Modern American Poetry

(^346) David Bromwich
From this fortunate position—a voyeur but one not in search of a
voyeur’s pleasure—Eliot imagines a meeting with a possible consummation
between the woman and a man. (The man, we are free to imagine, is the
speaker himself in a different life.)
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.
The compromised interest of the observer has much in common with the
attitude of a Jamesian narrator, though even by the terms of that analogy the
speaker of “La Figlia che Piange” is evasive—calling his anxiety and
bewilderment “cogitations” and his shadowy desire a concern with “a gesture
and a pose.” He is troubled most by an intimation that the woman is morally
innocent, as he somehow is not. And yet her life will be filled to a depth of
experience he does not hope to share.
A larger impulse of ordinary sympathy is at work in Crane’s poem. He tries—
one can feel the pressure of the effort—to associate his fancies with the actual life of
the woman he writes about. Yet as his ingenuity stretches to cover the distance
between them, the questions his poem asks take on a careful obliqueness like Eliot’s.
The love that his grandmother felt seems now so far off that, if he should cross the
house to retrieve her letters, each step would feel like a passage of countless years:
Over the greatness of such space
Steps must be gentle.