“La Figlia Che Piange” (“young girl weeping”)
A Work in Progress
70
Glenn Hughes enjoyed passing on his own opinions on the now famous, or infamous, poets he’d met when he had gone to England funded by academic grants to study the poets who had founded the imagist school of poetry. Ezra Pound was the most notorious, T. S. Eliot most famous, Hilda Doolittle and Richard Aldington, the least known except to Glenn Hughes who had stayed with Aldington and his then partner, Dorothy Yorke, at his country cottage in England and house-sat it on a second occasion when Aldington had left Yorke and decamped from England to France. He’d also met H.D. in Paris and exchanged several letters with her. He’d sold her letters and many others to the literary archive at the University of Texas in Austin.
He had a theory on Eliot’s poem: La Figlia Che Piange. It had been published in 1917. Hughes thought the pair of lovers depicted were Richard Aldington and H.D. reasoning that Eliot knew them both well and would have been privy to their marriage breaking up in 1917 when Aldington started his affair with Dorothy Yorke. The affair started with Aldington climbing the stairs to a small upstairs room leaving his wife H.D. downstairs in her large bed sitting room. Eliot staged his poem around a staircase. Please reread it, he would tell his students, I do think the Aldington’s marital troubles gave him the idea.
If he had the poem to hand, he would discuss it as a piece of cinematography. How Eliot poses the participants. The poem starts off by saying: O quam te memorem virgo…but who’s the virgin, he’d ask? It is ambiguous.
Dick Russell © Richard M Russell
2025
