T. S. Eliot's "Portrait of A Lady"

Taking an ambiguous quotation from Marlowe's play The Jew Of Malta (c. 1590),


Thou hast committed—
Fornication: but that was in another country,
And besides, the wench is dead.


as his point of entry, Eliot of edges his poem edges nervously into its theme of emotional entrapment and evasion with a spineless seven line sentence in which the verb is postponed for six lines and the subject, if you can find it, is more or less smeared across the previous lines. And yet it seems to make sense in an odd sort of way. It is a remarkably accomplished performance:

                                   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 fingertips.

“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 his 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,

I 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-à-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.

I shall sit here, serving tea to friends.”

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—

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 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?

The 'subject' of that first sentence is not grammatical but thematic; it is what the poem is about: the efforts of a lonely, rather pathetic woman of conventionally refined taste to alter the terms of her friendship with a younger man. She wants him to be more than a friend, perhaps a lover; he, knowing perfectly well where she is trying to lead him, wants none of it. So in the first stanza, he understands that the "scene" with its atmosphere of Juliet's tomb only seems to have arranged itself; this is a set-up: he is to be the Romeo who will enter just as Juliet wakes up and take her in his arms. That, if you remember the play, is how it was supposed to happen but didn't.

Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy of innocence: 

"What's in a name?" asks Juliet innocently, as if names don't matter: Romeo and Juliet

 think they can escape the deadly history of their families, leave it all behind, and live their own lives. Everything that could possibly go wrong, goes wrong.

There's nothing tragic about Portrait Of A Lady—or comic, for that matter; it's the sad little story of a hollow, heartless man who is too knowing for his own or anyone else's good.

He subtly mocks his 'friend', right from the beginning: 

We have been, let us say, to hear the latest Pole

Transmit the Preludes, through his hair and fingertips."

But she does leave herself open to mockery:

“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."

"Velleities" are wishes that are never acted upon: this is a woman, as the man critically appraises her, who is too weak to break out of the comfortable routine in which she has established herself. All she knows how to do is gush about music, friendships, the fragmentary nature of life, and serve tea to friends. He's heard it all before; her voice reminds him of the "attenuated tones of violins, mingled with remote cornets."

This time, his inner self rebels, and the cornets sound as if they've got cracks in them:

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.

—Oh for an ordinary life of odds and ends, he thinks. But his rebellion is not final; he keeps coming back for more. In Part II he gets more than he had bargained for: what we would call today a guilt-trip, which leaves him speechless: 

I take my hat: how can I make a cowardly amends

For what she has said to me?"

And that, you would think, is the end of that. The following lines have the sound of finality: "You will see me any morning in the park . . . . I remain self-possessed . . ." which indeed is what's wrong with him: he is too self-possessed, too self-enclosed for friendship or love. Or anything: this is a man who who doesn't have anything better to do than sit in the park and idly scan the newspapers for the latest gossip or the latest scandals.

The sound of some old street piano, "mechanical and tired," reiterating some worn-out common song, and the smell of hyacinths "across the garden" (whose?) reminds him of things that other people have desired—and, presumably, made some effort to obtain. So that supercilious word, "velleities" comes back to bite him. "Are these ideas right or wrong?" he wonders, missing the point: he hasn't been talking about ideas but feeling and emotions. Ideas can be, arguably, right or wrong, but feelings and emotions are things that you may or may not have; or, as in his case, have been trying to avoid.

Six months later with, surprisingly, only a slight sensation of being ill at ease he returns—he has come,

 it seems, to say goodbye—and discovers that what he really feels is humiliation as well as guilt and confusion. His smile falls heavily "among the bric-a-brac" and he sees himself with his shit-eating smile for the first time as his self-possession "gutters" like a burnt-out candle-end. They are both, as he acknowledges for the first time, "in the dark." For a moment, seeing himself as the futile, empty person that he has allowed himself to become, he tries to dehumanize himself: 

And I must borrow every changing shape

To find expression ... dance, dance

Like a dancing bear,

Cry like a parrot, chatter like an ape.

And, it may be that he succeeds:   

Well! and what if she should die some afternoon,

Afternoon grey and smoky, evening yellow and rose,

he says, carelessly, clearly more interested in the picturesque qualities of the day than the woman whose death he is imagining. But as usual, there is something about this person, unremarkable as she is, that won't let him alone, and we know why: she is, for all her little clichés, more of a person than he is and he knows it. It may be that, unremarkable as they are, they were made for each other.

He has pretensions to being a writer, perhaps (or maybe he is at last getting round to that letter he had promised her) which is what he imagines himself to be doing when he gets the news of her (imagined) death, to which he responds—imaginatively— in all the wrong ways: not by having feelings but by talking, irrelevantly, about the feelings that he doesn't have.

This poem clearly belongs with that titannic panorama of waste, futility, emptiness and despair, The Waste Land.

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

 "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", is not a love song, or even a song, by a man with a name that could not possibly be confused with the name of the poet. It seems to be an account  a visit to a tea-party or salon where upper-class women like to talk about the arts in general and Michelangelo in particular.  It is a visit which may or may not take place, and consists of a meditation on that subject which may or may not come to a conclusion.

We stumble over uncertainties before we even get to the poem and Prufrock's invitation, "Let us go then, you and I . . ." A quotation in Italian, unidentified—it turns out it's from the 27th canto of Dante's Inferno—blocks our way. Here it is in English:

"If I thought that my response [to Dante's question about who he is and why he is in hell] would be addressed to one who might go back alive, this flame would shake no more [i.e. he'd say no more]; but since no one ever goes back alive out of these deeps (if what I hear be true), without fear of infamy I answer you."

His name, as we may learn (elsewhere), is Guido da Montifeltro, and he is—or was—actually proud of the skills that made him famous, and landed him in this place:

"The machinations and the covert ways

I knew them all, and practised so their craft,

That to the ends of the earth the sound went forth."

Why is he in hell? On a technicality: he had repented of his Machiavellian machinations but had been lured out of retirement by a Pope who needed his help and told him that, as it was in a good cause, he'd be forgiven. Which was a lie.

So, right away, we're likely to be confused before we even begin to read—depending on how assiduously we follow up the little 'hint' that Eliot has offered us. Prufrock may be in a sort of social and emotional hell, not because of anything he has done but because of what he is: a more intelligent and cultured individual than any of the people who are likely, as he fears, to put him down—and because he doesn't have any other place to go, no one else to talk to. The fatuity of the talky-talk that he knows he'll have to listen to is perfectly caught by the lines (which will be repeated a couple dozen lines later):

In the room the women come and go

Talking of Michelangelo.

And what of the men? Surely there must be some. But it's the women who do all the talking.

"Let us go then, you and I," he says (emphasis mine), as if there were something about this invitation that might naturally follow from those lines from Dante. So, of course, we read on and quickly find ourselves in a bizarre cityscape: an evening spread out across the sky like a patient on an operating table being prepared for surgery (which may be how Prufrock sees himself) and a maze of sleazy streets in a lower-class part of town which seem to be part of a conspiracy:

Streets that follow like a tedious argument

Of insidious intent

To lead you to an overwhelming question.

Anticipating our natural desire to know what he is talking about, he brushes us off:

Oh, do not ask, "What is it?"

Let us go and make our visit.

It is soon clear—it may be the only clarity—that Prufrock has something important that he has been wanting to say: "an overwhelming question" of his own that he is in no hurry to ask. "And indeed there will be time" he says—twice—as he tries to get up his nerve. "Do I dare to disturb the universe?" Here he is being ironic: the only universe he has ever known is the universe taken for granted by his social set, which he knows so well that he can predict with meticulous accuracy how it will respond to anything that disturbs its routine or forces it to confront disagreeable facts.

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 . . . .

And I have known the eyes already, known them all—

The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,

And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,

When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,

Then how should I begin

To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?

Whatever the question agitating this man, it has nothing to do with love; this is a man who is dying of boredom; and while he wants more than anything to make a different life for himself, he has no idea how  to go about it.

Suppose he were to talk about a moment of insight into the ordinary lives of ordinary people:

Should I say that I have gone at dusk through narrow streets

And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes

Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? . . .

I should have been a pair of ragged claws

Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

Obviously, it's going to take more than that to shake up these people; and he is afraid. Suppose, he thinks, I were to ask them a really overwhelming question. Suppose I were

To say:

 "I am Lazarus, come from the dead, 

Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all—

The trouble with that gambit is two-fold: he doesn’t know what Lazarus might actually say and he  hasn't even begun to about what comes next: so what? And even if he knew how that question ought to be handled, it wouldn't make any difference; he knows exactly how anything he might want to say would be received:

That is not it at all,

That is not what I meant at all.

For all his feelings of inadequacy, however, Prufrock really does have something to say and he finally says it, beautifully and forcefully, with stunning conviction, in the last six lines of the poem—but not to those arty society women who would have laughed in his face. (It’s not just anyone who gets to see memaids riding the waves and “singing each to each.” He is pretty sure they would not sing to him but so what? They wouldn’t sing to those silly women either).

I have seen them  riding seaward on the waves

Combing the white hair of the waves blown back

When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea

By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown

Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

Prufrock, to his credit, is such a human voice, trying to figure out how—however ineffectually—to wake up a complacent society before it's too late and it dies in the airless, life-less chambers it has constructed for itself—so remote from the real human world they might as well be at the bottom of the sea. It should have been clear, even in 1910, which was when Eliot began writing this poem, that a genteel, privileged society that knows nothing of life on the other side of the tracks, in the mean streets,

The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster shells


could not long survive in the violent new world that was evidently about to be born.