The Full Text of “La Figlia Che Piange”
O quam te memorem virgo...
1Stand on the highest pavement of the stair—
2Lean on a garden urn—
3Weave, weave the sunlight in your hair—
4Clasp your flowers to you with a pained surprise—
5Fling them to the ground and turn
6With a fugitive resentment in your eyes:
7But weave, weave the sunlight in your hair.
8So I would have had him leave,
9So I would have had her stand and grieve,
10So he would have left
11As the soul leaves the body torn and bruised,
12As the mind deserts the body it has used.
13I should find
14Some way incomparably light and deft,
15Some way we both should understand,
16Simple and faithless as a smile and shake of the hand.
17She turned away, but with the autumn weather
18Compelled my imagination many days,
19Many days and many hours:
20Her hair over her arms and her arms full of flowers.
21And I wonder how they should have been together!
22I should have lost a gesture and a pose.
23Sometimes these cogitations still amaze
24The troubled midnight and the noon’s repose.
The Full Text of “La Figlia Che Piange”
O quam te memorem virgo...
1Stand on the highest pavement of the stair—
2Lean on a garden urn—
3Weave, weave the sunlight in your hair—
4Clasp your flowers to you with a pained surprise—
5Fling them to the ground and turn
6With a fugitive resentment in your eyes:
7But weave, weave the sunlight in your hair.
8So I would have had him leave,
9So I would have had her stand and grieve,
10So he would have left
11As the soul leaves the body torn and bruised,
12As the mind deserts the body it has used.
13I should find
14Some way incomparably light and deft,
15Some way we both should understand,
16Simple and faithless as a smile and shake of the hand.
17She turned away, but with the autumn weather
18Compelled my imagination many days,
19Many days and many hours:
20Her hair over her arms and her arms full of flowers.
21And I wonder how they should have been together!
22I should have lost a gesture and a pose.
23Sometimes these cogitations still amaze
24The troubled midnight and the noon’s repose.
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“La Figlia Che Piange” Introduction
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"La Figlia Che Piange" (Italian for "the girl who weeps") is the final poem in T. S. Eliot's first collection, Prufrock and Other Observations (1917). It's an unusual kind of breakup poem, one whose speaker remains both disturbed and strangely captivated by the memory of his breakup. Like a director restaging a scene, he tries reimagining the moment he "left" his lover, but nothing seems to assuage his guilt or regret. Nor can he seem to let go of his interest in the woman he disappointed, though he claims that staying with her would have meant the greater loss. Through its shifts in tense and perspective, the poem dramatizes the deep internal conflict that often follows the end of a romance.
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“La Figlia Che Piange” Summary
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Oh, what should I call you, maiden?
Pose on the top step of the paved staircase. Lean against a decorative garden vase. Let the sun filter through your hair. Clutch your bouquet tight, looking shocked and hurt, then throw it aside and turn away with a fleeting look of bitterness. But keep letting the sun filter through your hair.
That's how I would have wanted her lover (me) to leave her. That's how I would have wanted her to stand around, mourning. That's how he would have deserted her: the way a soul leaves a wounded corpse, the way a mind leaves a body it's been using. I would want to find some exceptionally slick and artful exit—something we could agree on, as easy and dishonest as a grin and a handshake.
She turned from me, but like the fall weather, she captivated my mind long afterward, with her flowing hair and the bouquet in her arms. I still wonder how that couple (me and her) would have worked out! I wouldn't have the same stance and attitude as I do now. Occasionally, these thoughts still stop and disturb me, in the middle of the night or during my midday break.
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“La Figlia Che Piange” Themes
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Love, Heartbreak, and Regret
"La Figlia Che Piange" (Italian for "the girl who weeps") deals with the lingering pain and confusion of a romantic breakup. The speaker, who has left his lover, reimagines and reframes his "desert[ion]" in various ways—even critiquing himself in the third person—as if trying to gain imaginative control over a painful experience. Despite his efforts, his lover's memory still "Compel[s]" his "imagination," plaguing him with some combination of guilt, desire, and regret. Through the speaker's internal conflict, the poem illustrates how the end of a romance can haunt lovers long afterward—especially, perhaps, the lover who called things off.
The speaker tries various ways of coming to grips with the breakup, and with his role in it, but none seem to satisfy him. He shifts between second and third person when referring to the young woman, and third and first person when referring to himself. First, he addresses the remembered lover as if giving her stage directions, trying to arrange the perfect version of the breakup scene; then he critiques both her and himself in the third person, saying how he wishes they'd behaved. He also toggles between past and present tense, at one point musing that "I should find" some better "way" to leave her. It's as if the scene is still replaying in his mind, long after the event, and he's still irrationally holding out hope that he can get it right.
His internal conflict points to lingering doubt or guilt over the breakup, as well as a lingering attachment to the girl herself. He describes the girl's "pained surprise" at his rejection, and the "fugitive resentment" (fleeting bitterness) in her eyes as she "turn[ed]" away from him. Evidently, he hurt her, and they didn't part as friends. But "fugitive" may suggest that she wasn't that hurt, and moved on quickly—in the speaker's judgement, at least. However, the speaker also compares the way he "left" her to the way the mind or soul "deserts the body it has used," leaving "the body torn and bruised." This suggests that he took advantage of her emotionally ("used" her) and hurt her deeply as a result. He wishes, sarcastically, that he had found (could still find?) some smoother "way" to leave her: some "light and deft" exit that would be "Simple and faithless as a smile and shake of the hand." His self-mocking tone implies that even he thinks he's cowardly and glib, never mind what she thinks. On top of all his guilt, he still seems attracted to her: he's dwelled on her memory for "many days" and "hours" since their parting.
Though the speaker rationalizes the breakup, he's clearly still haunted by it in the end. No matter how he reframes or justifies such moments, the poem suggests, they'll still return to "trouble[]" him long after the fact. He reports that the memory of her beauty (her "hair," "flowers," etc.) "Compelled [his] imagination" for a long time after the breakup. Then he switches back to present tense and the distancing third person, as if to prove he's still not over her: "I wonder how they should have been together!" He struggles to find a silver lining, claiming that he would have "lost a gesture and a pose" if they'd stayed together. In other words, his personality would have turned out differently, and he might not have developed into the artist he is.
But even this justification makes him sound glib, like a "pose[r]." Finally, he admits that "these cogitations," or thoughts, "Sometimes" return to him in dreams and daydreams (during "the troubled midnight and the noon's repose"). The word "cogitations" is almost absurdly pompous, suggesting that he's intellectualizing his painful situation as a defense mechanism. His mind keeps trying to find some detached perspective on the breakup, but his heart (or unconscious mind) remains "troubled"—and probably always will.
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Emotional Attachment vs. Aesthetic Detachment
The speaker of "La Figlia Che Piange" presents himself as a fussy aesthete, someone who cares more about getting his breakup right—making it a successful gesture or beautiful scene—than about the pain of the breakup itself. Indeed, he suggests that the breakup was worth it because it gave him a tragic "pose" he could incorporate into his personality and art. But his true feelings show through this detached pose, suggesting that no poetic language or artistic "gesture[s]" can heal the deepest emotional wounds. Moreover, the poem suggests, people can't be the art directors of their own lives—they have to live them, and they don't always work out as satisfyingly as art.
From the outset, the speaker comes off as a fastidious artist type, trying to arrange his memories and emotions just so. The poem begins with an epigraph from Virgil's epic poem the Aeneid, which translates to "Oh, what should I call you, maiden?" Among other things, this allusion suggests that the speaker (or poet) imagines his failed romance in literary terms. In wrestling with his feelings about an ex, he casts himself as the mythical hero Aeneas addressing Venus, the goddess of love. At first, he tries to pose his ex like a model or mannequin in his imagination. Later, he claims that "a gesture and a pose"— an artistic personality or literary attitude—is what he gained from the breakup. (Basically, he's suggesting that staying with her would have been bad for his art.) In both instances, he's trying to replace an awkward, painful reality with a pleasing "pose." It's easier to pretend that the breakup made her look beautiful, and made him a better artist, than to acknowledge how hurtful it was.
Meanwhile, "I should find" suggests that the speaker is still trying to imagine what the perfect breakup would have been, long after the moment has passed. The grammar here is ambiguous—"I should find" might mean "I would find [if I could]" or "I ought to find"—and the ambiguity suggests the speaker is still wrestling with his level of responsibility. It's here that he finally steps into the active role of "I" and stops referring to "him." Yet he continues to distance himself from his emotional turmoil, speaking as though he were staging a scene and could find some different "way" of doing it. He claims that his preferred "way" of parting would be "incomparably light and deft," "Simple and faithless": in other words, as slick and unemotional as possible. If he's accusing himself here, he's doing so from behind a shield of irony rather than plainly confessing his guilt and regret.
Despite all these layers of ironic self-dramatization, the speaker can't remain coolly detached. His "pose" won't bring the girl back or ease his conscience; by extension, no amount of artistry or irony will defeat real-life pain. There's something absurd about his attempts to stage-direct the girl in his imagination: she's long gone, and probably wouldn't listen to him anyway!
The effort at gaining some artistic power over her ultimately seems desperate and sad. The way she haunts his "imagination" may have given him a few beautiful lines or images, such as the image of "Her hair over her arms and her arms full of flowers." But emotionally, it's just not enough: he "wonder[s]" how their romance would have turned out if he'd chosen love over art, or love over mere emotional "gesture[s]" and "pose[s]." Indeed, the thought of her still "amaze[s]" him sometimes, as if leaving him at a loss for words. In the end, all artistic gestures—including the poem we're reading—seem to pale beside real love and pain.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “La Figlia Che Piange”
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Before Line 1, Lines 1-3
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—The poem begins with an epigraph from the Aeneid, an epic poem by the ancient Roman poet Virgil. The Latin quotation translates to, "Oh, what should I call you, maiden?" (or "Oh, by what name should I call you, virgin?"). Aeneas, the poem's hero, asks this question of the love-goddess Venus, who has appeared to him disguised as a huntress. Together with the Italian title, which translates to "the girl who weeps," the epigraph suggests that Eliot's poem will involve a beautiful young woman—one who is both distressed and enigmatic. "La Figlia Che Piange" is also the title of a stele, or monumental tablet, that the poet had unsuccessfully searched for in an Italian museum. Overall, these references prepare readers for a speaker who imagines his personal life in literary or artistic terms—in other words, an aesthete type.
Lines 1-3 then introduce the speaker, who is giving directions to an initially unidentified person. These sound like directions one might give to an actor, or someone posing for a picture: "Stand on the highest pavement of the stair— / Lean on a garden urn." The first two instructions are straightforward enough, but the third is subtler and more metaphorical: "Weave, weave the sunlight in your hair." This seems to mean that the person being addressed should stand partly in the sun, so that light and shadow "weave" together in their hair.
Unsurprisingly, it turns out that the speaker is addressing a young woman, the "Figlia" of the title. As the following lines reveal, he's posing her in his memory. (Or in a revised memory, a kind of fantasy after the fact.) In other words, she's not there with him now, and he's addressing her via apostrophe.
The "stair," "garden urn," and "sunlight" are features of a remembered scene—in fact, a breakup scene. They have strong symbolic overtones:
- For example, the "stair" seems to elevate or exalt the girl as she stands "on the highest pavement" (top step).
- Gardens are traditionally associated with youth, love, freshness, and so on—but also with lost innocence (as in the Garden of Eden).
- Urns are associated with beauty and delicacy, but also with fragility and loss (funerary urns).
All of these resonances make sense in a poem about the speaker's ex: a girl he seems to miss and, in part, regret leaving. (For more on the symbolism of this setting, see the Symbols and Setting sections of this guide.)
Each of the first four lines is end-stopped with a dash, giving the passage an urgent, staccato quality. Meanwhile, the meter shifts around: it approximates, but doesn't settle into, iambic pentameter (five-beat lines that follow a da-DUM, da-DUM rhythm). Line 2 has only three beats, for example ("Lean on a garden urn"). The poem ends up being an unstable mix of meter and free verse, which may reflect its speaker's ambivalence and unease. It's as if this speaker is having as much trouble committing to a rhythm as he had committing to a relationship.
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Lines 4-7
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. -
Lines 8-12
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. -
Lines 13-16
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. -
Lines 17-20
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. -
Lines 21-24
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.
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“La Figlia Che Piange” Symbols
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The Urn
Urns, or decorative vases, are symbolically associated with beauty and fragility—they're highly breakable, after all. Since funerary urns are used to hold cremated remains, urns can also be associated with death. Finally, thanks to John Keats's famous "Ode on a Grecian Urn" (1819), they're often associated with poetry, as well as with the particular themes of that poem (including unfulfilled love and the link between truth and beauty).
All of these associations could be read into the "garden urn" here. The speaker is imagining his ex, a beautiful young woman, leaning on an urn at a moment of great vulnerability. In fact, it's the moment he broke up with her, so it represents the death of their love. He's trying to reimagine the breakup in the most aesthetically pleasing way possible, as if turning it into an image worthy of poetry. But the following stanza ("So I would have had her stand and grieve") implies that this beautiful vision is a fiction. In other words, despite what Keats wrote, beauty and truth aren't so synonymous after all.
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Flowers
Flowers are traditional symbols of love, youth, femininity, and innocence. The poem plays on all of these associations. It features a young woman who, as her lover breaks up with her, "Fling[s]" away the flowers she's holding. Symbolically, this gesture suggests that she's losing love, losing innocence, and growing up (however painfully), all in the same moment. At least, that's the way the speaker imagines the scene! Either way, he remembers her with "her arms full of flowers" before their parting: a nostalgic image of youthful beauty.
Meanwhile, the breakup takes place in a garden—presumably the source of the girl's flowers. There's probably a little biblical symbolism here: after all, the Garden of Eden was a lovers' paradise for Adam and Eve until they, too, lost their innocence. (The girl feels "pained surprise" at the speaker's "faithless" betrayal, so if she's a kind of Eve figure, he's arguably more like the serpent than Adam! But the breakup appears to have been painful and formative for him, too.) The "autumn weather" (line 17), traditionally symbolic of decline, reinforces the idea that this couple has experienced a fall from grace.
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“La Figlia Che Piange” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Apostrophe
The poem begins with an apostrophe to the speaker's ex, the girl or "Figlia" referred to in the title. It's not immediately clear that she's absent; at first, it seems as though she and the speaker might be in a "garden" together. By the second stanza, however, it's clear that she's long gone, and the speaker is essentially talking to a memory.
It's a strange kind of apostrophe, too: rather than pouring his heart out to the girl, he's giving her instructions. It sounds almost as if he's stage-directing her, or posing her for a picture: "Stand on the highest pavement of the stair," "Lean on a garden urn," etc. He's remembering her, and their breakup, in the way he prefers—making it a prettier scene, or at least one he can live with. The only hint of his underlying passion comes in the repetition of "Weave, weave the sunlight in your hair."
Finally, "Weave, weave the sunlight in your hair" (repeated twice in the first stanza) is a visual metaphor. It describes a delicate play of light and shadow in the girl's hair, such that the two seem woven together. It's a lovely, subtle image that conveys how the speaker wants to remember her: beautiful and perfectly posed.
Even more unusual is the way the apostrophe ends after the first stanza. The speaker shifts to critiquing his breakup, alternately referring to himself in the third and first person as he does so. It's as if he's switching psychological tactics while coming to grips with a painful event. Meanwhile, he shifts from addressing his ex in the second person to recalling her in the third. This change makes her seem all the more distant, underscoring the fact that their romance is truly over.
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Repetition
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Simile
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Enjambment
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Irony
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"La Figlia Che Piange" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Pavement
- Urn
- Fugitive
- Incomparably
- Faithless
- Compelled
- Pose
- Cogitations
- Amaze
- Repose
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Any paved surface; here, the paved top step of a staircase.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “La Figlia Che Piange”
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Form
The poem has a very musical, but flexible, form. It contains three stanzas of differing length (seven, nine, and eight lines, respectively) and employs a shifting meter and rhyme scheme. It begins and ends with iambic pentameter (five-beat lines that generally follow a da-DUM, da-DUM rhythm), but the rhythm varies considerably in between, and each stanza rhymes in a different pattern. Uniquely, line 13 has no matching end rhyme, though it forms an internal rhyme with the line before ("mind"/"find").
This form is loose enough that Eliot's contemporaries would have understood it as free verse. To a contemporary ear, it may sound more like a metrical poem with creative variations. Eliot himself was ornery about these categories: he famously claimed that "No verse is free for the man who wants to do a good job." However, in this phase of his career, he was consciously adapting some of the vers libre (free verse) techniques of late 19th-century French poetry into early 20th-century English poetry.
The experimental form of "La Figlia Che Piange" isn't just a technical exercise: it also has psychological overtones. The shifting structure highlights the speaker's own inconsistency, or internal conflict, as he reimagines his breakup scene. It parallels his fussy shifts in narrative perspective and grammatical tense. It makes him sound fitful and agitated, and perhaps a bit slippery—as if he doesn't want to be pinned down to one version of events.
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Meter
"La Figlia Che Piange" has a fluid, shifting meter. It begins and ends with iambic pentameter—lines that contain five stressed syllables and generally flow in an unstressed-stressed rhythm (da-DUM, da-DUM,da-DUM, da-DUM, da-DUM). Readers can hear this pattern, with small variations, in line 1 and lines 22-24:
Stand on the highest pavement of the stair—
[...]
I should have lost a gesture and a pose.
Sometimes these cogitations still amaze
The troubled midnight and the noon’s repose.Lines 1 and 23 begin with a trochee (DA-dum) rather than an iamb (da-DUM): "Stand on," "Sometimes." But this is an extremely common variation. In general, all these lines are thoroughly conventional iambic pentameter (which is itself the most common meter in English poetry).
What comes in between is much less conventional. The poem contains lines with only two or three stressed syllables: "I should find," "Lean on a garden urn" (lines 13 and 2). It also contains longer, metrically irregular lines, such as line 16: "Simple and faithless as a smile and shake of the hand." The shifty meter helps convey the speaker's doubt, ambivalence, and desire to revise his words and actions.
Eliot wrote this poem at a time when he, and fellow modernists, were adapting the techniques of French vers libre (free verse) into English poetry. His peers would have read the poem as free verse, and it's certainly much looser than the rigid forms of the 18th and 19th centuries. At the same time, it's strongly informed by Eliot's metrical expertise and never strays that far from the pentameter.
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Rhyme Scheme
The poem's rhyme scheme is irregular and varies from stanza to stanza. The full scheme looks like this:
ABACBCA DDEFFGEHH IJKKILJL
Look carefully and one will notice that there's only one unrhymed line: line 13 ("I should find"). The word "find" here forms an internal rhyme with "mind" in the previous line, but it has no matching end rhyme. Its uniqueness helps mark it as a transitional line, as the speaker shifts from the past tense (or the conditional perfect mode: "would have had") to the present ("I should find").
Like the poem's shifting meter and stanza pattern, the flexible rhyme scheme gives the speaker's thoughts a relatively natural flow. It reflects T. S. Eliot's experimental, modernist approach to poetic form, and it also reflects the character of the speaker—who himself is a little shifty and hard to pin down.
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“La Figlia Che Piange” Speaker
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The speaker is a somewhat slippery figure. As he reflects on his breakup with his lover (the "you" or "her" of the poem), he shifts between past and present tense and between first, second, and third person.
In the first stanza, he apostrophizes his lover while recreating the breakup (or a more satisfying version of it) in his memory. He addresses her almost as a stage director, managing her every movement: "Stand [...] Lean [...] Weave." (Of course, she can't literally hear him, nor would she be likely to follow his directions if she could!) In the second stanza, he calls the two of them "him" and "her," as if trying to detach himself emotionally from the breakup. He then shifts to a more natural-sounding first person ("I should find [...] Some way we both should understand," "She [...] Compelled my imagination," etc.), but continues to shift tenses and wrestle with his feelings.
These devices can be confusing on a first reading of the poem, but they make a certain kind of emotional sense. The speaker comes off as a fastidious, neurotic aesthete: a man struggling to gain some artistic or poetic perspective on a painful event. His pronoun shifts help dramatize his internal conflict as he turns the breakup over in his memory. The grammatical shiftiness also suggests that he's a little shifty: someone who'd prefer a "light and deft," insincere breakup to a candid one.
T. S. Eliot's poems often feature conflicted or self-divided speakers. For example, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (from the same book as "La Figlia Che Piange") famously begins with the speaker, Prufrock, talking to himself as though he were two different people: "Let us go, then, you and I."
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“La Figlia Che Piange” Setting
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The poem's main setting is a "garden," which contains "flowers," a "stair[case]," and a large "urn" (vase). This is the scene of the couple's breakup, at least as the speaker fantasizes it. He implies that his mind is rearranging the details, but the memory seems to have some underlying reality: he affirms in the final stanza that the woman "turned away" from him, apparently with "her arms full of flowers."
The breakup happened during, or maybe just before, the "autumn weather": a time of symbolic decline. But the speaker continues to recall the event long afterward, including in the middle of the day and night (during "The troubled midnight and the noon's repose"). In other words, the emotional impact of the event wasn't confined to a single place or season.
The garden setting, whether real or imagined, carries some symbolic and allusive overtones as well. Like the biblical Garden of Eden, it's a place where one or both lovers lose some form of innocence (the girl's "pained surprise" suggests her shock at having her heart broken).
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Literary and Historical Context of “La Figlia Che Piange”
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Literary Context
T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) published "La Figlia Che Piange" as the final poem in his first collection, Prufrock and Other Observations (1917). The collection's famous title poem, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," shares some features and themes with "La Figlia Che Piange"; the speakers of both poems seem divided against themselves, for example, and brood on their romantic hesitations and regrets.
"La Figlia Che Piange" appeared during a period of widespread literary experimentation, known as modernism. Modernist writers such as Eliot, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf challenged the literary norms they had inherited from the 19th century. These norms were both formal—related to the structure and style of poems, plays, and novels—and social: sex, drugs and alcohol, feminism, and working-class life all became new subjects for serious literature during this period. Eliot's models at this time were mainly French poets of the late 19th century, such as Jules Laforgue and Stéphane Mallarmé. He experimented skillfully with the emerging techniques of vers libre (English: free verse); "La Figlia Che Piange," for instance, hovers around iambic pentameter, but doesn't follow that meter consistently until the last few lines.
The poem's title—Italian for "The Girl Who Weeps" or "The Weeping Girl"—alludes to a stele (stone monument) that Eliot hoped to see, but was unable to find, on a trip to Italy. The epigraph is a quotation from Virgil's Aeneid, the central epic poem in the Latin language. Spoken by the hero Aeneas to Venus, goddess of love, while the goddess is in disguise, it translates roughly to: "Oh, maiden, by what name shall I call you?" These allusions create an air of elusiveness or mystery around the young woman in the poem, as well as an atmosphere of uncertainty around the lovers' parting. The phrase "the weeping girl" also stresses how much the breakup hurt this woman. (Eliot's own love life was notoriously conflicted; scholars are still discovering new details about the romantic turmoil he experienced—and caused.)
Eliot's influence on Western literary culture was immense. Poems like "The Waste Land" and "Four Quartets" cast a long shadow over 20th-century writing, and Eliot was regarded as the premier literary critic and tastemaker of his era. His achievements won him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948.
Historical Context
The early 20th century was a time of profound change. Inventions such as the airplane and telephone altered daily life significantly in a short time. Cities grew denser as people began flocking from the countryside to urban centers. New technologies and industries improved the quality of life for some, while creating polluted environments and unsafe working conditions for others.
When poems from Prufrock and Other Observations were first printed, World War I had just begun. The immense violence of the "Great War" shook ideals inherited from the previous century and shattered the old European order. The new technologies that had seemingly improved life for so many were used to kill on an industrial scale. All these developments made modernist artists deeply skeptical of the modern world. At the same time, modernist thinking stirred up animosity towards older ways of living; after all, it was the old European empires that had led the continent into war.
Many modernists, including Eliot, also wrestled with the problem of belief in an age of mass death and declining religious affiliation. While "La Figlia Che Piange" is more concerned with love problems, a hint of this conflict is visible in the speaker's self-accusing word "faithless" (line 16), as well as his revision from the religious "soul" to the secular "mind" (lines 11-12).
As an American poet who had just resettled in England, and who would spend most of his life in Europe, Eliot sought novel ways of depicting and addressing his increasingly globalized society. His poems incorporate a wide range of languages and literary traditions, as in the title and epigraph here.
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More “La Figlia Che Piange” Resources
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External Resources
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The Poet's Life and Work — A short biography of Eliot at The Poetry Foundation.
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An Introduction to Modernism — A Poetry Foundation feature on the movement Eliot helped define.
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The Poet's Love Life — An article about the complex romantic relationships that inspired Eliot's poems.
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An Original Printing — See the poem as it originally appeared in Prufrock and Other Observations (1917).
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The Poem Aloud — Listen to T. S. Eliot read "La Figlia Che Piange."
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LitCharts on Other Poems by T. S. Eliot
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