Revisiting T. S. Eliot’s “Prufrock”

During the summer season, when local peaches are plentiful, as we’d finish dinner I’d ask my husband “Do you care to eat a peach?” I knew I was playing on the line “Do you dare to eat a peach?”—from T. S. Eliot’s poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” But after a while I realized that there was nothing else I remembered from that poem. I hadn’t read it in, literally, decades. So I pulled Eliot’s Complete Poems and Plays from my bookshelf and opened the book.