This poem, the Sun’s selection for T.S. Eliot’s 134th birthday, recounts a romantic breakup. It’s the kind of event that seldom achieves aesthetic perfection in real life.
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Today’s Poem of the Day commemorates the September 26 birthday of the modernist giant T. S. Eliot (1888–1965). In his first book of poems, the 1917 “Prufrock and Other Observations,” Eliot dwells on the desire, all too familiar to us in the age of social media, to curate our lives: to make them larger, more meaningful, more beautiful than they are. From the first line of the book’s first poem — the title poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” — 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 for the randomness of his experiences.
The book closes with a return to this impulse, in “La Figlia che Piange” (Italian for “Young Girl Weeping”). This poem, the Sun’s selection for Eliot’s 134th birthday, recounts a romantic breakup. It’s the kind of event that seldom achieves aesthetic perfection in real life. It is composed instead of sullen silences, storms of ugly crying, and zingy ripostes thought of too late. We’d all have liked to break up the way they do in movies, but then we generally don’t get to direct our own lives as a series of takes.
The speaker here indulges himself in the essential human fantasy of doing precisely that. In imagination, he inhabits the scene as an actor, playing a role: an Aeneas, larger than life, speaking Aeneas’s greeting to Aphrodite, his mother, as the poem’s first line. But he also operates outside the frame, telling the female lead where to stand, how to hold her flowers and arrange her face. At least, “so I would have had him leave,” he says of the male lead, played by himself. So he would have composed this scene, with its irregular stanzas and meters, its shifting patterns of rhyme. In the end, the art he might have made of life, but didn’t, is what haunts him.
By GEORGE WILLIS
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By BRADLEY CORTRIGHT
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By A.R. HOFFMAN
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