Women are presented in a series of stereotypes of the social set -- they sip tea, talk about art, eat marmalade, and live among porcelain as they pretend that they are more influential than they are. For Prufrock, the singing of the mermaids is a key image identifying the attracting of women as a vital element of youth so that the loss of this ability is a sign of age and decline. Several references are made to the women as they move through the room:

In the room the women come and go

Talking of Michelangelo (35-36).

The women serve as consumers of art rather than artists themselves, and the reference to Michelangelo is a reference to the great Italian master of art. They are here associated with "toast and tea" and with the measuring of life by coffee spoons. The protagonist sees women as distractions:

Is it perfume from a dress

That makes me so digress? (65-66).

The image that prevails throughout is a male image, a society where males make the decisions and produce the art. The reference to "talking of Michelangelo" also evokes the idea of a certain degree of pretension as these women speak of something they do not really understand and do so in order to show that they are of a higher social class. Women are decorative in themselves but seem at most to be distractions to the more important thoughts of the male. Prufrock is so distracted at the tea; he remembers...

As one critics writes,
The closed and open o's, the assonances of room, women, and come, the pointed caesura before the polysyllabic burst of "Michelangelo," weave a context of grandeur within which our feeling about these trivial women determines itself. (Kenner 7)

The image contributes to the idea of Prufrock as ineffectual, as Michael Grant notes when he writes that Prufrock "listens politely; he accepts the proffered cup; he chatters on aimlessly. It is the quiet tragedy of frustration, the revolte buried in the gentleman" (129).

Each of these references expands on what the poet is saying in the text and creates mental links to image and ideas from the other works that contribute to the meaning in this poem.

Works Cited

Eliot, T.S. "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." In Literature: An Introduction to Critical Reading, William Vesterman (ed.). New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1993. 522-526.

Grant, Michael. T.S. Eliot: The Critical Heritage. Volume: 1. London: Routledge, 1997.

Headings, Philip R.T.S. Eliot, Revised Edition. Boston: Twayne, 1982.

Kenner, Hugh. The Invisible Poet T.S. Eliot. New York: McDowell, Obolensk, 1959.

Maxwell, D.E.S. The Poetry of T.S. Eliot. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960.