Today’s Poem: La Figlia che Piange

T.S. Eliot: curation and cure for the modern soul

Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, Venus Appearing to Aeneas, 1757 (Wikimedia Commons)

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La Figlia che Piange 

by T. S. Eliot 

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. 

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In his first book of poems, the 1917 Prufrock and Other Observations, T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) dwells on the familiar desire to curate our lives, to make them larger, more meaningful, more beautiful than they are. If we recoil a little from that overused verb, curate — applied these days to everything from Spotify playlists to food-and-drink pairings at wine dinners — we should remind ourselves that that very overuse speaks to the rootedness of the human impulse to arrange things for presentation. “Observations” is an apt word for this collection of poems, whose speakers experience, observe themselves experiencing, and try to order both the experiences and the acts of observation.

But  it’s also interesting to note the connection to the noun, curate, or priest, one who has the keeping or “cure” of souls. In England the word eventually came to connote the raw, nervous assistant to the vicar. The curate, if not the vicar, could be terrorized by dragons of the altar guild. With the curate, if not the vicar, the young ladies of the parish might be hopefully, though decorously, in love. Be that as it may, the word derives from the Latin verb curare, which simply means “to take care of.” The “cure” of souls is the care of them. 

In these early poems of Eliot’s, curate might well apply in both senses, the noun as well as the verb. Or to put it another way, Eliot’s most emblematic speakers seek to arrange, examine, and present the particulars of human experience on an aesthetic level. But they also seek to arrange things in a more transcendent, spiritual sense, hoping rather than believing that in order they may find some larger validation. They are the anxious curates of a disappointingly banal modern world. 

T.S. Eliot in a 1920 snapshot by Lady Ottoline Morrell (Wikimedia Commons)

From the first line of the title poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” which opens the book, Eliot’s persona speaks himself into being as two people, “you and I.” He is at once the person living and the person watching himself live, the observer who tries to discover, or impose, some pattern, motif, or thread of significance in, or on, the randomness of his experiences.

If he is the raw-nerve curator of these experiences, he is also the raw-nerve curate, charged with organizing some particularly depressing existential fête, in a gritty parish, the city of unbelief, while he suffers his own simultaneous crises of faith and confidence. Famously, the poem ends in his own spiritual impotence and his failure to reconcile the material cosmos with something beyond itself. “I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. / I do not think that they will sing to me.” 

The collection closes with a similar impulse, in “La Figlia che Piange,” or “Young Girl Weeping.” Today’s Poem, as the English poet David Sutton has noted, is an ekphrastic poem of sorts, its title alluding to a possibly non-existent ancient stele, or stone tablet. Eliot apparently went looking for this stele in an Italian museum, but never found it. This failure may provide us with one way into understanding the poem, in which reality is called upon to imitate art, but does not do so.

Here we move from the filthy London streets to an otherworldly Italian garden, setting for a weirdly ambiguous leavetaking. In the poem’s epigraph, Aeneas addresses his mother, Aphrodite, disguised as a huntress. Because he doesn’t recognize her as his mother, he asks her, “O, how should I call you, virgin?”

This line makes a perplexing frame for a poem recounting a romantic breakup, the kind of event that in real life all too seldom achieves aesthetic perfection, but consists of sullen silences, storms of ugly crying, and zingy ripostes thought of too late. What the epigraph signals may simply be that people — in this case, women — are not always as they seem.

But it also signals the complex flight of fantasy in which the poem’s speaker indulges himself. On one level, he imagines himself as an Aeneas figure, larger than life, heroic, but — inescapably — also the kind of person who flees Carthage and abandons Dido to self-destruction. If the young girl he addresses isn’t the fair virgin he thought she was, he doesn’t come off all that nobly, either.

On another level, he imagines himself in the role of an Aeneas-like figure. He isn’t Aeneas, but he plays him, or tries to, in this poem. At the same time, re-enacting the essential human fantasy, he figures himself also as the artist composing the scene for presentation, telling the female model how to stand, hold her flowers, arrange her face. But even this moment, when he imagines himself running the world, slips away from him even as it happens.

He curates the elements of his composition, ordering them in what he hopes, painfully, will prove to be an aesthetically satisfying way. Of course it doesn’t come together as he had hoped. “So I would have had him leave. / So I would have had her stand and grieve.” He attempts, too, in the manner of a curate, to invest these events with, or to wrest from them, some transcendent meaning. Again his failure haunts him. He can make it pretty, maybe. He can’t make it not banal.

We’d all like to say goodbye the way they do in art, but then we generally don’t get to compose our own lives. We’d all like, for that matter, for events in the primal garden of the Book of Genesis to have gone differently, or for the few heroes who survived the Trojan War to have conducted themselves ever afterward with heroic virtue. We’d like for our history to have been more dignified, more exalted, less ruptured and sordid. As members of the human race, we’d like to come off better than we do. 

So Eliot’s speaker would have composed this scene, with its irregular stanzas and meters, venturing out from and returning to the safety of pentameter, and its shifting patterns of rhyme. In the end, he is haunted by the art, and the transcendence, that he might have wrung from life but didn’t. “Sometimes these cogitations still amaze / The troubled moonlight and the noon’s repose.”

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