portrait of a lady

Peter Cash AO5 on the speaker

“he is concerned that he will have to live forevermore with recollection of his moral complacency”

Joel Edmund Anderson AO5 on the speaker

“too cruel to fall in love”

Patterns x12

• music/ sound

• juxtaposition

• theatrical language

• time and the seasons

• stasis

• smiling motif

• motif of friendship

• flowers

• repression

• masculine spaces vs female spaces

• contrast of light and darkness

• self-obsession

AO3 Adeline Moffat - AO5 quote describing her

• woman that lived in Boston and frequently invited Eliot and other graduates in for tea and conversation

• “the poem depicts the emptiness and sterility of the life of a cultured woman surrounded by bric-a-brac”

The voice and POV displayed in portrait

• the lady is made to speak - direct speech

• visitor silently comments

• centres the psychological state of the man

• stream of consciousness

• The lady’s voice is constructed by the speaker

“Portrait of a lady”

• Renders the woman a male construction

• allusion to Henry James’ novel - placing the poem as a social commentary

Real meaning of the poem

looking at the psychological turmoil which goes on beneath polite conversation

Epigraph

• violent and satirical in tone

• direct address - blame/ disappointment

• juxtaposition between the bluntness of the epigraph and the subtly in poem

• 3 lines likening the poem to the epigraph structurally and narratively

• “the wench is dead” - suggesting a clean end to the affair - mans escape of womens death

Form of the poem

Dramatic monologue - aligning the reader with the speaker

Setting - “smoke and fog”

• much like “etherised sky” in Prufrock- suggesting a haziness to the relationships

“December afternoon … Juliet’s tomb”

• uses the seasons throughout the poem to mark time - show its passing

• death imagery - December marking the death of nature - lack of fecundity, sterile

• theatrical metaphor - performative, false, tension - also Juliet connotates youth

“cracked cornets” “dull tom-tom” “absurdly hammering a prelude of its own” “capricious monotone”

• music motif

• creating an uncomfortable cacophony of sound

• reflecting the unsettling nature of the relationship

• “capricious monotone” - oxymoron reflecting the internal suffering

“let us take the air”

• connecting the poem yet again to Prufrock “let us go”

• both poems examining the tortured psyche of the modern man

“monuments” “late events” “public clocks” “our bocks”

• uses traditionally male symbols

• showing his want and desperation to escape the male world

• bock = german beer

“lilacs are in bloom” “a bowl of lilacs in her room” “twist one in her fingers”

• Irony as lilacs are a symbol of youth that are in

• “a bowl of lilacs in her room” “twists one in her fingers” – oppressive nature of the room on youth – nature being destroyed - unnaturalness of social conventions

“My buried life and Paris in the spring”

“My buried life”

• allusion to Matthew Arnold poem

• about the inability to speak about ones thoughts and inner desires

Overly romantic idea of life - performance - poignancy to it

“I shall sit here, serving tea to friends …”

• euphemistic

• evoking pity or characterising her as comedic

• passivity vs his active nature

• narrative gap highlights the awkwardness of silents

“I mount the stairs … feel as if I had mounted on my hands and knees.”

• suggests immense level of effort

• repeated verb choice emphasising the physicality of the image

• emphasising howe the speaker feels burdened by his commitment to the lady

“My smile falls heavily among the bric-a-brac”

• paradoxical smile .. heavily - supposed to be an easy, comforting thing

• suggesting her life is in fragments - giving the poem the tone of ‘social malice’, rendering the woman’s life meaningless - her existence is empty and ornamental

• perhaps the speaker feels likened to these meaningless objects when in this room, devalued

“fate, rate, late”

satirical look at oppressive forces of elders on youth -rhyming couplet – dialogue “fate, rate, late” emptiness – ridiculousness- dramatized, mocking  

“like a dancing bear, cry like a parrot, chatter like an ape”

• performative - must take on the role of the entertainer

• feels he must take on another form

• perhaps bitter tone at being another piece of “bric-a-brac”

“And should I have the right to smile?”

• is smiling a symbol of the youth?

• he smiles as he is young but is the lady unable to

• when he thinks of her death he smiles - as only then can he let go of these false pretences and rejoice without her

• characterising him as cruel