"Portrait of a Lady"

[rivendellrose]

It's very difficult to talk about both "Portrait of a Lady" by T. S. Eliot and "Portrait d'une Femme" by Ezra Pound. First off, they have only a little bit in common, beyond the titles. They're actually kind of opposing... but not so strongly that it makes a good argument.

Secondly, I keep getting totally distracted by the Eliot poem. I can't concentrate on the Pound poem - it's so dull and normal compared to the Eliot, and doesn't at all grab me by the soul like the Eliot one does. And then there's the fact that the 'grabbing by the soul' bit keeps causing problems - I get so distracted by the feelings the poem is bringing up that I can't concentrate on trying to analyze it, or I'm afraid that I'm reading things into it that aren't there.

The idea of this was that the three of us doing the presentation were supposed to come with our different angles and interpretations of the poems. But without discussing them ahead of time... it worries me.

I love this poem. I just am not thrilled with the idea of doing a group presentation on it. Hell if I know what this is going to turn out like... as long as I can keep from getting too distracted by the stuff this poem does to my head, I should be fine. Maybe I'll go to the classroom early and hope the other girls are there, so we can talk things through just a bit. What can I do that isn't just going through and paraphrasing, or explaining the bits of French or out-moded language?

Comments

[ursula]

Actually, as I read the poems, the women are very similar, but the speakers' relationships to the women are very different: Pound's speaker feels free to observe and admire, whereas Eliot's speaker is afraid of getting caught-- tangled up in the seaweed, if I may borrow the metaphor of the other poem.

[rivendellrose.livejournal.com]

They oppose in that the women in the two poems seem, to me, to have contradictory views of relationships with men, at least from what little we can see in the poems. I'm a little confused by your reference to the seaweed, though - from what I remember, it's the "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" that refers to men being tied by mermaids in seaweed. "Portrait of a Lady" doesn't reference the sea at all, from what I can see...

[ursula]

"Portrait d'une Femme" has the seaweed (in the Sargasso sea); "Portrait of a Lady" has the entanglement. I guess my 'other poem' got confused.

I think we're in agreement, though you're ascribing more of the conversation's dynamic to the lady and I to the gentleman's interpretation; does that make sense? I do think the question of how reliable the narrators are here is important. (Can we read Pound's poem as distancing, for instance?)

[rivendellrose.livejournal.com]

Ah, yes, I get it now.

Yes, that's it. And you're right to say that the narrators are both of them a bit... questionable, particularly Eliot's, I think. Pound's as distancing... hmm. I suppose you could read it that way - I'd be more likely to ascribe that adjective to Eliot's, though, honestly. Pound gives me more trouble than Eliot, though, so it's quite likely I'm missing things in the Pound poem. Or either, for that matter. ;)

[ursula]

Yeah, Eliot's narrator is way more obviously unreliable, but since you've got to read the poems *together* it's kind of interesting to look at the way our skepticism of Eliot's narrator informs our assessment of Pound's. (One way to ask this question is whether the lady in each case would be pleased with her portrait, should she exist and encounter it; I realize this is a little outside the bounds of ordinary 'adult' poetic analysis, but if you've ever written poetry about real people you'll understand that this can be an issue.)

The lines I'd look at in the Pound poem are:

Oh, you are patient, I have seen you sit
Hours, where something might have floated up.
And now you pay one. Yes, you richly pay.

and

No! there is nothing! In the whole and all,
Nothing that's quite your own.
Yet this is you.

Both of these have some tricky language stuff going on: in the first passage, the sense of "you richly pay" seems to be "one is richly rewarded for visiting you," but the alternate way to understand it would be "you are paying a high price for your past behaviour", while in the second passage "this" refers to the entire poem, but grammatically it refers to the word "nothing".

The second interpretation of the situation, then, which the poem ostensibly rejects but verbally echoes, is "You have not emotionally invested in any one or thing, and now you are old and paying the price for your detachment." So the poem isn't as detached as it sounds-- the speaker is arguing for a positive view (admiration for, pride in?) a state which might as easily be viewed as empty loneliness.

The question is, whom is he arguing with? If your answer is "Society, which doesn't understand how important this woman is" then the speaker comes off as perceptive and insightful. But what if the woman is lonely, growing old, and the speaker is telling her to suck it up and accept that her loneliness is beautiful? Do we still admire the speaker's wisdom?

[ursula]

Now, if you accept my negative reading of the Pound poem for a minute, and return to the Eliot, we can read the Eliot poem as having a distinct poetic agenda, namely, to critique the idea of a Poet as a dispassionate or enlightened observer by highlighting the anxieties which real would-be observers are confronted with in the real world.

[rivendellrose.livejournal.com]

*Boggles* You're making me look bad as an English major, here. ;)

I do definitely agree with you on how the potential reaction of the subject can be an issue in both these poems. Your interpretations of the Pound poem are fascinating - I'll have to read the whole over again to get a feel for it, and see what I think of what you've said. They're definitely possibilities, and ones that, for the most part, I would never have considered; I'm not a great student of poetry, although I read and like some and very occasionally write my own, just for the hell of it, so I've never gone further in poetry interpretation than was required for general lit. classes I've taken.

I love the potential double-meanings you've pointed out, especially the "this" in the second passage - reading it as referring to "nothing" might be backed up by the line "Great minds have sought you--lacking someone else" in the first stanza. The same could be said of the "strange gain" one takes away from visiting her - "fact that leads nowhere [...] or with something else / that might prove useful and yet never proves."

I'm not sure I entirely understand what you're pointing at with Eliot, though. You mean to say that the poem is meant to underscore the fact that the observer is not dispassionate, because of the social anxieties displayed?

[ursula]

This is why I did the minor in classics-- it's much more susceptible to All Close Readings, All The Time than modern literature ;) (And the truth is, I'm not at all familiar with non-Latin poetry; I had to google these poems.)

That the observer is not dispassionate, not just because of social anxiety, but because he is (inevitably) susceptible to manipulation by the observed, and refusing to be manipulated is in itself a reaction. (I feel like one ought to be able to say something about Modernism here . . . )

[rivendellrose.livejournal.com]

And the truth is, I'm not at all familiar with non-Latin poetry; I had to google these poems.

*Covers ears* It just gets worse - not only are you running circles around me in my own department, but you're doing it with material you weren't previously familiar with. I shall go crawl under a sign that reads "Bad English Major" now. ;)

That said - I do totally get what you mean about Classics being more focused on close readings - I miss that about the Classics class I took. Also, because English majors tend to be reading things in their native language, we're not properly encouraged to look at every possible angle of a word, I don't think. Which is really sad.

Ah, yes. That does make sense. And I'm sure there is something to be said about Modernism in there... but I'm just not intellectually with it enough at the moment to do it. Getting the sleepies from being at work, I'm afraid.

[ursula]

You don't want to know what the math is doing to me right now :) (And having kid_prufrock on one's friendslist does tend to make one contemplate Eliot . . .)