T.S.

Eliot's "Portrait of a Lady"

Paul Brown
January 29, 2011

One of T.S. Eliot's most straightforward poems, "Portrait of a Lady" presents a satire of
emotional emptiness and modern ennui.

T.S. Eliot’s “Portrait of a Lady” takes its name from the Henry James novel, but there is no direct
relationship between the two texts. Eliot’s poem is an examination of the emptiness of modern society,
with a narrator who has more in common with the protagonist of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
than might be immediately apparent.

An Atmosphere of Stasis

Like so many of Eliot’s poems, “Portrait of a Lady” begins with an epigraph, taken from
Christopher Marlowe’s play The Jew of Malta: “Thou hast committed- /Fornication: but that was
in another country,/And besides, the wench is dead.” The tone of the epigraph seems to contrast
starkly with the poem itself, where there is not only no fornication but almost no emotional
connection between the narrator and the lady. But the theme of death does become important in
the poem’s final section.

The poem begins with the narrator meeting the lady for tea “among the smoke and fog of
a December afternoon”; the image of fog was crucial in “Prufrock” as a symbol of stasis and
ennui, and while it is not as elaborated here, it serves much the same purpose. The narrator finds
the atmosphere of the lady’s room depressing: “Four rings of light upon the ceiling overhead,/An
atmosphere of Juliet’s tomb”- a suggestion that the lady is as self-absorbed and shallow a
romantic as the Shakespearean character Eliot references.

The Narrator Mocks the Lady

The narrator mocks upper-class pretensions with his depiction of a typical activity that
precedes these meetings for tea: attending a concert “to hear the latest Pole/Transmit the
Preludes, through his hair and fingertips”. The suggestion is that these musical prodigies are
simply tools by which those who attend their concerts try to appear fashionable, but are
essentially interchangeable and demonstrate no true understanding of the music. They are flashy
and showy rather than insightful, and the narrator’s contempt for them is evident.

But the lady thinks otherwise: she speaks of the intimacy of Chopin, and says his music
“should be resurrected only among friends/Some two or three, who will not touch the
bloom/That is rubbed and questioned in the concert room.” The narrator does not outwardly
mock her sincerity, but the implication is there: she is clearly too naïve to understand the
superficiality of such performances.
Musical Analogy for Conversation

Eliot extends the musical analogy to the conversation itself, and again the narrator’s tone
is subtly mocking as he speaks of “attenuated tones of violins/Mingled with remote cornets”,
conveying a sense of a kind of polite conversation lacking in substance. The lady speaks about
friendship and its importance, and the narrator becomes impatient. Her speech becomes “a dull
tom-tom…/Absurdly hammering a prelude of its own” in his brain, and he suggests activities to
move away from this line of conversation.

The narrator’s evasion of this discussion of friendship is indicative of his emotional

distance as a whole. As the poem progresses, it becomes more evident that the lady’s words were
entirely sincere, but the narrator cannot appreciate them because he lacks the capacity to engage
with the emotions she expresses. He remains detached as a defensive mechanism, one that leaves
him hollow and emotionally bereft.

The Narrator's Emotional Remoteness

This quality becomes apparent in the second section, which moves from the December of
the first to spring and finds the narrator again in the lady’s room, where she twists a lilac in her
fingers as she speaks to him about his failure to appreciate life. She admonishes him for letting it
flow from him and about the follies of youth, and he simply smiles and drinks his tea, failing to
understand the importance of her words.

It is at this point that the gulf in age between the lady and the narrator is revealed, though
Eliot is not specific about how far apart in age they are. In any event, there is no hint of romantic
interest, but the lady does seek friendship with the narrator and tries to impart her knowledge of
the world to him. But he continues to hear her voice as “the insistent out-of-tune/Of a broken
violin on an August afternoon”, and remains emotionally remote.

The Narrator's False Superiority

At the end of the second section, the narrator speaks of how he remains self-possessed as
he reads news of terrible events in the world, and is only shaken out of that state “when a street
piano, mechanical and tired/Reiterates some worn-out common song/With the smell of hyacinths
across the garden/Recalling things that other people have desired”. But even then, he is remote
from his own emotions, and receives this feeling secondhand, not from direct empathy with
others but from a musical portrayal of their desires.

This description contrasts with the passage about Chopin at the start of the first section,
and suggests the narrator finds himself in some way superior for deriving this pleasure from
popular song rather than the elitist pleasures the lady favors. But how is he in any way different?
Both experience the emotions secondhand, both filter their own experience through the lens of
aesthetic pleasures. Eliot makes it clear that the lady derives more immediate and sincere joy
from Chopin than the narrator does from “worn-out common song”, and so his notions of
superiority are entirely mistaken.
The Narrator Recognizes His Emptiness

In the final section, it is now October, and the narrator is about to leave the country. The
lady asks when he will be back, though she already realizes he does not yet know the answer,
and asks him to write to her. This strokes his ego a bit, but it is then deflated by what follows,
where she wonders “why we have not developed into friends”.

Confronted with her sincere disappointment, he struggles “to find expression”, but he
cannot: he can only imitate the appearance of emotion, rather than sincerely admit the collapse of
his own self-possession. He thinks on what would happen if she should die while he is gone, and
realizes that in his confusion, he has no right to place himself above her: “Would she not have
the advantage, after all?”. In the end, he is everything he mocked in her, and Eliot ends the poem
with his narrator fully aware of the void in his heart, but unable to figure out any way how to
mend it.