The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock - Epigraph

Epigraph

In context, the epigraph refers to a meeting between Dante and Guido da Montefeltro, who was condemned to the eighth circle of Hell for providing counsel to Pope Boniface VIII, who wished to use Guido's advice for a nefarious undertaking. This encounter follows Dante's meeting with Ulysses, who himself is also condemned to the circle of the Fraudulent. According to Ron Banerjee, the epigraph serves to cast ironic light on Prufrock's intent. Like Guido, Prufrock had intended his story never be told, and so by quoting Guido, Eliot reveals his view of Prufrock's love song.

Frederick Locke contends that Prufrock himself is suffering from multiple personalities of sorts, and that he embodies both Guido and Dante in the Inferno analogy. One is the storyteller; the other the listener who later reveals the story to the world. He posits, alternatively, that the role of Guido in the analogy is indeed filled by Prufrock, but that the role of Dante is filled by you, the reader, as in "Let us go then, you and I," (1). In that, the reader is granted the power to do as he pleases with Prufrock's love song.

Although he finally chose not to use it, the draft version of the epigraph for the poem came from Dante's Purgatorio (XXVI, 147-148):

'sovegna vos a temps de ma dolor'.

Poi s'ascose nel foco che gli affina.

Eliot provided this translation in his essay "Dante" (1929):

'be mindful in due time of my pain'.

Then dived he back into that fire which refines them.

He would eventually use the quotation in the closing lines of his 1922 poem The Waste Land. The quotation that Eliot did choose comes from Dante also. Inferno (XXVII, 61-66) reads:

S`io credesse che mia risposta fosse

A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,

Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.

Ma perciocchè giammai di questo fondo

Non tornò vivo alcun, s'i'odo il vero,

Senza tema d'infamia ti rispondo.

One translation, from the Princeton Dante Project, is:

"If I but thought that my response were made

to one perhaps returning to the world,

this tongue of flame would cease to flicker.

But since, up from these depths, no one has yet

returned alive, if what I hear is true,

I answer without fear of being shamed."