#41: La Figlia Che Piange

TS Eliot relives the Dido and Aeneas love story

This is one of those poems that sweeps me up in its eloquence, its similes, and its glamour. To the extent that I almost do not stop to consider what it is saying. When I do stop to consider, do a bit of research, oh my it is astonishing, the beauty intended, a simulacrum of one of the timeless stories of the world.

La Figlia Che Piange by Thomas Stearns 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.

Three languages – Italian for the title, Latin for the epigraph, and English for the poem. The key to the poem is the epigraph, those five words in Latin. O quam te memorem virgo. These words appear in Virgil’s Aeneid, Book 1, that epic story wherein Aeneas wanders Odysseus-like driven by the gods eventually to found Rome. Here Aeneas meets his disguised mother, the goddess Venus. O quam te memorem virgo? ‘By what name mayst I know thee, lady?’  Venus does not reply but still Aeneas knows her, knows something is afoot. He continues to Carthage where he and Dido fall deeply in love, a love mischievously facilitated by Venus. However, Aeneas, driven by his destiny to found Rome on distant shores, flees from Dido who takes her own life. Later in the Aeneid, the former lovers meet at the entrance to Hades and Dido snubs Aeneas who can only mouth platitudes.

It is the timeless story of unrequited love, the tragedy of ‘boy and girl meet and fall in love, boy deserts girl who dies heartbroken’. This is the background Eliot had in mind when he wrote La Figlia Che Piange, Italian for The Weeping Girl. We know who the weeping girl is and why she weeps.

A superbly beautiful poem anyway, it now has a message that transcends mere words. Eliot almost like a film director sees at a garden party or weekend stay at a country home a parody, a quasi-Dido and Aeneas encounter, as on a film set, fussy that the girl ‘weave, weave the sunlight in your hair.. as you clasp your flowers to you in a pained surprise’ (at the man/Aeneas leaving), fling the flowers to the ground ‘with a fugitive resentment in your eyes’.

‘Yes’ says Eliot, ‘so I would have had him leave and her grieve’. ‘As the mind deserts the body it has used’, ‘as the soul leaves the body torn and bruised’, how awful is the rejection. ‘Simple and faithless as a smile and shake of the hand’. Now in a poem, then thousands of years ago in Carthage, north Africa. Eliot’s imagination haunts him, as indeed Dido said she would haunt Aeneas. ‘..she compelled my imagination many days, many days and many hours’… and still amazes his troubled midnight and his noon’s repose. In a directorial flash he realizes he would have lost a gesture and a pose had they not parted. In the end, he cannot help himself, ‘And I wonder how they should have been together!’ How would any lovers have been together if their love had had the chance to flourish, and not be cast aside for a reason? Truly, a sentiment to trouble all our midnights and all our resting daydreams.

Finally: ‘I should find/Some way incomparably light and deft’ is Eliot presaging his own sublime intellect behind the writing of this poem. He succeeds in a manner akin to the great impressionist artists such as Monet, Degas or Picasso. Eternal meaning hidden in plain sight.