‘La FigliachePiange’ by T.S. Eliot
In Italian, ‘La FigliachePiange’ means ‘the girl who cries.’ Underneath this is the phrase, ‘O quam tememoremvirgo …’ which is Latin and translates roughly as, ‘Have you any other names, young lady?’This is interesting because at no point in the poem is the girl named or identified in any way other than in the title, as ‘the girl who cries.’ This is perhaps foreshadowing that her crying is the only important thing about her, and she need not be identified in any other way. Then we have a phrase asking if she has any other names. This is either meant to be sarcastic, or perhaps the person asking this question is actually wondering.
In the first stanza, the bright sunny picture evoked with such words as ‘garden’ and ‘sunlight’ and ‘flowers’ is in stark contrast to the subject of said picture: a girl who is in pain, who flings her flowers to the ground and has ‘fugitive resentment’ in her eyes. We don’t know what is upsetting her at this point, but the stanza ends on happy note, with the repetition of the line ‘but weave, weave the sunlight in your hair.’
There is but a passing reference made to the girl’s unhappiness. Rather, it is diminished by being sandwiched between imagery and diction intended to convey cheerfulness. The focus is on the picture of this girl standing in the staircase, leaning on an urn with the sunlight shining on her, and the speaker seems somewhat less than concerned with her current emotional state. In fact, in every line he addresses her in the imperative, instructing her to stand, lean, weave, clasp, fling, turn, and weave again, as though he is telling her she should be upset, yet through her tears she is still instructed to ‘weave the sunlight in (her) hair.’GREAT PAR.
The second stanza reveals the cause of her distress: ‘he,’ presumably her significant other, has left her. And not only does the speaker not care, but he says he wanted it that way. Also in this stanza, we are introduced to an ‘I’, our speaker, as yet unidentified.He compares the man leaving the woman to the soul leaving the body, and then again to the mind leaving the body. He associates the man as the soul and mind, and the woman is merely the body. This identifies our speaker as most likely male, and also reinforces his view of the weeping woman as merely an object, a sculpture standing there on the stairs in the sunlight to be observed and admired for its beauty without compassion for its tears. ALSO GREAT
The speaker expresses his desire to find ‘some way incomparably light and deft/ some way we both should understand.’ Some way to do what? Given his appreciation for the beauty of that moment in time he stumbled upon, and that he noticed the setting and the way the light was shining when most people would notice only the couple, their conversation, and the potential for good gossip, it is safe to assume our speaker is one of those inspired elite: the true artist, be his medium in paint, ink, film, stone, or other. Thus assured, we can further assume that the ‘way’ he seeks to find is a ‘way’ to communicate to depth of the image he saw to others in a way that he can help them to appreciate it, a way that is subtle and inspired rather than heavy handed and forced. YES
In the third stanza, the artist admits that he continues to think about her for some time, ‘many days and many hours.’ He may be reliving the experience in his mind for his own benefit, or thinking about how to convey the image through art in ‘some way incomparably light and deft,’ or perhaps he is even wondering, ‘o quam tememoremvirgo?’ Have you any other names, young lady, other than ‘girl who cries’? We can hope for the last, can hope that in the days in which she ‘compels his imagination’ he may eventually acknowledge her life and her humanity, as opposed to keeping her stuck in that one moment of time like an insect in amber.
Arguably the most telling lines in the poem, lines 21 and 22 read, ‘And I wonder how they should have been together!/ I should have lost a gesture and a pose.’ In other words, what is the happiness of the two young people compared to the beauty and inspiration of the grieving girl’s ‘gesture and pose’? If there is a curse on artists, it is that, as exemplified by our speaker, they may see the garden urn supporting the girl’s hand, the flowers flung to her feet, and the angle of the sunlight hitting her hair before they ever see the face below the hair or the tears running down it.
The artist concludes the poem by admitting that thinking about this girl still sometimes keeps him up at night. We can only wonder whether he is still picking up the lump of amber and turning it this way and that to better examine the width of the stairway, or if possibly he is spending those ‘troubled midnights’ bemoaning the artists’ curse that made him care more about the stairway than the girl standing in it.
Juli: Great analysis of a complex poem by a complex poet. You really get rolling after the second paragraph. See if you can rephrase the bolded language in the first par. Consider making your first par. more of an introduction by giving some of your conclusion in the last par. This may be too formal, however, but try to give more of a sense of where your analysis is heading. Second par. leans toward paraphrase, so without this direction, we might have the sense by the end of the 2nd par. that all you will do is paraphrase which is NOT what you do afterward. What you do is keen analysis. Oh, and cite those line numbers throughout!