La Figlia Che Piange (The Weeping Girl) Analysis

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 a 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.

.: :.

In this poem, Eliot's narrator (a poet figure) ponders (perhaps a bit guiltily) the tension between his memory of a distraught, crying girl he once encountered and his feelings about the aestheticized image of her that he has since rendered in poetry.
In the first stanza, Eliot uses the imperative form of direct address, as though speaking to the girl. "Yes," the narrator is essentially saying, "Do show me all these bodily signs of your distress, but above all let the sunlight fall upon your hair just so, to preserve the aesthetic moment I am now capturing/creating." In the second stanza, the narrator perversely states that if he had had his way, the departing male lover would have left the girl broken just as badly and irrevocably as the soul/mind leaves a broken, twisted corpse, further (and more sadistically) sexualizing the metaphor with the image of a body that has been "used" and discarded like the proverbial used Kleenex. In the last stanza, the poet/narrator remarks that the image of the girl still haunts him, long after the event itself. He expresses ambiguous feelings (if not some measure of guilt) over his appropriation of the girl's misery. On one hand, he is satisfied, saying that if the couple hadn't broken up in this way, he never would have had the opportunity to aestheticize this "gesture and...pose" in poetry. On the other hand, the last two lines state that the narrator is still troubled by the idea that his poetic triumph came at the cost of his compassion.
Compare this poem with Baudelaire's "The Red-Haired Beggar Girl," another poem with a detatched, aloof poet-narrator.

| Posted on 2008-09-22 | by a guest