Welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.

I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Wednesday, April 24th, 2024.

Today's poem is by T.S. Eliot, and it's the love song of J. Alfred Prufrock.

It's a longer poem, so I'll say a few things up front and then read it just once through today.

This seemed like an appropriate choice before the end of the month.

T.S. Eliot is famous for saying April is the cruelest month,

and this is a bit of a downer of a poem.

No blood or gore, but some true deep sadness.

Elliot chose to open the poem with an epigram from Dante's Inferno.

It is in Italian, and I'll spare you my reading of it here.

But it comes from a conversation that Dante is having with the shade of Guido de Montefeltro,

a fellow Italian who is in hell or giving fraudulent counsel. And he tells Dante, if I thought that you were ever going to return to the surface, to the

land of the living, I wouldn't tell you the things I'm telling you now, because that might

tarnish my reputation among those who are still alive.

But, as we all know, nobody comes down to hell and then goes back up again, Jesus being the notable exception there.

The irony, of course, is that Dante is the other great exception, at least within the world of his poem.

And he is going to immortalize the words that Guido speaks to him.

So, Elliot chooses this epigram to set the theme and the tone for his own poem, which is also a story or a dramatization of anxiety about the way that we are perceived,

what people are thinking about us and talking about us,

but also the true human isolation and loneliness that's at the heart of those anxieties.

And if anything, the overall loneliness and isolation of the human race,

especially in first world countries,

...