LIDIA VIANU

T.S. Eliot - An Author for All Seasons

POETRY

In PORTRAIT OF A LADY the music of words is as carefully arranged as in Prufrock. The rugged tune of The Waste Land is not yet in sight. The narrative thread, on the other hand, is somewhat more obvious. The poem is no longer the story of a life. It relates a short-lived relationship between the speaker (a young man) and a middle-aged woman who talks nostalgically about her ‘spring’. The same as Prufrock, this poem reveals two worlds, two meanings: one real and one unreal, unuttered, only guessed at. The unuttered, hidden landscape is, this time, grim. It binds together all the real episodes, the same as in Prufrock, only it has nothing to do with an aspiration. It is a fierce menace. Prufrock is the poem of a secret wish. Portrait of a Lady is the poem of an inexpressible fear. Both are too intense and personal to be directly stated, and both are, because of that, stifled.

The poem begins on a December afternoon, still, smoky and foggy (the feeling is not new for Eliot), in a woman's room. From the very first lines, the image of the woman is associated with premonitions of death. She has lit only four candles, so the room is ‘darkened’. To the hero of the poem, instead of intimate (as it was meant to be), the atmosphere of this room looks like Juliet's tomb. They have been to a concert, and the woman speaks of Chopin's soul being ‘resurrected’ in the interpretation of his music. The second part of the poem takes place during the following spring, presumably. ‘Lilacs are in bloom’, and she ‘twists one in her fingers while she talks’. The woman speaks of life that flows, and, all along, she herself keeps fingering a dead flower. The romantic effect of her pose is missed. In the eyes of the (really young) man she is lecturing, she looks grotesque. Spring makes her remember her past ‘buried life’. However, she claims that she feels ‘at peace’ and ‘youthful, after all’, that is in spite of her advancing age. She feels as if she were on the edge of a precipice, and professes to know for sure that, ‘across the gulf’, the young man in the poem holds out his hand to reach her. She describes herself as someone at ‘her journey's end’. The poem ends on an October night. The young man has come to say good bye before going abroad. She asks him when he will return, then sadly muses (as a warning, in a way):

‘But our beginnings never know our ends!’

All through the poem, she has obsessively repeated the word ‘friendship’. In the end, it seems that she has not got what she wanted. She feels frustrated because this ‘friendship’ has remained a mere word, and she concludes (in two lines whose obvious rhyme is devastatingly ironical):

'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 fate.

You will write, at any rate.

Perhaps it is not too late'.

The same ironical effect of the noisy rhyme was used in Prufrock (‘the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo’). The poet's intention was as bitter there as it is here. Some rhymes, thus, turn into poison in Eliot's early poetry.

Although by this time the woman in the poem has grown into the very image of imminent death, paradoxically, the person who really speaks of death, who seems to experience its horror in advance, is the young man. His mood develops from mere irritation to disturbing panic. At first, he merely notices the artificiality of the woman's behaviour. He seems to see through her, to understand exactly what she wants from him. He even feels guilty as if he had already refused what in fact she will never dare ask. Eliot's poem, again, is not the story of a failed love affair. There is a hidden meaning to it that goes a long way beyond love, beyond ‘friendship’, beyond all words, beyond life itself as a matter of fact.

At first, the young man feels a ‘tom-tom’ absurdly ‘hammering’ in his mind, while the woman tells him how much her friends mean to her. The predictability of the rhymes in the lines she utters renders them even more ridiculously artificial, unbelievable:

'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 ...'

The young man runs away from the woman's high-browed remarks by breathing deeply (‘Let us take the air, in a tobacco trance’) repeatedly, and he takes refuge in opposite, common-place acts: admiring monuments, discussing recent events, correcting his watch by the public clock (a symbol of time that Eliot never abandons), drinking his beer. Next, his awkward feeling is accompanied by a smile. The woman slowly twists the dead lilac stalk in her hand and is lecturing him on life with the same embarrassingly childish rhymes:

 'Ah, my friend, you do not know, you do not know

What life is, you who hold it in your hands; (...)

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' .

The young man smiles ‘of course’, and refuses to see the tragedy behind the woman's words. Her voice ‘returns like an insistent out-of-tune / Of a broken violin’, driving him mad. He imagines himself seated in a park, reading the ‘comics or the sporting page’, paying more attention to a countess who ‘goes upon the stage’ or to a bank defaulter’s confession than to the real woman in front of him. he feels guilty, although he does not see clearly why, and his smile grows heavier and heavier until, towards the end of the poem, when he comes to announce his departure, he feels as if he had mounted the stairs on his ‘hands and knees’. He also feels like one who has just seen his own smiling face in a mirror, and the image looked frighteningly unfamiliar to him. Like the grin of a skeleton, almost. His self-possession ‘gutters’, he feels ‘in the dark’.

The woman has gradually dragged him out of his easy going irritation, into a deep fear. He is unable to do or say anything about it. An unseen pressure weighs him down. He wriggles:

‘And I must borrow every changing shape

To 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 –’

He imagines that she wants him to write letters to her so that, if she should die ‘some afternoon’, he might find himself ‘sitting pen in hand’, writing to no one. Stretching his hand towards the dreaded beyond. Feelings of loneliness, of fugitive time, of deep uncertainty burst in upon him. The inexpressible significance of the poem lies in this very horror finally inspired to the young man by what the woman (whose portrait he will never be able to draw) was the first to see. Eliot tries to stifle the dread by ending jokingly:

‘Now that we talk of dying –

And should I have the right to smile?’

Nevertheless, the image of the woman has been replaced by that of death. A portrait of a lady?..