TEAM NAME: Student Questions

Tone and Mood
  • Inferences
  • Irony
  • Connotation
  • Questions dealing with purpose or motive with the author
/ Specific
  • choice of details
  • atmosphere
  • diction
  • people
  • places
  • time period
  • verisimilitude
/ Comparison
  • Allusions
  • Metaphors/Simile
  • Symbols
  • Personification
/ Organization
  • Spatial- repetition and contrast
  • Sequential
  • Beginning & Ending
  • Transitions
  • Syntactical
  • Juxtaposition
  • Paradox
  • Antithesis
  • Parallels
/ Unusual
  • Things that don’t make sense
  • Things that seem out of place or time
  • Ambiguities
/ Theme examples
  • quotes
  • symbols
  • sentences
  • characters and actions
  • epiphanies
  • rhetoric

Is this a carpe diem poem?
Does the speaker want to go on an adventure or is he looking back?
Why (and where) the tone shifts?
Is this poem to comfort himself or comfort others?
Is this a story of an Average Joe having a mid life crisis?
What is Prufrock’shangup with time? “There will be time, there will be time.”
“And time yet for a hundred indecisions / And for a hundred visions and revisions.” / Who are “you and I”?
Is the speaker scared of getting old or dying?
Can we assume the poem is set in England?
Why so many references to the sea at the end?
Why the word “presume”?
The mood at the beginning is ethereal and surprising? Why “like a patient etherized upon a table”?
In the end, who are the “human voices who wake us” when we “drown”?
WhyPrufrock “should have been a pair of ragged claws…”? / What is the significance of the women coming and going talking of Michelangelo?
What does the yellow fog/yellow smoke symbolize?
Why so much self-questioning?
Do the mermaid refer to mythological sirens?
How is the Prince Hamlet stanza significant to meaning of poem?
Who is the “eternal Footman”?
What does the Dante quote mean? How does it inform poem’s meaning? / Why the odd rhyme scheme?
Where are contrasting ideas in the poem?
Why does the poem begin in a seemingly seedy place but end at the sea?
It seems like the speaker shifts from happiness to despair. Is he satisfied?
What does the ending mean?
Why the repetition of “do I dare?”
What’s up with the repetition of “after” in the stanzas beginning “And would it have been worth it, after all”? / Why does he need to “squeeze the universe into a ball” to ask it a question?
Why is this a “love song” if he doesn’t mention love?
What’s the significance of the peach? “Do I dare to eat a peach?”
What makes this poem so moving even though it’s difficult to understand?
What’s up with the mermaids?
Who is J. Alfred Prufrock?
What does “That is not what I meant at all” mean? / What is the significance of the epigraph/Dante quote?
Does the speaker come across as something he isn’t?
“I grow old…I grow old…” What’s up with these lines?
“There will be time to murder and create” – what does this reference or mean?
Is the speaker making an argument for how to live a life?
How is the theme of growing old/aging developed?
What does it mean to “measure out a life in coffee spoons?