La Figlia Che Piange

Few emotions are more memorable or consequential than regret. A breakup, death, or any traumatic event conjure up intense emotions that seem impossible to remove from memory. The memory of a regretful event plays on an infinite loop in the mind of those affected, constantly reminding them of the problems of the past and making them wish for an escape from their emotions.

In his 1917 poem, “La Figlia che Piange,” translated from Italian as “The Girl Who Weeps”, T.S. Eliot explores the relationship between a traumatic, regretful event and the speaker’s idealized memory of it. The speaker describes a beautiful woman standing on a stair posing like a model for a classical work of art. The speaker describes a man who leaves the woman for other, leaving her utterly crushed. As the poem progresses, however, it becomes apparent that the woman exists not in reality, but in the speaker’s memory. In an attempt to cope with the regretful emotions that he associates with the event, he attempts, like an artist, to alter his memory to fit a classical ideal. The creation and interpretation of memory, he discovers, is like the creation of a work of art.

The poem’s title is an allusion to a work of classical art that sets the poem’s tone of artistic interpretation. According to the poet, “La Figlia che Piange” is the name of a statue in a Northern Italy museum that he searched for on a recommendation from a friend, but was unable to find. He had never seen the statue, but drew inspiration from his friend’s description of it. This story establishes a surface-level interpretation of the poem in which the speaker views memories which are not his own and attempts to imagine himself inside them. In this lens, the first stanza describes the speaker’s ...

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...the point of view shifts once again. This time the speaker, now in the present, talks on a historical time scale about the events of the first two stanzas. He no longer participates, but contemplates the emotions that remembering the girl brings forth. The speaker remembers how his memory of the girl “compelled [his] imagination” (18) for “many days and many hours” (19) and wonders how things would be if they had not broken up—“How they should have been together!” (21). In this point of view, the speaker is able to reflect on his emotions about the event. Without experiencing the traumatic emotions of regret, the speaker asks, would he have had the opportunity to write about it? Only in the idealized world of his memory was the speaker able to see the art in his traumatic situation. Without that experience, he comments, “I should have lost a gesture and a pose” (22).