Monthly Archives: September 2021

Week 465: La Figlia Che Piange, by T.S.Eliot

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Richard Dawkins mocked certain evolutionary naysayers for deploying what he called ‘the argument from personal incredulity’. With this in mind, I am always reluctant to criticise a literary work using what might be called ‘the argument from personal stupidity’: ‘I don’t understand this poem therefore there is something wrong with it’. And indeed there are things about this piece that I much admire, especially the hauntingly melodious third stanza. I just can’t help wishing that the poet had made it a bit clearer what is actually going on here and why.

To deal first with the title and the epigraph. ‘La Figlia Che Piange’ (The Woman Who Weeps’) is the name of a stele that Eliot once went to look for in an Italian museum. He never found the tablet, which sets the tone for the poem’s mood of aesthetic detachment: this is a construction of what might have been rather than a reconstruction of what was. This sense of unreality is reinforced by the epigraph ‘O quam te memorem virgo’ (‘Maiden, by what name shall I address you?’), which is from Virgil’s ‘Aeneid’, from the scene where Aeneas meets, unbeknown to him, the goddess Venus disguised as a huntress.

So the poet sees, or imagines, a woman standing at the top of a flight of stone steps. There is something ethereal about her, a creature like the sunlight that he enjoins her to weave into her hair. At first she is holding a bunch of flowers, and he tells her to clasp these to her, but then changes his mind and imagines her throwing them to the ground, presumably in a fit of pique which goes with her pained surprise and the ‘fugitive resentment’ in her eyes.

The pique and resentment are explained in the second stanza, in which the poet pictures a parting between this woman and a man whom one assumes to be her lover. There is a curious shift within the stanza from third to first person, as if the poet were having difficulty in admitting to himself that he is himself the lover and the one doing the imaginary dumping in this imaginary relationship. I don’t know why the woman’s resentment is described as ‘fugitive’, unless the implication is that the woman will soon have other admirers and will forget him

The third stanza is then one of regret for that parting. Imaginary the whole encounter may have been, but at some level of memory or dream the poet has made a choice, and that choice comes back to haunt him with a sense of perennial loss. I wonder if there is a parallel here with Edward Thomas’s poem ‘That Girl’s Clear Eyes’ where the poet has a transient encounter with a woman that comes to nothing, but then confesses that all he wanted anyway was to savour the moment without any actual human involvement: ‘Nor until now could I admit/That all I cared for was the pleasure and pain/I tasted in the stony square sunlit…’ So is Eliot’s too a poem about preferring the exquisite potentiality of a relationship to the complex and demanding actuality?

This is all a bit rarefied for my taste, and so it is that for all its fine touches I find, as so often with Eliot’s work, that there is something posed and artificial about the piece, such that it remains for me a poem under glass, that I can admire intellectually but not engage with emotionally. It would be interesting to know what others make of it.

La Figlia Che Piange

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.

T.S.Eliot

Week 464: The Dover Bitch, by Anthony Hecht

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I feel that there must be a single word term for this kind of irreverent gloss or counter-poem, but for the moment I can’t bring one to mind. You cannot, I think, call it a parody. A good parody works by close imitation, so close that you could almost think you were reading an original work by the target author, just giving the game away by the subtlest of exaggerations, the most innocent-looking of stumbles. Think, for example, of Henry Reed’s parody of T.S.Eliot, ‘Chard Whitlow’, of Chesterton’s versions of Yeats and Whitman, of Max Beerbohm’s take-offs of Henry James and Arnold Bennett, of Hugh Kingsmill’s A.E.Housman.

In contrast, Hecht’s poem is in tone and style nothing like Matthew Arnold’s celebrated Victorian poem ‘Dover Beach’, about the ebbing tide of faith and the loss of the old certainties. It is not even clear to me whether Hecht dislikes Arnold’s poem and finds in it a pomposity that needs puncturing, or whether he feels that high-mindedness is all very well but sometimes a bit of low-mindedness doesn’t come amiss either, or whether he is just having a bit of fun. In any event, I do find the poem good fun, and of course Arnold’s original remains a powerful piece well able to take the hit and sail on.

The Dover Bitch

So there stood Matthew Arnold and this girl
With the cliffs of England crumbling away behind them,
And he said to her, ‘Try to be true to me,
And I’ll do the same for you, for things are bad
All over, etc., etc.’
Well now, I knew this girl. It’s true she had read
Sophocles in a fairly good translation
And caught that bitter allusion to the sea,
But all the time he was talking she had in mind
The notion of what his whiskers would feel like
On the back of her neck. She told me later on
That after a while she got to looking out
At the lights across the channel, and really felt sad,
Thinking of all the wine and enormous beds
And blandishments in French and the perfumes.
And then she got really angry. To have been brought
All the way down from London , and then be addressed
As a sort of mournful cosmic last resort
Is really tough on a girl, and she was pretty.
Anyway, she watched him pace the room
And finger his watch-chain and seem to sweat a bit,
And then she said one or two unprintable things.
But you mustn’t judge her by that. What I mean to say is,
She’s really all right. I still see her once in a while
And she always treats me right. We have a drink
And I give her a good time, and perhaps it’s a year
Before I see her again, but there she is,
Running to fat, but dependable as they come.
And sometimes I bring her a bottle of Nuit d’ Amour.

Anthony Hecht

Week 463: Under The Waterfall, by Thomas Hardy

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Bit of an odd one this week. On the face of it this is a rather decorous, even slightly naïve poem about two Victorian lovers enjoying a picnic by a waterfall, yet it portrays the event with a sensuous precision that borders on the erotic, and while the last thing I would want to do is get all Freudian about a beautiful poem, I can’t help wondering if Hardy, with a knowing twinkle in his not-so-innocent Victorian eye, was not well aware of certain symbolic possibilities in the poem. This is after all the man who in ‘Far From The Madding Crowd’ gives us such a dazzling account of Sergeant Troy’s swordplay in ‘the hollow amid the ferns’. But never mind all that: as always with Hardy, any other theme is subordinate to the passage of time, the transience of human happiness and the bittersweetness of memory.

Under the Waterfall

‘Whenever I plunge my arm, like this,
In a basin of water, I never miss
The sweet sharp sense of a fugitive day
Fetched back from its thickening shroud of gray.
      Hence the only prime
      And real love-rhyme
      That I know by heart,
      And that leaves no smart,
Is the purl of a little valley fall
About three spans wide and two spans tall
Over a table of solid rock,
And into a scoop of the self-same block;
The purl of a runlet that never ceases
In stir of kingdoms, in wars, in peaces;
With a hollow boiling voice it speaks
And has spoken since hills were turfless peaks.’
‘And why gives this the only prime
Idea to you of a real love-rhyme?
And why does plunging your arm in a bowl
Full of spring water, bring throbs to your soul?’

‘Well, under the fall, in a crease of the stone,
Though where precisely none ever has known,
Jammed darkly, nothing to show how prized,
And by now with its smoothness opalized,
      Is a drinking-glass:
      For, down that pass
      My lover and I
      Walked under a sky
Of blue with a leaf-wove awning of green,
In the burn of August, to paint the scene,
And we placed our basket of fruit and wine
On the runlet’s rim, where we sat to dine;
And when we had drunk from the glass together,
Arched by the oak-copse from the weather,
I held the vessel to rinse in the fall,
Where it slipped, and sank, and was past recall,
Though we stooped and plumbed the little abyss
With long bared arms. There the glass still is.
And, as said, if I thrust my arm below
Cold water in basin or bowl, a throe
From the past awakens a sense of that time,
And the glass both used, and the cascade’s rhyme.
The basin seems the pool, and its edge
The hard smooth face of the brook-side ledge,
And the leafy pattern of china-ware
The hanging plants that were bathing there.

‘By night, by day, when it shines or lours,
There lies intact that chalice of ours,
And its presence adds to the rhyme of love
Persistently sung by the fall above.
No lip has touched it since his and mine
In turns therefrom sipped lovers’ wine.’

Thomas Hardy

Week 462: The Burial of the Old, by Wendell Berry

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Wendell Berry (1934-) is an American poet, novelist, short-story writer, essayist and environmental activist. I admire this poem for its terse unsentimental serenity, even if it does appear to take a rather brisk attitude towards the dying of the aged. I sat with my father in his last hours, wanting to say to him those things it is so difficult to utter in normal times, but he never came round from the operation, so all went unsaid, and whether the light became again the sky for him I cannot say. But the third verse certainly rings true: when I left the hospital it seemed an extraordinary thing to walk in sunlight and for days afterwards I felt charged with an almost lacerating sensitivity to my own aliveness.

The Burial of the Old

The old, whose bodies encrust their lives,
Die, and that is well.
They unhinder what has struggled in them,

The light, painfully loved, that narrowed
And darkened in their minds
Becomes again the sky.

The young, who have looked on dying,
Turn back to the world, grown strangely
Alert to each other’s bodies.

Wendell Berry