Dante’s Beatrice would not have cut her hair, as Emily did in preparation for Scripps, ignoring Eliot’s mutter at how barbarous it was. As far as Eliot was concerned, whenever his poems entertain a possibility of love, long hair comes into play, going back to the hair over La Figlia’s arms. In The Waste Land a speaker dreams of a girl’s wet hair after staying out late in a garden, and there’s the sweetness of ‘brown hair over the mouth blown’ in Ash Wednesday. Long hair aroused desire, most blatantly in The Scarlet Letter when Hester Prynne, meeting her one-time lover in the woods–the frontier (the moral wilderness) is close by in seventeenth-century Boston–takes off her sober cap and shakes down her hair. Eliot is pure Arthur Dimmesdale, the impeccable minister, leaving the woman he has loved to face her hard lot alone. Temperamentally, Eliot is a throwback to Dimmesdale with his hand hiding his heart, who secretes desire, fixates it on one woman–and forbids it.
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