I had other plans for this week’s poem. Time for a laugh, I thought. Time for a woman’s voice too. Where better to head than towards the warm, welcoming, very womanly embrace of Jackie Kay and Maw Broon’s Vagina Monologues? But then I switched on the radio and heard Jeremy Irons reading the Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, cajoling out of thin air an altogether different kind of sensuality.

It’s fifty years since TS Eliot died and exactly one hundred years since Prufrock’s languorous love song was published in the June 1915 issue of Poetry with the help of Ezra Pound who sent it to the Chicago-based magazine with his seal of approval: “This is as good as anything I have seen.”

Odd to think that this (to me) deliciously seductive, world-weary trawl through “corners of the evening” was a journey conjured out of foggy, smoggy, lamp-lit imaginings by such a young man – Eliot was just 22 when he started writing it in 1910. And perhaps odder and much sadder to remember that other young men were being blown to pieces on the battlefields of WW1 by the time it was published.

I was almost 30 when I discovered the poem and, for me, it was one of those moments that changed perception. For the first time poetry came truly alive – not as something to be read and learned by heart (as at school) or teased apart to uncover form and meaning (as in undergraduate essays), but as pure delight in the sound, music and beguiling touch of words. All the more alluring, perhaps, because of the interwoven tangle of emotions and images.

Alright, there’s that pervasively strange, tantalising, neurotic, self-doubting, eroticism. All those fleeting encounters with the opposite sex, lamplight caressing downy hair on arms, “braceleted, and white and bare.” All for what exactly in a life “measured out with coffee spoons”?

And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!

Smoothed by long fingers,

Asleep … tired … or it malingers,

Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.

Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,

Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?

But what caught and charms me still is the poem’s musical, teasing rhythm and the lingering hint of sensuality, interrupted with sudden jagged diversions, ‘ragged claws/scuttling across silent seas.’ Held between past, present and future; poised between irony and introspection, this is, as Jonathan Sturgeon cleverly describes it in flavorwire: “a perfectly deranged poem, it is also perfectly balanced between the 19th and 20th centuries.” I would add that Eliot’s discomfiting and uncertain sense of self is very much at home in our own deranged and unbalanced 21^st century.

Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherized upon a table;

Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,

The muttering retreats

Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels

And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:

Streets that follow like a tedious argument

Of insidious intent

To lead you to an overwhelming question …

Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”

Let us go and make our visit.

Thomas Stearns Eliot died too recently for his work to be out of copyright so for the rest of the poem please go to Poetry.

And, next week, stand by for Jackie Kay.