Thank you. This is definitely the best reading of this poem I've found. It's a poem I've read many times (since Eliot was my Junior Poet project poet at UD) but never really felt I had a firm footing in. Many of the Prufock poems are like that for me. Eliot isn't an easy poet.
Your reading feels true and right to me. The idea of him curating the scene, or trying to and failing... that feels right.
I love the anecdote about the unfound stele too. I've never heard that.
I'm not quite sure why, I've always thought of the image of the girl in this poem as being somehow connected to, or maybe reworked into, the hyacinth girl in The Waste Land:
"‘You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;
‘They called me the hyacinth girl.’
—Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
Oed’ und leer das Meer."
I suppose both have a girl holding flowers and both have an impotent viewer "taking her portrait" and both have a sense of futility.
I'm indebted to David Sutton, whose blog post I linked in the piece, for the bit about the stele, which I hadn't known, either. Pretty fascinating, and seems very much in character!
That's a good thought, too, about the Hyacinth Girl.
Thanks for reminding me to go click on the link to Sutton's piece. I forgot about it as I switched from reading this piece on my phone in the dentist's office to writing a comment on my laptop when I got home.
I also like the question Sutton asks here "So is Eliot’s too a poem about preferring the exquisite potentiality of a relationship to the complex and demanding actuality?" That feels pretty on the nose for Eliot during the Prufrock and Other Observations phase of his career.
I've generally preferred the later Eliot to the earlier. Though Prufrock itself will always have a special place in my heart as the first Eliot poem I encountered. And also as it was the occasion of my forming one of the most influential friendships of my high school career as the two of us bonded over our delight at the poem, which was in turn new and odd, surprising and breathtaking and also absolutely lovely.
Much to think about in your reflections on curates and curating! The curated woman (endlessly weaving the sunlight into her hair) also reminds me of the Pre-Raphaelite painters with their yearning for classical harmony - maybe Eliot could have looked closer to home for his image, not sure if I can post the picture I'm thinking of: Daniel Gabriel Rossetti's Lady Lilith. She's not leaning on an urn, but she is leaning, and musing on something. And being a muse of sorts.
Oh, yes. Though I think the Pre-Raphaelites would have been right out for the Modernists --- they were rejecting Victorianism and all its works pretty hard. BUT I think you're right that Eliot is, on some levels, whether he wants to be or not, doing much the same thing.
True, they probably would have scorned each other, and I hesitate to suggest their affinity. But time passes, and the narrative is not in their control, and (at least here) Eliot seems to share with the Pre-Raphaelites, "a gesture and a pose..."
Thank you for your explication of a poem I find hard to understand and hard to like. Perhaps understanding will bring affection, though usually for me it happens the other way round.
I know that all poems are contrivances in a way, but this one seems particularly contrived, unlike "Prufrock." However, I may be confessing my own inadequacy, not the poem's.
No, I think you're right, though I also think that that sense of contrivance is part of the point. Whether it makes for a sympathetic poem is a whole nother question.
Thank you. This is definitely the best reading of this poem I've found. It's a poem I've read many times (since Eliot was my Junior Poet project poet at UD) but never really felt I had a firm footing in. Many of the Prufock poems are like that for me. Eliot isn't an easy poet.
Your reading feels true and right to me. The idea of him curating the scene, or trying to and failing... that feels right.
I love the anecdote about the unfound stele too. I've never heard that.
I'm not quite sure why, I've always thought of the image of the girl in this poem as being somehow connected to, or maybe reworked into, the hyacinth girl in The Waste Land:
"‘You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;
‘They called me the hyacinth girl.’
—Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
Oed’ und leer das Meer."
I suppose both have a girl holding flowers and both have an impotent viewer "taking her portrait" and both have a sense of futility.
I'm indebted to David Sutton, whose blog post I linked in the piece, for the bit about the stele, which I hadn't known, either. Pretty fascinating, and seems very much in character!
That's a good thought, too, about the Hyacinth Girl.
Thanks for reminding me to go click on the link to Sutton's piece. I forgot about it as I switched from reading this piece on my phone in the dentist's office to writing a comment on my laptop when I got home.
I also like the question Sutton asks here "So is Eliot’s too a poem about preferring the exquisite potentiality of a relationship to the complex and demanding actuality?" That feels pretty on the nose for Eliot during the Prufrock and Other Observations phase of his career.
I've generally preferred the later Eliot to the earlier. Though Prufrock itself will always have a special place in my heart as the first Eliot poem I encountered. And also as it was the occasion of my forming one of the most influential friendships of my high school career as the two of us bonded over our delight at the poem, which was in turn new and odd, surprising and breathtaking and also absolutely lovely.
Much to think about in your reflections on curates and curating! The curated woman (endlessly weaving the sunlight into her hair) also reminds me of the Pre-Raphaelite painters with their yearning for classical harmony - maybe Eliot could have looked closer to home for his image, not sure if I can post the picture I'm thinking of: Daniel Gabriel Rossetti's Lady Lilith. She's not leaning on an urn, but she is leaning, and musing on something. And being a muse of sorts.
<img src="https://news.artnet.com/app/news-upload/2023/05/Lady-Lilith-884x1024.jpg" alt="Dante Gabriel Rossetti's 'Lady Lilith' Was an Infamous ..."/>
Oh, yes. Though I think the Pre-Raphaelites would have been right out for the Modernists --- they were rejecting Victorianism and all its works pretty hard. BUT I think you're right that Eliot is, on some levels, whether he wants to be or not, doing much the same thing.
True, they probably would have scorned each other, and I hesitate to suggest their affinity. But time passes, and the narrative is not in their control, and (at least here) Eliot seems to share with the Pre-Raphaelites, "a gesture and a pose..."
Hindsight definitely affords us a view of patterns that might not have been evident at all to the people involved in them.
Thank you for your explication of a poem I find hard to understand and hard to like. Perhaps understanding will bring affection, though usually for me it happens the other way round.
Well, it is a weird poem! I struggle to make real sense of it myself, and this is just a stab . . .
I know that all poems are contrivances in a way, but this one seems particularly contrived, unlike "Prufrock." However, I may be confessing my own inadequacy, not the poem's.
No, I think you're right, though I also think that that sense of contrivance is part of the point. Whether it makes for a sympathetic poem is a whole nother question.