I had a dream in which I was re-reading “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock,” and the “In the room, the women come and go” couplet was suddenly much longer, and went into a lot of interesting stuff. I wish I remembered what it said. I’ve had a long history with Prufrock, including memorizing it, reading the sections Eliot excised following Ezra Pound’s advice, and working on a poem in the style of Prufrock (“The Homework of J. Albert Potter”), so it would’ve been interesting to see if those things influenced my dreamed version of the poem. But probably I just dreamed up some gibberish.
