Portrait of a Lady (poem)

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Portrait of a Lady is the title of a poem by T. S. Eliot, first published in 1915 in Prufrock and Other Observations.

The title derives from the novel by Henry James, and employs as an epigraph the famous quotation from Marlowe's The Jew of Malta, "...but that was in another country, / And besides, the wench is dead."

Eliot, it can be noted, was not the only 20th-century poet to borrow James's title. William Carlos Williams also wrote a poem titled "Portrait of a Lady," while Ezra Pound wrote a poem he called "Portrait d'une Femme."

The poem is one of the two Bostom poems written by Eliot, the other being The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. It gives us an insight into upper class society of the time as something rather empty and forlorn. The main focus of the poem, however, is the speaker, who in his own depiction of this Lady who belongs to this upper class society as soulless and empty, reveals himself as the one who is truly callous and unfeeling.