There are certain verses of poems that I have been carrying with me. And one of those verses were the six from the Portrait of a Lady by T. S. Elliot. Where I heard these verses first, I can vividly recall – a friend who introduced them to me. Since then I have came across these lines many time and fondly kept in my memory as something that I cherish.
I am not very fond of the whole poem. It seemed too long and boring for my taste. In short the poem charts the friendship between a man and an older woman. In the first section, they attend a concert together; in the second, she talks regretfully of being old, and envies the young man his youth (he, meanwhile, busies himself reading comics and the sports pages of the newspaper); in the third, he tells her he is going abroad, and she makes him promise to write to her. After he leaves her, he reflects on how he has treated her. Does he have the right to smile? Has he treated her badly?
But irrespective of the story of the poem, I found these lines staying with me after all those years. The words and narrative paints a very busy picture and kind of clouds my mind. I can almost hear the violins and cracked cornets playing a symphony that I do not enjoy like loud rock music on mid day during work.
“Among the windings of the violins
And the ariettes Of cracked cornets
Inside my brain a dull tom-tom begins
Absurdly hammering a prelude of its own,
Capricious monotone
That is at least one definite ‘false note’.”
I find this to have that perfect balance, living on the line between sanity and insanity. This is a perfect example of sensory overload where you still can detect the deviation from the chaos we live in. Even though we plough through the drudgery of every day life, all the mayhem and stresses, we can still notice the slightest of changes in our surroundings. We may not pick them up instantly, but we eventually take notice.