Remembering Challenging Reading Task
The literary journey is a long and winding process, at the end of which most people expect to have improved their skills in reading and understanding literature from other writers as well as developing their own writing skills. During this journey, a person gets to interact with different types of literature, such as poems, short stories, novels, and plays. These literary works are diverse in terms of the era they were written, and the motivations of the authors. Sometimes, the literature a person interacts with is relatively easy because of a number of factors such as simple language or the presence of cultural influences in a literary piece that the reader can relate to hence making the piece easy to understand. However, at one point in the journey of literary development, a student of literature will inevitably come across a piece of literature that they find impossible to understand in the first, second and even the third reading. Such an experience has the ability to strongly decide the trajectory of a person’s literary development, depending on how the reader responds to this challenge. Some readers decide to give up while others take the bull by the horns and embrace this experience. Reading Thomas Sterns Elliot’s poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” was, and still is, a challenging experience from which I have learned the importance of critical thinking, research and analysis while reading literature.
T.S Elliot’s poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is, for me, one of the greatest poems of all time. The poem was published in 1915, and the narrator is an aging male who narrates his feelings and thoughts about the world and himself. My older sister, a lover of literature, gave me this poem when I was in high school. At the time, I was developing a keen interest in reading and dissecting poetry, and my older sister was the one I turned to for advice and guidance. My sister gave me this poem and simply asked me to tell her what I thought the poem meant. The first thing about this poem is that it starts with an epigraph of Dante’s Inferno, which is in Italian. I read through the poem for the first time, and upon reaching the end, I had picked up nothing expect literary elements such as repetition, assonance, and alliteration. But this was not the aim of the task. I read through the poem again for a second time and picked the themes of fear and love. However, the mention of people such as Michelangelo, Lazarus, the epigraph from Inferno, and the repetition of certain phrases perplexed me. There were also some words whose meanings I did not understand.
I decided to read the poem again for the third time. This time, I read the poem with a dictionary. As I read, I underlined the difficult words and looked them up. Slowly the poem was becoming more comprehensible. Afterward, I went on Google and looked up Dante’s Inferno, Michelangelo, and the story of Lazarus (Eliot, 1915). Having covered all bases, I was ready to read the poem again, this time with an understanding of all the difficult terms and allusions that T.S Elliott makes in this piece. As I read the poem for the fourth time, I found the poem easier to read, the structure and flow of the poem made much more sense to me than in my previous attempts. At the end of the reading, I had an idea of what the poem meant. The poem is about a man who wants to ask a lady he is in love with a question, but he is conflicted. Prufrock, the speaker, is not a confident man; he is aware of how unnoticed he is in the vastness of the world. Prufrock is concerned that because the world is so complex, his words, perhaps a proposal for marriage, will be misunderstood. He thus resolves to keep to himself and not to act bravely. Even though this how I understood the poem, I have always been aware that I may wrong, but I believe that is the beauty of poetry.
The task of reading “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” though challenging, was a significant experience in my literary journey. From it, I learn the importance of critical thinking, research, and analysis when interacting with literature. To understand the poem required a high level of critical thinking. I had to make myself understand the reader while simultaneously being an outsider to be able to understand what the poet was trying to say. However, I discovered I could think critically about the poem with understanding the text. This prompted me to do research on the difficult words in the poem, and the allusions that Eliot makes such as the epigraph from Inferno. I had to analyze the poem by reading it more than once, noticing the repetitions and emphasis of the poem, and try to figure out why Eliot wrote the poem in this way. The experience was a turning point for me because it taught me the importance of going beyond the surface to understand a piece of literature. This challenge taught me that if I dedicate myself to researching, analyzing, and thinking critically, I can understand even literature regardless of its complexity.
Some reading tasks can be challenging experiences. My most challenging reading task was reading T.S Eliot’s poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” To understand this poem, I had to do a lot of research, analysis, and critical thinking. In the process, I improved my skills in unpacking seemingly complicated literature. After overcoming this challenge, my confidence when interacting with literature was increased, and my appetite for literature increased. The reading task challenge was a turning point in my literary journey, and it is an experience I hold in fond memory.
References
Eliot, T. S. (1915). The love song of J. Alfred Prufrock. Poetry, 6(3), 130-135.