Locusts and Shells
When Pound compares modern people to pesky insects and calls them "shells" of real human beings, it might seem like he's being really harsh. And he is. But on the other hand, these images are also...
Empty Rooms
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...
Tacky Decorations
As if the empty rooms in this poem weren't bad enough, the speaker also has to contend with rooms that are full of tacky decorations. Early in Canto VII, Pound starts listing off all of the furnitu...
The Beautiful Woman
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...