love song of Satin-Legs Smith: Gwendolyn Brooks revisits Prufrock's hell, The

Papers on Language and Literature, Winter 2000 by Saunders, Judith P

Her body is like new brown bread

Under the Woolworth mignonette.

Her body is a honey bowl

Whose waiting honey is deep and hot.

Her body is like summer earth,

Receptive, soft, and absolute .... (148-53)

Food imagery ("bread," "honey") indicates how much he is nourished and sustained by this connection; D. H. Melhem notes the "delicacy" of the "lyric epilogue," which lends the conclusion of Brooks's poem "a startlingly romantic note" (34). His experience of the female body is said, furthermore, to be "absolute." The poem concludes with this word, which lends extra significance to the human event and human feelings it characterizes. The encounter itself may be transitory, but while it lasts the experience is perfect in its human completeness: nothing is missing. Thus Smith, for all the poverty and external

difficulties in his life, achieves with a woman the satisfactions unrealized by his wealthy counterpart in Eliot's poem. Smith's quest ends in the simple consummation of desire; Prufrock's ends only with fears about his relations with women, doubts concerning his own erotic potential.

Brooks's poem effectively strips eros of the metaphysical weight it carries in Eliot's and Dante's poems. Both Brooks's predecessors associate woman's love with redemption. Protagonists unable to extricate themselves from a moral and spiritual "dark wood," or its equivalent, require external, female guidance (Headings 21). Dante's protagonist, of course, receives such guidance, while Eliot's does not. Prufrock's desires are more complicated than Smith's in that Prufrock seeks to share profound, vaguely metaphysical communication with a woman, and possibly also to articulate to her his denunciation of his social universe (Headings 24). Certainly his wish to "force the moment to its crisis" has implications that go beyond the physical (80). This difference between his desires and Smith's appears in large measure to be a by-product of economic and educational differences between them and in no way blunts the fact that Brooks's protagonist obtains fulfillment on his own terms, where Eliot's fails to do so. Smith does not need to look to women for spiritual solace or insight. The good he seeks with them is free of transcendent meanings because, unlike Dante or Prufrock, he is not perceived-by himself or by his poet-creator-as enmeshed in any guilty collaboration. He is free of the morbid introspection that is Prufrock's most salient trait for the best of reasons: the injustice and aridity of the environment in which he finds himself are emphatically none of his making.

Why, after all, are these characters in "hell" in the first place? To what ends do the poets offer readers these guided tours through regions of the damned? In each case, the implied relationship between narrator and reader provides an important clue in understanding the poet's purposes. As already noted, Eliot's Prufrock assumes readers know, or at least understand, his world of porcelain and marmelade and cultural oneup-manship. If readers do not end in judging Prufrock quite as severely as he judges himself, it is because they recognize something of themselves in him. Readers, too, have experienced the power of social structures and strictures to thwart the quest for human and spiritual fulfillment. They too have been "afraid" (86). And, like Prufrock, readers perhaps can recognize their own collusion with these same stifling social forces. The epigraph to Eliot's poem forces readers to consider whether they themselves may be living in an earthly hell: will they learn, Dantelike, from observing Prufrock's futile torments, or are they doomed to participate in endless cycles of personal and metaphysical sterility?