by Eliot · Cluster: Dreams · Moon
Abstract
Ironic flirtation lyric: the speaker’s moonlit posturing deflated by the lady’s cool questions; love as failed communication, irony and self-deflating wit.
Connections
Topoi: Unattainable Beloved Motifs: Moon, Music and Song Themes & Concepts: Romantic Love, Alienation Forms & Genres: Lyric
Testo integrale / Full text
Conversation Galante
I observe: ‘Our sentimental friend the moon!
Or possibly (fantastic, I confess)
It may be Prester John’s balloon
Or an old battered lantern hung aloft
To light poor travellers to their distress.’
She then: ‘How you digress!’
And I then: ‘Someone frames upon the keys
That exquisite nocturne, with which we explain
The night and moonshine; music which we seize
To body forth our own vacuity.’
She then: ‘Does this refer to me?’
‘Oh no, it is I who am inane.
‘You, madam, are the eternal humorist,
The eternal enemy of the absolute,
Giving our vagrant moods the slightest twist!
With your air indifferent and imperious
At a stroke our mad poetics to confute —’
And — ‘Are we then so serious?’
La Figlia Che Piange
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.