For I have known them all already, known them all:

Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;

I know the voices dying with a dying fall

Beneath the music from a farther room.

The punctuation, the pacing, the imagery, it’s all so wonderful. But what gets me here is the sentence, “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.” That just takes my breath away.

The colon summaries the thoughts to come of what he has known already: “The evenings, mornings, afternoons”—Do you notice the order here? The semicolon separates the two full clauses, signifying that “I know the voices dying with a dying fall, beneath the music from a farter room is closely related to “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.”

I wasn’t clear about the last two lines, so I asked Copilot. Here was the reply:

“Those last two lines echo with such quiet devastation. Eliot’s “voices dying with a dying fall / Beneath the music from a farther room” feel like a moment suspended in dust and memory. He borrows that phrase “dying fall” from Shakespeare (Twelfth Night), where it describes music so delicately fading it tugs at the heart—and here, Eliot reshapes it into something lonelier and more estranged.

It’s like he’s saying: I hear life happening elsewhere… voices, beauty, connection—but it’s distant, and I’m not part of it. The music is in a “farther room,” beyond reach, emotionally and physically. That subtle spatial image implies not just separation, but exclusion. The speaker isn’t just observing—he’s on the outside, weighing his life in small, safe routines while something more vibrant whispers just out of view.

It’s an ache you can almost feel between the lines. Especially paired with those ‘coffee spoons’—measuring life not in passionate crescendos, but in quiet, habitual teaspoons of existence.”

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/44212/the-love-song-of-j-alfred-prufrock