LIDIA VIANU

T.S. Eliot - An Author for All Seasons

POETRY

LA FIGLIA CHE PIANGE is a poem whose narrative basis may be inferred from Eliot's subtle use of grammatical moods and tenses. It begins with a request in the imperative:

‘Stand on the highest pavement of the stair –

Lean on a garden urn –

Weave, weave the sunlight in your hair –’

The image of a forsaken girl is called up, leaning on a garden urn, in full sunlight, clasping a bunch of flowers with an air of ‘pained surprise’. The imperative seems to prolong, almost to immortalize her gesture. Then, suddenly, she flings the flowers to the ground, turns with a ‘fugitive resentment’ in her eyes, and the stanza ends with the same caressing, timeless imperative that begs prolongation:

‘But weave, weave the sunlight in your hair’.

The second stanza plunges the serene certainty of the first into the improbable night of a past conditional:

‘So I would have had him leave,

So I would have had her stand and grieve ...’

The poem is one of the very few images of a loved (an lovable) woman Eliot ever produced. The image is not a firm one. This past conditional intimates that reality must have been different: without flowers, without the woman's pain, without sunlight, without beauty. The speaker talks about the pain of an imaginary parting. It would have been as if the soul had left the body ‘torn and bruised’, as if the very mind had deserted the body it had used. It would have ended in suppressed pain, in a ‘light and deft’ way, ‘Simple and faithless as a smile and a shake of the hand’. The pain would have stirred the man's sensibility, enriched his life with a theatrical emotion  The Past Tense of the last stanza replaces, contradicts the sunlit image of the first by simply stating:

‘She turned away’.

The ‘pained surprise’ was not real, then, not shared by the girl. Which may mean it simply did not exist. The pain must have belonged to the speaker only. As he says, her back turned and stepping away (forsaking and not forsaken) in the autumn weather, she ‘compelled’ his imagination ‘many days and many hours’. He is left with a memory that will be taken up in The Waste Land (part I) as the hyacinth girl:

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

This statue-like image (reminiscent of Keats' Ode on a Grecian Urn) is the main point of the poem. All the other lines are speculations massed around it. For a short while, the speaker wonders what would have happened if this parting image had not occurred, if the two had remained together. The answer – a poet's answer – is prompt:

‘I should have lost a gesture and a pose’.

The end of the story is, therefore, the point where the poetic narrative starts. Eliot usually weaves his poems from the last moment backwards. It was the same in Aunt Helen and in Prufrock, and it will be true for many of the narrative kernels in The Waste Land. The same as Robert Browning, though with less obvious narrative pleasure, Eliot chooses a moment of crisis, because his poetry thrives on sadness, pain, hopelessness. The Past Tense melts into the Present, and the past pain becomes the present poem:

‘Sometimes these cogitations still amaze

The troubled midnight and the noon's repose’.

The same as Prufrock, the poem is rather a discreet meditation on love than a love poem. We feel that the poet's interest in the emotion itself is stronger than the lover's interest in a beloved woman.