by Eliot · Cluster: Appearance vs Reality · Beauty · Eyes and Sight
Abstract
Sonnet on a painted woman who stands beyond the reach of the viewer’s thought — an evanescent, lamia-like enigma watched by a silent parrot; mystery, the unattainable, the inscrutable feminine.
Connections
Topoi: Unattainable Beloved Motifs: Eyes and Sight, Birds, City Themes & Concepts: Beauty, Appearance vs Reality Forms & Genres: Sonnet
Testo integrale / Full text
On a Portrait
Among a crowd of tenuous dreams, unknown
To us of restless brain and weary feet,
Forever hurrying, up and down the street,
She stands at evening in the room alone.
Not like a tranquil goddess carved of stone
But evanescent, as if one should meet
A pensive lamia in some wood-retreat,
An immaterial fancy of one’s own.
No meditations glad or ominous
Disturb her lips, or move the slender hands;
Her dark eyes keep their secrets hid from us,
Beyond the circle of our thought she stands.
The parrot on his bar, a silent spy,
Regards her with a patient curious eye.
Song: ‘The moonflower opens to the moth’
The moonflower opens to the moth,
The mist crawls in from sea;
A great white bird, a snowy owl,
Slips from the alder tree.
Whiter the flowers, Love, you hold,
Than the white mist on the sea;
Have you no brighter tropic flowers
With scarlet life, for me?