Portrait of a Lady -T.S Eliot

Portrait of a Lady

 
Thou hast committed–
Fornication: but that was in another country,
And besides, the wench is dead.
The Jew Of Malta
I

Among the smoke and fog of a December afternoon
You have the scene arrange itself–as it will seem to do–
With “I have saved this afternoon for you”;
And four wax candles in the darkened room,
Four rings of light upon the ceiling overhead,
An atmosphere of Juliet’s tomb
Prepared for all the things to be said, or left unsaid.
We have been, let us say, to hear the latest Pole
Transmit the Preludes, through his hair and finger tips.
“So intimate, this Chopin, that I think his soul
Should be resurrected only among friends
Some two or three, who will not touch the bloom
That is rubbed and questioned in the concert room.”
–And so the conversation slips
Among velleities and carefully caught regrets
Through attenuated tones of violins
Mingled with remote cornets
And begins.

“You do not know how much they mean to me, my friends,
And how, how rare and strange it is, to find
In a life composed so much, so much of odds and ends,
(For indeed I do not love it … you knew? you are not blind!
How keen you are!)
To find a friend who has these qualities,
Who has, and gives
Those qualities upon which friendship lives.
How much it means that I say this to you–
Without these friendships–life, what cauchemar!”
Among the windings of the violins
And the ariettes
Of cracked cornets
Inside my brain a dull tom-tom begins
Absurdly hammering a prelude of its own,
Capricious monotone
That is at least one definite “false note.”
–Let us take the air, in a tobacco trance,
Admire the monuments
Discuss the late events,
Correct our watches by the public clocks.
Then sit for half an hour and drink our bocks.
II

Now that lilacs are in bloom
She has a bowl of lilacs in her room
And twists one in her fingers while she talks.
“Ah, my friend, you do not know, you do not know
What life is, you who hold it in your hands”;
(Slowly twisting the lilac stalks)
“You let it flow from you, you let it flow,
And youth is cruel, and has no remorse
And smiles at situations which it cannot see.”
I smile, of course,
And go on drinking tea.
“Yet with these April sunsets, that somehow recall
My buried life, and Paris in the Spring
feel immeasurably at peace, and find the world
To be wonderful and youthful, after all.”

The voice returns like the insistent out-of-tune
Of a broken violin on an August afternoon:
“I am always sure that you understand
My feelings, always sure that you feel,
Sure that across the gulf you reach your hand.

You are invulnerable, you have no Achilles’ heel.
You will go on, and when you have prevailed
You can say: at this point many a one has failed.

But what have I, but what have I, my friend,
To give you, what can you receive from me?
Only the friendship and the sympathy
Of one about to reach her journey’s end.

I shall sit here, serving tea to friends….”

I take my hat: how can I make a cowardly amends
For what she has said to me?
You will see me any morning in the park
Reading the comics and the sporting page.
Particularly I remark
An English countess goes upon the stage.
A Greek was murdered at a Polish dance,
Another bank defaulter has confessed.
I keep my countenance,
I remain self-possessed
Except when a street piano, mechanical and tired
Reiterates some worn-out common song
With the smell of hyacinths across the garden
Recalling things that other people have desired.
Are these ideas right or wrong?
III

The October night comes down; returning as before
Except for a slight sensation of being ill at ease
I mount the stairs and turn the handle of the door
And feel as if I had mounted on my hands and knees.

“And so you are going abroad; and when do you return?
But that’s a useless question.
You hardly know when you are coming back,
You will find so much to learn.”
My smile falls heavily among the bric-a-brac.

“Perhaps you can write to me.”
My self-possession flares up for a second;
This is as I had reckoned.
“I have been wondering frequently of late
(But our beginnings never know our ends!)
Why we have not developed into friends.”
I feel like one who smiles, and turning shall remark
Suddenly, his expression in a glass.
My self-possession gutters; we are really in the dark.

“For everybody said so, all our friends,
They all were sure our feelings would relate
So closely! I myself can hardly understand.
We must leave it now to fate.
You will write, at any rate.
Perhaps it is not too late
shall sit here, serving tea to friends.”

And I must borrow every changing
find expression … dance, dance
Like a dancing bear,
Cry like a parrot, chatter like an ape.
Let us take the air, in a tobacco trance–

Well! and what if she should die some afternoon,
Afternoon grey and smoky, evening yellow and rose;
Should die and leave me sitting pen in hand
With the smoke coming down above the housetops;
Doubtful, for quite a while
Not knowing what to feel or if I understand
Or whether wise or foolish, tardy or too soon …
Would she not have the advantage, after all?
This music is successful with a “dying fall”
Now that we talk of dying–
And should I have the right to smile?

-T.S Eliot, 1915

About the Poet:

My favourite poet, (I’m surprised it’s taken me this long to introduce him on here) Thomas Sterns Eliot is probably the most influential poet of the 20th century, not just for his work in poetry, including the masterpiece ‘The Waste Land‘, but also for his introduction of the idea of poetic tradition in the English literary cannon (I suggest you read his essay: ‘Tradition and the individual talent‘). Eliot perhaps embodies the typical criticisms of modernism – an elitist individual he was obsessed with his own intelligence and had little time for those below his intellect. As a person this perhaps made Eliot somewhat concieted, but it makes his poetry a mine of allusion and alteration of classic text; “an atmosphere of Juliet’s tomb”, for example cannot be understood without the context of ‘Romeo and Juliet’ (well… it can… as the play is deeply entrenched into Western literary conscience, but that is another issue all together). Let us go then you and I… into the mind of this man, as he begins his poetic career with one of his two ‘Boston poems’, the other being ‘The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock’ – which forms the context of the above poem, which leads me to my first piece of blog homework… go and read Prufrock!

Form:

Have we all read Prufrock? Good. The form of each poem is superficially similar, in that they are both long narrative poems, written in rhyming free verse, the only real addition in Portrait is that there are three numerated sections, sections which represent different time periods. So where we have a dramatic monologue in Prufrock, describing the thoughts and feelings of the speaker in one instance, we have a series of descriptions in Portrait, describing the thoughts and feelings of the speaker in three different settings. This link in form is very important, because it implies a link between the two poems – be it just that Eliot wrote the poems during a similar period, or that Eliot is presenting a subtle type of diptych, “the same story told in a different perspective”.

Some important stuff:

To me Portrait will always be ‘When Prufrock got to Tea’. I have looked around, in articles online and offline, and absolutely no-one academic agrees with me. But, I am a man of boundless optimism and will press on with this reading regardless. What Portrait gives us is the destruction of a potential friendship through three meetings, through “discuss[ing] the late events” and “drinking tea”, very ordinary pursuits to which Eliot gives a guillotine twist. The first stanza in part II is possibly one of the most disturbing images, the high society lady literally crushing life in her hands. This suggests that she is unfeeling and immoral, however by the last stanza of this section it is revealed that it is the introspective speaker who is selfish and unfeeling. This continues until we get the final stanza the “what if” moment, the she-could-be-dead-and-I-don’t-care revelation. The speaker has failed to have any sort of “feelings [that] would relate”, and as a result of this alienates the reader completely, our sympathy largely falls on the side of the Lady. How does this relate to Prufrock? To me his indecision stems from this lack of emotional depth, the inability to “force a moment to its crisis” is because Prufrock is unable to express his sexual and emotional desires. To me the disintegration of this friendship is the natural progression from his “visions and revisions, before the taking of the toast and tea”. When Prufrock takes the tea and smiles, his indecision has worn him into simple cruelness. Existential crisis (maybe I’m stretching here) has rendered him unable to relate to the world.

Why it’s Poetry:

The atmospheric gloom is in itself a work of art:
“The October night coms down… a slight sensation of being ill at ease”.

London – William Blake

London

By William Blake 1757–1827

I wander thro’ each charter’d street,

Near where the charter’d Thames does flow.

And mark in every face I meet

Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every Man,

In every Infants cry of fear,

In every voice: in every ban,

The mind-forg’d manacles I hear

How the Chimney-sweepers cry

Every blackning Church appalls,

And the hapless Soldiers sigh

Runs in blood down Palace walls

But most thro’ midnight streets I hear

How the youthful Harlots curse

Blasts the new-born Infants tear

And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.

About the Poet:

The least celebrated Romantic in terms of contemporary opinion, Blake is now a crucial part of the English canon. As with all the Romantics, politically Blake is deeply interesting (Shelly (Percy, not his talentless wife) was expelled from Oxford for handing out a pamphlet arguing the benefits of atheism). Blake hated all forms of institution including Religious, Political and Scholarly. Blake also had a deep admiration of Childhood innocence, which he believed was blighted by extra-human experiences (‘Songs of Innocence and Experience’, O.K it’s a fairly obvious point, but it has to be covered). In a similar manner, Blake distrusted marriage and its limitations, seeing it as forcing deep spiritual affection into bonds of mere duty. Such a combinations of radical views had a lasting effect on Blake’s reception by his contemporaries, most of whom thought him deranged.

Form:

This poem’s four quatrains with their strong alternate rhyme scheme seem to imitate a nursery rhyme. Indeed, the general effect of the poem’s simple lexis, metre and repetition (a lot of it thematically implied, “weakness” and “woe”) is a deranged fairy story in the way of Sylvia Plath‘s ‘Daddy‘, with the simple form and structure juxtaposed to the more sinister content.

Some important stuff:

The great poet, Ezra Pound was a great believer in true poetry being that which was constructed around images and their implications (but then, he would be, wouldn’t he), and this is greatly seen in this poem. Syntactically the poem isn’t very complex, it’s almost conversational, in a clerical sort of manner, however it is the connotations of each of Blake’s images which form the meaning of the poem. For example in “mind-forg’d manacles”, there’s a very subtle reference to Rousseau (man is born free. . .), but what is more important is the image the reader creates. Similarly, the “blood down palace walls” and the “blackning church” are damning cries against institutionalism (and, support of the contemporary revolution in France), but also work in providing a set of visceral images for the reader to contemplate. These images beautifully overlap to form a dystopian London, more in line with Blake’s imagination than reality.

Why it’s poetry:

Who doesn’t love an Oxymoron? Especially when it’s provided by the contraction of syphilis… “marriage hearse”.

Holy Sonnet 14 – John Donne

Batter my heart, three-person’d God, for you

As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;

That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend

Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.

I, like an usurp’d town to another due,

Labor to admit you, but oh, to no end;

Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,

But is captiv’d, and proves weak or untrue.

Yet dearly I love you, and would be lov’d fain,

But am betroth’d unto your enemy;

Divorce me, untie or break that knot again,

Take me to you, imprison me, for I,

Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,

Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.About the Poet:
John Donne, the most brilliant of the metaphysicals has, arguably, one the greatest breadths in the history of English Literature. You could canonise him on his love poetry alone (on that note, Elergy: To His Mistress Going to Bed). Possibly the most interesting thing about Donne is that his poetry, and life, are full of paradoxes. The man who spent much of his youth womanising, drinking and gambling grows up to be… the Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral.

Form:

Who doesn’t love a Petrarchan sonnet? Especially one that starts with a stressed syllable, contrary to tradition. Especially one which bucks the trend of presenting highly romanticised love for a woman. Especially one where ‘the turn’ of line 9, means inviting God to… ahem, “ravish” the speaker. I’m just going to come out with the sacrilegious and say that I will, always, always, prefer a Donne Sonnet to a Shakespeare Sonnet.Some Important Stuff:
What has to be remembered is that this poem comes fourteenth in a line of poems which, among other things, detail Donne’s turbulent relationship with God. There’s a lot of retrospective reasoning in all of the Holy Sonnet‘s, but here it is at it’s highest. Why is Donne inviting God to invade and batter his body? Because reason the “viceroy” God gives to us all has gone missing, has been neglected, from Donne’s one man utopia, leaving him “bethroth’d” to the enemy.
More important, however, are those alliterative plosives: “break, blow, burn”, they just sum up the blunt sexualisation of God in this poem, even the cadence of the poem is dripping with it…

Why it’s poetry:

God and the Devil fighting over the conquest of humanity is one thing, fighting over the sexual conquest (albeit it metaphorical) of humanity is another…

Valentine – Owen Sheers

Valentine

The water torture of your heels
emptying before me down that Paris street,
evacuated as the channels of our hearts.

That will be one memory.

The swing of the tassels on your skirt
each step filling out the curve of your hip;
your wet lashes, the loss of everything we’d learnt.

That will be another.

Then later – holding each other on the hotel bed,
like a pair of sunken voyagers
who had thought themselves done for,

only to wake washed up on a shore,
uncertain in their exhaustion,
whether to laugh or weep.

That, my valentine, will be the one I’ll keep.

About the poet:
I didn’t think I’d ever use the phrase: ‘Poet in residence at the Welsh Rugby Union’. Mr Sheers deserves extra brownie points just for that. However, if you remain unconvinced, Sheers’ prolific literary offerings speak from themselves. To date there have been two poetry collections, along with various other projects including the novel Resistance which was adapted into the 2011 film. Sheers’ poetry draws heavily on his welsh heritage, which personally reminds me of everything positive about Hughes’ nature poetry, whilst placing a satisfyingly dark gloss on the entire affair. Oh and, he’s also dangerously attractive.

Form:
Free-verse which seems to stem from Sheers’ opinion of himself as ““quite an instinctive writer, I do a lot of it on the ear.” In fact, reading the poem not only are the words beautiful but it is entirely readable out loud. There are no awkward pauses where an accidental trochee destroys a rhythmic progression, as so often happens in ill-managed free verse. Instead the entire poem is gentle, and follows completely from beginning to end.

Some important stuff:

This is not, obviously, your typical Valentines day poem. In fact, far from being either overtly mushy or horribly self-deprecating, Sheers manages to do both at the same time. The poem is retrospective and almost elegiac in tone, but relies only upon the three powerful images to explain the relationship detailed. In this we get the entire relationship, from the typically cliche days in Paris, the lust of the reader for his subject and, most importantly, the feeling of complete isolation from the rest of the world. The final stanza, one line by itself, is particularly effective as it cuts off the last image, with Sheers’ view of the future, a future that appears to be without his Valentine.

Why it’s poetry:

Sheers literally reinvents a used cliche, and i’m not taking about Valentine’s day. Alone on a desert island is so ridiculously common that you’d think there was nothing else to be said. Except, in his last stanzas… Sheers says something new.

‘The Second Coming’ – W.B Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

About the poet:

Occasionally billed as the bridge between Romanticism and Modernism, Yeats started off writing highly lyrical verses in praise of irish folklore. His turbulent and lengthy relationship (or rather, lack of) with Maud Gonne also produced some of the most original love poetry of the period. Yeats was deeply involved in the Celtic Twilight and the politics leading up to, and following, Irish Independence. The years 1920-1939 produced Yeats’ most thoughtful and mystic poetry, which was often influenced by his indulgence in automatic writing.

Form:
Rough iambic pentameter which is, almost, simply free verse with the occasional heavy stress. Similarly, the rhymes are mostly coincidental half-rhymes such as “man” and “sun”. This makes the poem feel equally hap-hazard and deranged. A sort of inverted Shakespeare, if you like.

A few important things:
The plosives and sibilance in the first stanza create a dense, harsh sounding preamble to Yeats’ argument. It seems as if the speaker is getting carried away with his own opinions, only to be checked by what is (almost) a deeply introspective rhetorical question (!/?, they’re the same thing, really).
Built upon heavy religious imagery and a beautiful reference to Mr. Blake (‘stony sleep’), the poem is endowed with what one Camille Paglia has called a ‘cinematic’ panorama. The poem is like a single voice plucked from ‘The Waste Land‘, but embodying a similar sense of waste, loss and intellectual desolation.

Why it’s poetry:
A rough beast, slouching towards a metaphorical Bethlehem, to wreak a Christian havoc… I rest my case.