across the floors of silent seas’ (lines 73-74). Humanity itself disintegrated and returned to where it
came from - the seas. Therefore this represents Prufrocks total isolation and alienation from society.
The brokenness and disintegration also continues in “The Waste Land” beginning with ‘A heap of
broken images’ (line 22), ‘The river’s tent is broken’ (line 172), ‘broken fingernails’ (line 304),
‘seals broken’ (line 408) and ‘a broken Coriolanus’ (line 415) all symbols of turmoil, decline and
decay. But there is hope; Eliot seems to be saying that prayer is the answer; the waste land can be
regenerated in the repetition of DA DA DA – self-control, alms giving and mercy (Rainey p.120).
This is the way of regeneration and peace as the poem ends with the Sanskrit invocation Shantih
Shantih Shantih – ‘the peace which passeth understanding ‘ which echoes St Pauls letter to the
Philippians 4:7: ‘And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and
minds through Christ Jesus’ (Rainey p.126).
For Prufrock the mermaids song has cast a spell, this mirrors the ‘love song’ of the title, but for him
there is only the impossibility of love in the modern world, his ‘indecision self-pity and self-disgust’’
(Singh p. 83) have seen to that. At the end of the poem he is woken from his ‘etherized’ state by
human voices but only to drown in the morass of modern society. When things fall apart there is an
abyss and Prufrock and Eliot have looked into it and like Kurtz in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness see
the horror.
In conclusion Eliot’s poetry illustrates the dilemma of man in modernity and which so rightly Yeats
pronounced as ‘things fall apart, the centre will not hold’, in such a scenario the individual is
disorientated and isolated from a society where the old certainties are no longer upheld and spirals
out of control as moral and spiritual values fragment.