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.

La Figlia Che Piange
by T.S. Eliot

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.

___________________________________________ 

With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems will be typically drawn from the lesser-known portion of the history of English verse. In the coming months we will be reaching out to contemporary poets for examples of current, primarily formalist work, to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.