Symbol Analysis
Our speaker is not above the obvious. For lots of the poem, he compares our search for beauty in the world to an attractive woman. This woman, though, is always spoken of in ghostly terms, and it's unclear whether she's a figment of Pound's imagination or an actual woman Pound might have known during his lifetime.
In any case, the ghostly presence of this beautiful woman in Canto VII definitely seems to capture Pound's uncertainty about whether the beauty he's looking for is something that can actually be attained or if it's just some pipe dream that could only ever exist in his head. Not knowing the answer himself, Pound elects to leave this question with his readers, at least for the time being…
- Lines 31-33: While he's wandering through the empty (symbolic) house, Pound tells us that he's looking for a buried beauty. But unfortunately, he also tells is in lines 30 and 31 that "the sun-tanned gracious and well-formed fingers/ Lift no latch of bent bronze, no Empire handle." Worse yet, there is "no voice to answer." In these lines, Pound implies that some beautiful feminine presence might be somewhere inside the house of his mind. But he just can't find her, and she doesn't give any answer to his calls. Shmoopers, can we just pause for a second to acknowledge that these lines are a big ol' bummer? In one of the saddest moments of this poem, Pound seems to be on the verge of giving up his search for beauty. By this point, he's spent the better part of his life trying to make the world understand his point of view and trying to get people to appreciate everything that's beautiful in life. Alas, ain't gonna happen.
- Lines 56-59: After wandering through the rooms of his mind and looking for beauty, Pound wonders if beauty is actually "dead as Tyro." Tyro was the name of a nymph who was raped by the sea god Poseidon. Here, Pound is no doubt wondering if the modern world has ruined beauty in an irreversible way, and he seems genuinely concerned that all of this efforts to find beauty might be for nothing. Follow this concern, he yells out the name "Eleanor," which probably refers to Helen of Troy, the symbol of classical beauty whom Pound feels to be fading away from him as his despair grows.
- Lines 61-68: But just when his hope starts to wane again, Pound finds his feet and mentions "Lamplight at Buovilla," which is an allusion to poetry from medieval France that focuses on the poet's love for a beautiful woman. As he continues, Pound mentions how "Nicea moved before me," claiming that his ideal of beauty is still somewhere in his mind, guiding his actions. Pound ends the passage by saying "We alone having being." In other words, he thinks that the only things in the world that are actually real are himself and his ideal of beauty. Everyone else has been robbed of life by ignorance and stupidity, and only Pound knows how to bring them back to life. And that, folks, is what people today would probably call Narcissistic Personality Disorder.
- Lines 84-87: In one last effort to call up his ideal of beauty and show it to his readers, Pound talks about the "Square even shoulders and the satin skin" of the woman who's supposed to symbolize beauty. But unfortunately, this woman's cheeks are "gone" because she's been made unhealthy and sickly by the warped modern world. Instead, this woman is totally imprisoned by the dead, boring talk of modern men, whose language "makes stiff about her a glass." Here, you can picture the beautiful woman being put underneath a glass dome and turned into a specimen by the shell-like words and empty thoughts of modern people who don't care about beauty like they should (at least according to Pound).