The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Some of the literary features that make this poem an extraordinary reading are the complexity and fragmentation that frequently occur throughout the poem. In this poem focused on time, the speaker narrates with a stream of consciousness, suggesting that he presents his thoughts and emotions without clarity nor organization.Though the reader must be knowledgeable of all the literary references Eliot includes in his poem, Eliot presents these literary allusions in anachronistic order to demonstrate the complexity and fragmentation the literary mind throughout time(though not the only reason).
In the third stanza, the narrator personifies the lingering yellow fog as a stray animal comfortably living in the lower city levels of industrial society. As yellow fog appears synonymous with poisonous gas(mustard gas, to be precise;possibly a reminder of the tragic WWI) and, hence, alludes to approaching death, the contradiction between the yellow gas and the connotation of its actions as warm and comfortable add to the complexity of the modern man. To further complicate the modern man and add to the fragmentation of the poem, in the fourth stanza, the speaker mentions the seemingly irrelevant pairs of words "toast and tea", "yellow smoke", and "murder and create". Though the combination of these words in one stanza communicates to the reader the elements and possibility of time, the words,nonetheless, form a fragmented mirror that distorts and complicates the view of the chaotic, modern world.