Portrait of a Lady

“Portrait of a Lady” is an early poem by renowned English American poet T. S. Eliot. Completed in the first years after he graduated from Harvard, it was published in the literary magazine Others in September 1915 and was included in Eliot’s first collection of poems, Prufrock and Other Observations (1917).

The poem describes interactions between a young man and a much older woman who wants to befriend him. However, the young man feels strained and awkward at their meetings and they never manage to connect in a meaningful way, despite the woman’s efforts. The poem is autobiographical: The young man is based on Eliot himself, and the older woman, according to Eliot’s wife Valerie Eliot, is a version of Adeleine Moffat, a woman of means who lived in Boston and liked to invite selected Harvard undergraduates to tea.

Often described as a companion poem to the better-known “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” which depicts the empty life of a middle-aged man, “Portrait of a Lady” shows a young man’s difficulty in forming an authentic relationship with a needy woman and in dealing with his own feelings about it.

Poet Biography

Poet, dramatist, literary critic, and editor Thomas Stearns Eliot was born on September 26, 1888, in St. Louis, Missouri, to a family with roots in New England. Eliot attended Milton Academy in Massachusetts and graduated from Harvard in 1909. In college, he discovered the work of French Symbolist poet Jules LaForgue (1860-1887), which helped Eliot to find his own poetic voice—one that featured a conversational tone. Eliot received an master’s degree in English literature from Harvard in 1910, after which he studied philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris, France, before returning to Boston in 1911. Within a few months, still under the influence of LaForgue, he completed “Portrait of a Lady.”

During World War I, Eliot accepted a scholarship to study philosophy at Merton College, Oxford. After teaching English and working for Lloyd’s Bank, Eliot joined the publishing firm Faber and Faber, eventually becoming its director in 1929, a role he continued until his death. While at Faber, he was responsible for launching or advancing the careers of many young poets.

Eliot’s modernist poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” was published in 1915, just a few months before “Portrait of a Lady.” Both poems later appeared in the collection Prufrock and Other Observations (1917). Eliot’s most famous poem, The Waste Land (1922), described the fragmentation and decay of Western culture in densely symbolic and allusive verse. In the same year, Eliot founded the influential quarterly journal The Criterion, which he edited until it ceased publication in 1939.

An influential literary critic, Eliot published the essay collections The Sacred Wood (1920), Homage to John Dryden (1924), and Collected Essays (1932), becoming an important arbiter of taste in classical and modern poetry. He championed the 17th-century English metaphysical poets, whose work had been neglected for over two centuries.

In 1927, Eliot became a British citizen and joined the Anglican Church. “Journey of the Magi” (1927) and Ash Wednesday (1930) were among the first poetic fruits of this conversion. In 1944, Eliot published Four Quartets, exploring spirituality with a focus on the intersection of time and eternity. Eliot was also a dramatist. His best play is considered to be Murder in the Cathedral (1935), about the murder of Archbishop Thomas Becket at the behest of King Henry II in 1170. In 1949, Eliot achieved popular success with The Cocktail Party (1949), which ran for 409 performances on Broadway. Two later plays were The Confidential Clerk (1953) and The Elder Statesman (1958).

In 1948, Eliot was awarded the Order of Merit by Britain’s King George VI as well as the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Eliot married Vivien Haigh-Wood in 1915. By all accounts, it was not a happy marriage. After 1933, they lived apart but did not divorce. Haigh-Wood died in 1947. In 1957, Eliot married Valerie Fletcher. Eliot died of emphysema on January 4, 1965.

Poem Text

Eliot, T. S. “Portrait of a Lady.” 1915. Poetry Foundation.

Summary

The male speaker describes three visits he made, in three different seasons, to the house of an older woman. The first visit, in Part 1, takes place on a December afternoon. They have just returned from a piano recital, in which a Polish pianist played Chopin’s Preludes. The lady remarks it would be better if Chopin was played only in small gatherings that would preserve the intimate nature of the music rather than in the more showy setting of a concert hall. The speaker comments obliquely on the conversation that ensues, using musical imagery to convey how distant it seemed to him. The lady expresses how much she appreciates her friends; it is uncommon to find someone who possesses the qualities that a friendship needs in order to flourish. She also makes it clear that she is not happy with her life and compliments the young man because she thinks he has noticed this about her. Without friendship, she says, life would be a nightmare. The speaker returns to the musical imagery, contrasting it with what is going on in his own mind—boredom. He would prefer that they do something more interesting, like going outside and smoking, discussing current events, or drinking beer.

Part 2 takes place in April. The lady addresses the man’s youth, saying there is so much about life that he does not understand. He smiles, says nothing, and continues to drink his tea. The lady has cheered up in the springtime, a season in which she enjoys life. She is full of exaggerated praise for the young man; she thinks he understands her feelings and self-deprecatingly wonders what she can offer him. She then remarks that she is nearing the end of her life. The speaker is unsettled by her remarks, and as he leaves he wonders how to respond. He feels that he should make amends for some unstated offense. He is most at ease on his morning routine of reading the newspaper in the park, except when something in the environment arouses in him a difficult emotion.

Part 3 takes place in October. The young man visits again, and the lady remarks on the fact that he is about to go abroad. She asks if he will write to her and wonders why they never became friends, contrary to others’ expectations. The speaker feels uncomfortable and does not know what to say. He wonders what would happen if she were to die one afternoon, and is unsure of what he should be feeling. He suspects her dying would give her an emotional advantage over him. He is also unsure of whether he should allow himself a smile about the relationship they had, which indicates his ambivalence and confusion.