r oneself what the implications of the name "J. Alfred" are compounded with "Love Song". As the reader discovers this poem he sees that everything that Eliot has put into it has more than one side. Thus the title itself is two sided-at first glance one assumes a love poem to another person. However, on deeper inspection and knowing Eliot's penchant for dealing in effects "in an odd way wholly verbal, seemingly endemic to the language, scrupulously concocted out of the expressive gestures of what a reader whose taste has been educted in the nineteenth-century classics takes poetry to be"(Kenner pg. 4), one must assume that there is more to the title, which the reader can best understand only when looked at in conjunction with the epigraph at the start of the poem.
             Although the title of the poem suggests one thing: a love song to another person, a somewhat light-hearted idea, the reader soon sees a darker side to Eliot's work. Eliot puts and epigraph from Dante's Inferno at the beginning of the poem. It is spoken by Guido de Montefeltro who advised Pope Boniface VIII how to betray and destroy the Collona family after being promised absolution, but died unrepentant. In the epigraph, Guido, who is entombed in a flame, tells the listener that he will reveal his name only because he knows that no one who is in hell is ever able to escape. From the combination of epigraph and title, we may understand the Prufrock himself is two sided. According to Ledbetter "Prufrock lives with his light entombed in the dark hell of his own fear of rejection: he cannot share his 'love song'". Prufrock, though the title implies lightness of spirit, is then speaking from a dark place, from his own hell. Eliot, in contrasting title with epigraph, immediately lets the reader understand that Prufrock is speaking to us from a dark place, but the message that he is sending, or wants to s...