Portrait of a Lady

Musical imagery is a recurring motif. It is introduced in Part 1, with the lady’s comments about Chopin’s Preludes; the speaker picks up on this reference with positive images of violins and cornets heard from a distance. The imagery reappears in Line 31, but this time it is filtered through the speaker’s agitated state of mind as “cracked cornets” (Line 31) and then takes a full-on dissonant character:

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’ (Lines 32-35).

Music thus becomes a symbol of an oppressive rather than harmonious state of mind. The “false note” is also a nice characterization of the speaker’s strained politeness throughout his interactions with the lady.

Music imagery returns in Part 2, also strongly associated with the speaker’s perspective; he compares the lady’s voice to “the insistent out-of-tune / Of a broken violin on an August afternoon” (Lines 56-57). Clearly, the young man has no patience for her insinuations that they grow closer. Later in Part 2, the mellifluous music of Chopin, which leaves the speaker cold, is implicitly contrasted with the music from a “mechanical and tired” (Line 79) street piano, which “Reiterates some worn-out common song” (Line 80). Despite the barrage of negative adjectives, that piano still has an insidious power to convey some unstated emotion that disturbs the young man.

In the final appearance of the music motif, the lady’s favorite Chopin piano pieces return to the speaker’s mind; this time he links them to a vision of the lady’s death: The music is “successful with a ‘dying fall’” (Line 122). Her death might, he thinks, leave her with an advantage over him—she would be gone but he would still be left to sort out his own troubled feelings.