Symbol Analysis
It can be tough to distinguish between the images of empty rooms and badly decorated rooms in this poem, but the two actually serve very different purposes. For example, Pound talks a lot of smack about poorly decorated rooms, which is his way of symbolically saying that the modern world has no clue what it's doing when it tries to imitate the beauty of bygone eras.
When he talks about wandering through empty rooms, though, Pound is a lot more melancholic than when he's criticizing people. Instead, he has a tone of sadness as he describes himself walking through empty rooms and looking for beauty. In this sense, he symbolically represents his own quest to look for beauty in the modern world, a quest that led him from America to England, then to Paris, and eventually to Fascist Italy, where we're betting he didn't find it.
- Lines 28-30: When he suddenly claims that "We also made ghostly visits," Pound introduces the image of walking through an old house that he remembers being in before, since "the stair […] knew us." By saying "we," he also seems to pull us into his journey, making us feel like we have a stake in what's going on.
Pound caps off this first mention of wandering through empty rooms when he says that we were "Knocking at empty rooms, seeking a buried beauty." So in other words, he's using the wandering through empty rooms as a symbol of the modern quest we should all be on to revisit the old books of the past and to look for true beauty in them. The beauty isn't gone, just "buried," meaning that we'll have to put in some work if we're going to uncover it. - Lines 32-33: As Pound keeps looking through the old house and searching for beauty, he knocks on doors and waits for an answer. In this case, he represents beauty as a beautiful person (probably a woman) who is supposed to answer his knocks. But unfortunately, beauty's "well formed fingers/ Lift no latch of bent bronze" to let Pound in to see her face to face. Worse yet, there's "no voice to answer," meaning that the house gives no evidence that the beauty Pound's seeking is anywhere inside. At this point, the beauty Pound is after is starting to seem like a figment of his imagination.
- Lines 41-42: After describing the sad experience of knocking on doors and getting no answers, Pound shifts his focus to the threshold spaces of the old house he's wandering through. More specifically, he focuses on the house's lintel. That makes us think of thresholds and spaces that are caught in-between two rooms, just as Pound feels himself caught between the modern time he's living in and the classical past that he wants to bring into the modern world. The fact that Pound compares the lintel he's standing beneath with Liu Ch'e's lintel creates a comparison between Pound's work and the poetry of Liu Ch'e, a Chinese poet from the 1300s. But the comparison is short-lived, as Pound feels like "Time [is] blacked out with the rubber." In other words, it's like someone just took a pink, rubber eraser and destroyed all of the history that still clings to the room Pound's walking through. For Pound, one of the worst aspects of the modern world is its tendency to not care about the past and to focus only on the present.
- Lines 45-47: Pound makes one final trip around the old house, focusing on the "Low ceiling and the Erard and silver." It really seems here as if Pound is remembering a specific room from his own life, complete with its "Four chairs [and] bow-front dresser." But this trip down memory lane will be the last of Pound's sad wanderings through empty rooms. After these lines, the poem quickly turns aggressive and hateful. Pound stops focusing on his sadness and turns angry when he thinks of the people who are responsible for banishing beauty from modern life. For more info on these enemies of Pound, check out our Shmoopy commentary on the imagery of "Locusts and Shells" in this poem.