiritual ‘ Do I dare / Disturb the universe ?’ ( Lines 45-46 ) with the mundane ‘ I have measured out my life with coffee spoons ’. Like modern society Prufrock ’ s world continues to fall apart and as his spiritual drought continues he wishes that he ‘… should have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling