T. S. Eliot: "La Figlia Che Piange"

   La Figlia Che Piange

O quam te memorem virgo…

STAND on the highest pavement of the stair—

Lean on a garden urn—

Weave, weave the sunlight in your hair—

Clasp your flowers to you with a pained surprise—

Fling them to the ground and turn

        

With a fugitive resentment in your eyes:

But weave, weave the sunlight in your hair.

So I would have had him leave,

So I would have had her stand and grieve,

So he would have left

        

As the soul leaves the body torn and bruised,

As the mind deserts the body it has used.

I should find

Some way incomparably light and deft,

Some way we both should understand,

        

Simple and faithless as a smile and shake of the hand.

She turned away, but with the autumn weather

Compelled my imagination many days,

Many days and many hours:

Her hair over her arms and her arms full of flowers.

        

And I wonder how they should have been together!

I should have lost a gesture and a pose.

Sometimes these cogitations still amaze

The troubled midnight and the noon’s repose.

This poem, like “Portrait Of A Lady,” exemplifies (perhaps in a way that Eliot did not intend) his claim in “Tradition And The Individual Talent” that poetry “is not a turning loose of emotion but an escape from emotion.” Emotion is what the speaker in “Portrait” wants to escape from at any price, and the price is high:  he becomes a heartless and diminished prig.

Something similar occurs (if it hasn’t already done so) in “La Figlia Che Piange” (“The Weeping Girl”—which, like “Portrait,” is provided with an ambiguous epigraph to stumble over: when Virgil, In the Aeneid, makes his obligatory descent to Hades (a precedent established by Homer’s Odysseus in the Odyssey) he meets Aphrodite disguised as a huntress and asks her, “O maiden, by what name should I address you?”—knowing all the while exactly who she is. 

The disingenuousness of the epigraph carries over into the poem which begins with a scene which is not really being staged, as the various imperatives might lead one to think. Those imperatives are ironic: what we are really observing is a scene of cruel mockery in which the speaker, by ironically pretending to instruct the girl how to perform her scene, and ironically pretending to admire her performance, is doing his best to destroy her. 

Or rather, as lines 8-12 seem to suggest, that is how the speaker might have liked to handle this break-up. But it is hard to be clear about Eliot’s use of the subjunctive, “should”, in line 13:

I should find

Some way incomparably light and deft,

Some way we both should understand,

        

Simple and faithless as a smile and shake of the hand.

In other words, keep it simple? Which, evidently is how they handle it.

The faithlessness, however, is all his—as she perfectly understands.

She turned away, but with the autumn weather

Compelled my imagination many days,

Many days and many hours:

Her hair over her arms and her arms full of flowers.

She, however—the person that she is, whom he at least pretended to care for—is not what compells his imagination, but her estheticized image, “with her hair over her arms and her arms full of flowers.” 

The last stanza returns to the oddly evasive use of the subjunctive, ‘should’, which we have already noticed in line 13:

Her hair over her arms and her arms full of flowers.

        

And I wonder how they should have been together!

I should have lost a gesture and a pose.

Sometimes these cogitations still amaze

The troubled midnight and the noon’s repose.

What it all come down to, seemingly, is his wonderment at this last image of this girl, with her hair over he arms and her arms full of flowers, which is the only memory of her that he values. “How lucky I am that these things should have come to together so perfectly; I should, otherwise, have lost a beautiful gesture and a beautiful pose.” The last two lines, however, hint at deeper cogitations and more troubled midnights than he has heretofore admitted to.