Portrait of a Lady

The poem’s epigraph is from Christopher Marlowe’s play The Jew of Malta (1590). Marlowe was an Elizabethan dramatist, a contemporary of Shakespeare. Although the epigraph does not show it, the lines are spoken by two different characters. Friar Barnardine speaks T. S. Eliot’s opening line in an accusation of Barabas, the play’s eponymous Maltese merchant—“Thou hast committed—” (Line 1). At this, Barabas interrupts Barnardine to finish the accusation with a lesser crime than the ones of which he is actually guilty, adding the next two lines of Eliot’s epigraph: “Fornication: but that was in another country, / And besides, the wench is dead” (Lines 2-3). Barabas thus dismisses the importance of his actions and excuses himself as if they do not matter if their victim has died; he refuses to feel guilt. The epigraph reflects on Eliot’s poem in several ways. First, it hints that Eliot’s two characters were at some point sexually involved. At the same time, Barabas’s shamelessness is appealing and aspirational to the speaker, who would also like to be able to dismiss any consequences of his encounters with the lady. This is suggested when he muses on the lady’s death (which echoes Barabas’s callous “the wench is dead” [Line 3]). However, for Eliot’s young man, the image only leads to more unanswerable speculation, and the poem, not surprisingly, ends with a question. Barabas he is not.

In their meeting in Part 1, the woman has done her best, with the four candles in the darkened room, to create a pleasant, romantic environment. However, for the speaker, the effect is quite different from what the lady desires: He reads it as, “An atmosphere of Juliet’s tomb” (Line 6). Instead of a seductive boudoir, the chamber makes the speaker think of the end of Shakespeare’s tragedy Romeo and Juliet (1597): Juliet lies in her family’s mausoleum, having faked her own death to reunite with Romeo; Romeo, however, thinks Juliet is really dead and drinks poison; learning this, Juliet stabs herself in the heart. Eliot’s lady has inadvertently made her room resemble this grisly setting, at least to the speaker. This sets up the poem’s dramatic conflict: The young man experiences his relationship with the lady quite differently from how she sees it. The following line also hints at what is to come: The room is “Prepared for all the things to be said, or left unsaid” (Line 7). In this relationship, the most important things remain unspoken.

As the poem continues, the lady attempts to make conversation regarding the piano recital they have just attended, but her high-flown remarks about Chopin’s Preludes elicit no response from the speaker; what’s more, the musical imagery of “attenuated tones of violins / Mingled with remote cornets” (Lines 16-17) suggests that he is barely listening to her. It is noticeable that what the woman says throughout the poem is contained in quotation marks, marking all of her characterization—including her appearance and the setting of her room—as external. The speaker has no knowledge of the woman’s thoughts and feelings, and he offers no opinions or guesses about her inner life. In contrast, the speaker never directly reproduces his own speech, but merely supplies descriptions of how he reacts to what the lady says. While he lacks the maturity, wisdom, or empathic ability to read into his companion, the speaker is an almost obsessively self-analyzing chronicler who cannot escape his own interior world.

The young man’s inability to connect is reflected in the poem’s musical imagery. Following the lady’s seemingly confessional declaration of how much her friends mean to her and what a nightmare (“cauchemar” [Line 28]) her life would be without them, the young man’s boredom is reflected by “winding violins” (Line 29) and “cracked cornets” (Line 31)—atonal sounds of discord. Indeed, he is becoming more and more uncomfortable and restless: “Inside my brain a dull tom-tom begins / Absurdly hammering a prelude of its own” (Lines 32-33). (A tom-tom is a drum; and Tom also happens to be Eliot’s first name.) This “[c]apricious monotone” (Line 34) creates a dissonant effect, “at least one definite ‘false note’” (Line 35). This word choice is ambiguous, as a “false note” can figuratively mean an inappropriate conversational gambit—perhaps whatever he said to the lady in response to her comments struck a false note, since in her company he is frozen into a kind of polite sterility. In his imagination, he seeks relief by going outside to smoke, observe the environment, and drink “bocks” (Line 40), or heavy beers—an escapist fantasy of activities that deflect attention away from feelings that the speaker could never do here; the lady would never do something so unbecoming to her gender and social status.

It does not get any better for the speaker in Part 2, which takes place four months later. Music has been replaced by nature, with images of blooming lilacs and sunset. The lady seems to be happier; as she recalls times she spent in Paris in the spring, she is “immeasurably at peace” (Line 54). Yet in her remarks about the ignorance of early life—“And youth is cruel, and has no remorse” (Line 48)—might be a veiled reference to some hurt she has suffered from her young acquaintance and perhaps lover. The speaker lets the comment pass acknowledged with only a polite smile. After that, the lady is lavish in her praise of the young man, certain that he understands his feelings and that he has great strength. This is not what he wants to hear, however. As his frustration and possibly anger build up, the discordant musical imagery returns: The woman’s voice is “like the insistent out-of-tune / Of a broken violin on an August afternoon” (Lines 56-57).

If in Part 1 he merely imagined his escape outdoors, he now actually does escape, taking his hat and leaving the woman’s house. Running away is all he can think to do; he has no strategy for facing the situation and engaging in honest dialogue. He also doesn’t know how to handle his guilt, asking himself how he can make amends to her, but knowing he can only muster a “cowardly” (Line 69) response. One reading is that his cowardice is pretending that he has feelings for her, when he doesn’t. Another reading is that the young man’s cowardice is a kind of paralysis, trapping him in awkwardness and a very limited range of possible actions. Once more, as in the previous section, he refers to a familiar and reassuring outdoor activity—reading the newspaper in the park—by which he can experience the world vicariously and therefore remain “self-possessed” (Line 78). Still, even this is not proof against a stray disturbing emotion triggered by a familiar song or a sensory experience (the “smell of hyacinths” [Line 81]). Part 2 ends with the speaker wondering whether his reaction to all of this is “right or wrong” (Line 83). He is clearly in an uncertain frame of mind.

In Part 3, the speaker feels humiliated, as he climbs the stairs to visit the lady again, feeling like a supplicant—“as if I had mounted on my hands and knees” (Line 87). He is going abroad—finally a real form of escape. This departure for another land recalls the poem’s epigraph—Barabas too assuages his guilt by highlighting the distance between himself and the setting of his crime: “but that was in another country” (Line 2). Once again rendered speechless, the young man merely smiles as the lady offers polite remarks wishing him well. When she openly wonders why they have not managed to become friends, he cannot answer as his mind fills with the noises and movements made instinctively by animals and birds. This retreat into bestial prey behavior displaces any coherent feeling or the possibility of an appropriate, mature reply. Instead, like the animals in his thoughts, he is eager to run away or distract himself via a “tobacco trance” (Line 113). Then the thought strikes him, what if she were to die one afternoon? He would not know what to feel, but resents that her death would give her some advantage over him: In death, she would be invulnerable, while he would still be left with his confusion and guilt. Then he shifts into an aesthetic evaluation of her death. Remembering the music he associates her with—Chopin and the musical imagery in Part 1—he thinks, “This music is successful with a ‘dying fall’” (Line 122), forming an artistic backdrop to her demise. (In Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, the romantic Duke Orsino listens to music with a “dying fall” [Line 122] to dwell on his love.) In the end, though, there is no resolution for Eliot’s speaker, who asks, “should I have the right to smile?” (Line 124). He wonders if his destiny is to be shadowed by guilt and frustration or if he will he rest easy.