The portrait of a lady summary line by line explanation
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'Portrait of a Lady' is a descriptive monologue written in 1911 at Harvard by T. S. Eliot. The poor lady is the female counterpart of Prufrock, a miserable soul longing for the touch of friendship and love which she never gets. The lady makes cautious advances to a man younger than herself. The poem is recited within the memory of the man, who is the speaker of the poem and deals with the psychological impasse of a sensitive young man who visits a lady, but the lady knows that there is an air of uncertainty in their amorous relationship, and their love is not going to be blessed with maturity. The lady makes the proposal of friendship or love to the handsome young man, but he shows no enthusiasm for her gestures of love.
The lady lectures him on the meaning of life, tries to win him over, makes fervent appeals of friendship, but the young man is all the time concerned how to succeed in preventing himself from being emotionally involved with the lady. The young man does not remain entirely unaffected by her revelation of friendship, but he cannot love her and searches for an excuse for a break. At length, having the excuse of a projected foreign tour, he pays the lady a final call to take his leave. When, with placid understatement and only half in reproach, she deplores that they 'have not developed into friends,' he suffers the humiliation of seeming in the wrong and goes away shaken though not regretful. ‘Portrait of a Lady’ is concerned with the failure of a friendship to establish itself in any reality, to achieve any true meaning. The lady is a romantic to the core and it is largely her romanticism which alienates the man.
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The chapter ‘The Portrait of a Lady’ is the story of the author and his grandmother. The grandmother was an old woman with a wrinkled face. The author had always seen her like this, for the past twenty years. She appeared to be so old that he could not imagine her being ‘young and pretty’, someone who had a husband. She was short, fat and slightly bent. The author had seen his grandfather’s portrait- an old man with a turban and a long white beard covering his chest. To the author, his grandfather didn’t seem like a man who could have a wife and children, but someone who could have lots of grandchildren. His grandmother used to move around the house in ‘Spotless White’ with her one hand resting on her waist and her other hand counting the beads of her rosary. In the initial days, the author and his grandmother had a good relationship. She used to wake him up and get him ready for school. She used to pack the things required by him for the day and walked him to school everyday. She used to visit the temple that was attached to the school. She had a routine of reading the scriptures. The author along with other children sat on the verandah singing alphabets and morning prayers. They both used to come back home together with stray dogs roaming around them as his grandmother would carry the stale chapattis to feed them. Soon, the parents of the author who went to the city to settle in and called them. As they reached the city, his relationship with his grandmother took a turn. Though they shared the room, there bond grew apart. He started going to an English medium school, she no longer accompanied him to his school, and there were no longer stray dogs who roamed around them while walking back home. She, however, used to ask him about his day and what he had learned. She didn’t understand anything as everything was in another language which she could not understand. She didn’t approve of the new syllabus that he was studying because she thought that they did not teach him about God and the scriptures. They saw less of each other. As the days passed, he grew older and soon went to the university. He had his own room and this made their relationship sour. She stopped talking to everyone and spent her whole day sitting at her spinning wheel, reciting prayers and moving beads of the rosary with one hand. However, she loved feeding sparrows in the verandah at dawn. Breaking bread into pieces and feeding it to the birds was her daily routine. The birds would sit on her legs, her head, some even on the shoulders. Soon, the author decided to go abroad for further studies. She came to the railway station to leave him off. She was not sentimental, continuously recited her prayers, her mind lost in the prayers, and she kissed him on the forehead. After five years, as he returned home, she was there, came to pick him at the station, was still the same as she had been five years ago. She clasped him within her arms and didn’t say a word. She still used to feed her sparrows. One day, she didn’t recite her prayers but instead collected the women of the neighbourhood, got a drum and started singing. The next morning, she was ill with mild fever. The doctor said that there was nothing to worry about but she was sure that her end was near. She didn’t want to waste her time talking to anyone in the family anymore but spend her last hours in reciting her prayers laying on the bed. She died and so her body lay on the bed, lifeless. As they prepared for her funeral, they saw all the sparrows sitting in the verandah around her, mourning her death.