In-depth Analysis of J. Alfred Prufrock's Love Song The five-line interlude ending on the "bottoms of the silent seas" forms an encapsulated version of the rest of the poem, in which the frustrated effort to establish an intentional discourse leads once again to a retreat downwards and inwards, towards a silent world of instinctive being. A return to the relaxing and distracting images of sensuality provokes a final impulse towards the violent imposition of will - "forcing the moment to its crisis" - which ends, like the previous thoughts of disturbing the universe, in ruthless self-deprecation. The image of decapitation parodies the theme of being disconnected and provides at least one negative definition of the self: “I am no prophet.” At this point time has quietly moved from the present to the past and the speaker offers a series of prolonged questions about the consequences of actions not taken. While its grammatical context ("And it would have been worth it") reduces it to the contemplation of "what might have been"; the language and images of this passage stage with renewed intensity the recurring drama of mental conflict: it would have been worth it, to have bitten the question with a smile, to have compressed the universe into a ball, to have it roll towards an overwhelming question , To say: "I am Lazarus, I come from the dead, I come back to tell you everything, I will tell you everything." The infinitives in this passage – to have bitten, to have squeezed, to roll – conform to the text of the poem's widespread use of transitive direct action verbs in expressing the speaker's violent impulse to fight the forces of disorder: to kill and create, to disturb the universe, spitting out all the extremities, forcing the moment. The ling.. .... half of the paper ... that the author has chosen to work with, can itself evoke other psychic material; and then, poetic verse may arise, not from the original impulse, but from a secondary stimulation of the unconscious mind." The mental forces at work in Eliot's description of the poetic process serve as an analogy to the conflicts that beset the speaker. in Prufrock l the speaker is a failed poet in terms of his inability to "murder" existing structures in order to "create" anew; he finds it impossible to say what he wants to say in the "secondary stimulation of the unconscious mind"; and partly resolves the struggle between form and matter; the integration of the psyche remains incomplete at best. Works Cited Conflicts in Consciousness: Poetry and Criticism by T. S. Eliot Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984.