Portrait of a Lady

T. S. Eliot employs a long poetic line and also regularly uses half-lines. The long lines consist of pentameters (five poetic feet), alexandrines (six poetic feet) and heptameters (seven feet). The meter is predominantly iambic. An iambic foot consists of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. It is the most common meter in English poetry and is exactly suited to the conversational style of the poem, since speech in English tends to take on an iambic rhythm.

Thus, the first two lines are iambic heptameters: “Among the smoke and fog of a December afternoon / You have the scene arrange itself—as it will seem to do—” (Lines 1-2). These lines are followed by two iambic pentameters. “With ‘I have saved this afternoon for you’; / And four wax candles in the darkened room” (Lines 3-4). The first alexandrine follows in the next line: “Four rings of light upon the ceiling overhead” (Line 5). In that line, Eliot has made a substitution in the first foot. Instead of an iamb, he has used a spondee (“Four rings”), which is a foot in which both syllables are stressed.