“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.  

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47655/la-figlia-che-piange

Dick Russell © Richard M Russell

                   2025

 

Reaching for Odessa III

A Work in Progress
69

                        3

Donal stood guard his back to the boat

watching the approaches to the sandy beach

only to find on hearing noise in the rigging

sails unfurling as the craft made way

leaving the cove blown by a whipped-up wind

he’d been abandoned standing in moonlight

alone on the beach in sudden silence

wake waves slapping the sandy shore

Donal gazed at the moon in the azure water 

thinking an omen his shadow slanted

meeting a full moon’s reflection in the cove

backlit by the moon he saw his dead brother

come into the light his mother his father

his grandfather too whom Donal never knew

dressed in the uniform he wore in that war

against another generation’s minotaur

he saw they were smiling as if in a photo

he hoped they looked proud of him

he thought they did for they faded away

a cloud was passing the moon was shaded

he turned to find those footprints explained

barefoot clad in a peplos her hair falling free

Aphrodite? coming down the path to confront him

to ask him what once was unanswered

why did you come?  what brings you here?

dumbfounded he knew he’d bare his soul 

to this white clad goddess

an owlet on her wrist 

a raven on her shoulder

a spirit mother of the muses?  

Mnemosyne?

she spoke a language he thought was Greek

but her meaning was clear and her questioning deep

as the moon set over the enchanted hill

Dick Russell © Richard M Russell

                        2025

Reaching for Odessa II

A Work in Progress
68

2

Donal steered upwind fighting the sea surge

a curtain of rain shrouding the forecastle

when calmer waters were found in an island’s lee

where suddenly the wind swung aft 

drove his craft ashore through a narrow channel

onto a sandy beach between imposing cliffs 

entering a cove with quiet anchorage

where the punch of the wind had placed them

no island like this was on the charts

were they alive? had they crossed into legend?

sheltered from the storm 

what was this haven where a warm breeze ruffled

clear blue water glowing with light

dark sky overhead

firmly beached 

keel implanted in sand

Donal went ashore

plentiful driftwood available for a fire

made in a stone hearth already in place 

and an altar strewn with bones

for sacrifice

gathered around that hearth they lit a fire

with sparks from flints on dry wood shavings

igniting salt-stained kindling to make a blaze

piled high with wooden seashore detritus

flames leaping high in the gathering dark

watching and waiting for what would come next

there was a path they could see from the beach

leading up through bushes into evergreen trees

a well-trodden path they did not dare 

for they could see footprints there in the sand

a female foot they feared as much as a giant

if not Polyphemus who but Calypso or Circe

how else to explain what was happening

if this island existed 

they were far off course

on their way to Odessa 

they’d encountered brute force

Donal stood guard having taken the watch

cheerful if apprehensive 

they were safe because magic had brought them here

they would need magic and more to slay the minotaur

Dick Russell © Richard M Russell

                        2025