Symbolism Across Cultures: Alienation and Identity in T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”and Moayed Tayeb’s “Kîvî”

The purpose of this research paper is to compare the way of symbolism used in T.S. Eliot's poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and Moayed Tayeb's poem “Kîvî”. This research uses the qualitative comparative method, close reading technique, and has the purpose of investigating the symbolic structures that are contained in each poem. Although they are separated only by language and geography, and by literary ideology (Anglo-American modernism and Kurdish social realism, respectively), T.S. Eliot and Moayed Tayeb share an interest in symbolism as a unified method of investigating issues of otherness, identity, and selfhood. Close reading is used to interpret and compare the symbolic patterns in key passages and images from both poems. In each of the poems, the symbolic images are predominantly coded in the language of the interior, the psychological and social condition, and the condition of the community and culture, in Eliot's case, the anxiously repressed interiority and in Tayeb's, the image of the shoe brush, Mount Gara, and the crane of the social and economic condition that contributes to poverty and displacement in Kurdish society. The close reading shows how private symbolism is linked to universal themes of pain and anxiety, highlighting the commonality of private symbolism among disparate literary traditions.