(October 8, 2010 at 6:05 am)thesummerqueen Wrote: You could see it dawn on a few people the minute they bit down. I said that the peach symbolized every sensual and wildly sweet desire he had - not even just the sensual ones, but anything that could give you pleasure but might be 'messy' or even vaguely inappropriate - and was too afraid to go after.
A couple weeks ago I had one of the last of the summer crop from around here - there's nothing else that strokes all your senses the way a peach will. It's my reminder not to let what people think, what society deems appropriate, or my own insecurities get in the way. Eve's apple should have been a peach instead.
That is interesting. I have usually went with the more obvious meaning of peaches being associated with old people eating the fruit out on porch rocking chairs, and here Prufrock may be questioning whether he's ready to resign himself to becoming an old, lonely curmudgeon. Thus, resigning himself to that life, rather than continuing to dream of being with some of the ladies in the sitting room.
"Do I dare eat a peach?" seems to imply his certainty that he has the option of partaking in some sort of sensual activity, that he can, at will, "eat a peach" (or engage in sensual activity with one of the ladies). I think at this point in the poem, he has convinced himself, with this bald head and trousers, that he doesn't have that option, thus resigning himself to his dreams rather than reality.
But the "messy" and inappropriate interpretation is an intriguing one to think about. And yes, if I were God or whoever wrote Genesis, I definitely would have had Eve partake of a peach rather than an apple, something squishy, almost lurid, not crunchy. lol.
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We have lingered in the chambers of the sea | By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown | Till human voices wake us, and we drown. — T.S. Eliot
"... man always has to decide for himself in the darkness, that he must want beyond what he knows. ..." — Simone de Beauvoir
"As if that blind rage had washed me clean, rid me of hope; for the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself—so like a brother, really—I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again." — Albert Camus, "The Stranger"
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We have lingered in the chambers of the sea | By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown | Till human voices wake us, and we drown. — T.S. Eliot
"... man always has to decide for himself in the darkness, that he must want beyond what he knows. ..." — Simone de Beauvoir
"As if that blind rage had washed me clean, rid me of hope; for the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself—so like a brother, really—I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again." — Albert Camus, "The Stranger"
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