A Prayer for My Daughter its "metremes", or rhymical motifs, rather than common metrical devices. The poem also may be read to consist of straightforward iambic verse that relies on common metrical devices such as elision, acephalous lines, promotion, and metrical inversion. Lines 1, 2, 3, 5, and 8 of each stanza are iambic pentameter; lines 4, 6, and 7 are iambic tetrameter. For instance, using traditional principles of scansion, stanza two may be scanned as shown below, where syllables in all caps represent metrical beats, lower-case syllables represent metrical off-beats, the vertical bar represents the termination of a metrical foot, and apostrophes represent elisions.
Portrait of a Lady (poem) speaker takes his farewell from the Lady before going abroad; she wonders why they have not become friends, asks him to write to her and describes her melancholy, solitary fate; in the close the speaker thinks of the Lady possibly dying and questions his behavior towards her. Like many of Eliot's early poems, "Portrait of a Lady" shows heavy influence from Jules Laforgue. For example, in 'Another Complaint of my Lord Pierrot', Laforgue has the lines: While Eliot has the lines: Portrait of a Lady (poem) "Portrait of a Lady" is a poem by American-British poet T. S. Eliot (1888–1965),