How is the epigraph at the beginning of T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" relevant to the meaning of the poem? Try in particular to address such matters as secrecy, duality, emotion, and Prufrock's inferiority complex.

When Prufrock finishes the poem by pronouncing "We have lingered in the chambers of the seaŠTill human voices wake us, and we drown" (129, 131), he completes the vertical descent Eliot has been deploying throughout the poem. He has plunged into his own Dantesque underworld and, through the "We" pronoun, forces us to accompany him - hoping, like da Montefeltro from the epigraph, that we will not be able to return to the mermaids on top and shame him by repeating his story.

The concluding two three-line stanzas act as a sestet (six lines). Although the rhyme scheme differs (here it is abbcdd), Petrarchan sonnets complement the opening octet (first eight lines) with a sestet. This is Eliot's final mock-allusion to yet another Renaissance artist (after Dante and Michelangelo). Petrarch unrequitedly mooned after his love, Laura, but Prufrock, whose name sounds much like Petrarch's, does not even have an unattainable ideal love. He has unattainable, frustrated, paralyzed desire for all women who reject him; they are all inaccessible, and any reminder of the social world ("human voices") drowns him - and, he hopes, his reader-as-Dante - deeper in his watery Hell.