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‘Portrait of a Lady’ by T.S. Eliot depicts the relationship between a callous young man and a sensitive older woman who desires love. The poem takes the reader through three different meetings between the two – the speaker and the older woman, i.e., the lady.
Often described as a companion poem to the better-known “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” which depicts the empty life of a middle-aged man, “Portrait of a Lady” shows a young man’s difficulty in forming an authentic relationship with a needy woman and in dealing with his own feelings about it.
The title of the poem is drawn from two sources: Henry James’s novel The Portrait of a Lady (1881) and Ezra Pound’s poem “Portrait D’une Femme” (1912).
Isabel Archer is a woman in her early twenties who comes from a genteel family in Albany, New York, in the late 1860s. Her mother died when she was a young girl, and her father raised her in a haphazard manner, allowing her to educate herself and encouraging her independence.
‘Portrait of a Lady’, in summary, charts the friendship between a man – though this time a younger man than J. Alfred Prufrock – and an older woman.
“Portrait of a Lady” is characteristic of Eliot’s early secular poetry in that it is preoccupied with the bourgeois lifestyle of Eliot’s English environs and candidly presents the mind of a male in a perfunctory relationship with a sophisticated woman.
