Year 12 IB Extended Essays 2018

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demeanour to suit different individuals. The lines ‘There will be time to murder and create’ again juxtaposes the two polar opposites of life and death. ‘A hundred visions and revisions’ suggest deceptively that there will always be another time to make decisions or to change those that have already been made. The timidity of the narrator is shown by the repetition ‘Do I dare?’, ‘Do I dare?’, where he decides to turn away, avoiding the emotional risk of rejection. He fears-in-anticipation that they will reject him because ‘his hair is growing thin’; a reflection of his innate mortality and imperfection. Mounting tension is built by consecutive rhyme at the end of each line until the sudden climax, ‘Do I dare/disturb the universe?’, which highlights his isolation from the world. He concludes that he won’t interact with the world, and will continue his cycle of indecision and procrastination; the fate of modern, secular human kind. Progressively, the narrator then realises that he has experienced it all ‘evenings, mornings, afternoons’, suggesting that life is meaningless tedium. He further stresses the insignificance of his life; implying that it is measured by the ritual of ‘coffee spoons’. Prufrock doesn't dare to ‘presume’, and then divulges his own experiences of being rejected, likening himself to an insect ‘sprawling on a pin’, and ‘wriggling on the wall’. The paralysed and inert narrator continues to mull over lost opportunities with women where he can’t pluck up the courage ‘after tea and cakes and ices’ to express his feelings and ‘force the moment to its crisis’. Once again, Eliot innovates with rhyme to build a sense of tension to emphasise the idea conveyed through the climax. Prufrock likens himself to John the Baptist, but he acknowledges that he is no prophet. He uses the metaphor of his ‘head being brought in / upon a platter’ to symbolise his emotional trauma caused by rejection. In the final lines, Prufrock knows that he has seen his ‘moment of greatness flicker’, accepting that he will never amount to anything. This mediocrity is the fate of 20 th century men. The poem continues to explores the difficulties of genuine communication, as Prufrock muses ‘that is not what I meant at all’, further revealing his feelings of inadequacy. Prufrock regrets lost opportunities, where he should have expressed his deeper feelings instead of continuing with the banalities of inconsequential chat. The final stanza is symbolic of