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 furniture in a room, and we're not really sure why at first. As he keeps doing it, though, we begin to realize that he's being sarcastic, suggesting that modern people have absolutely no clue what true style is, and that their attempts to decorate their lives with class and beauty are total failures because they don't understand the history of art and beauty like Pound does.

As the poem continues, Pound keeps bringing up images of fake Greek columns and similar decorations to show modern readers how easy it is to see through their phony attempts to look cultured. For Pound, there's just no substitute to reading the classics and knowing what you're talking about. Unfortunately, modern folks aren't willing to put in this kind of study. They just want to look like they know what they're doing, rather than actually knowing it.

• Lines 13-15: Not everyone is gong to understand these lines because they're all written in French. And without a Google search, even fewer people are going to realize that these lines are taken from a story by the French author Gustave Flaubert. Further still, it's hard to figure out what Pound's getting at even after you know where these lines come from and realize that they just list a bunch of details about an old house. It's not until you really grasp the tone of Pound's whole poem that you begin to realize that Pound is probably quoting these lines with irony, making fun of people's tendency to focus on unimportant things like the objects in their house instead of worrying about the good stuff, like whether or not the whole world is falling apart. 
• Lines 16-22: In these lines, we really get a sense of just how much Pound has it out for the modern folks—who are to blame for the death of beauty, of course. More specifically, he seems to blame boring, middle class people who spend their lives trying to act like rich, cultured people without taking the time and effort to actually educate themselves. Oh, and when he talks about "columns of false marble," Pound symbolizes the fact that these people want their houses to look like buildings from classical Greece. But the fact that they use cheap, false marble means that they really don't get the point. If you're going to build something beautiful, you can't be worried about doing it quickly or cheaply. It has to take time, energy, and resources. And as we read on, we realize that the house with the false marble columns isn't even owned by the people inside it. It's a rental or "leasehold" building, meaning that any repairs or improvements people make to it are going to be quick and slapdash. The people living in this place don't actually have any stake in whether or not it will last. They just want to put in cheap, tacky decorations that'll last a few years until they move back out. 
• Lines 76-80: By this point in the poem, we might think we've seen the last of tacky decorations. But that's not the case, as Pound places us "between walls of a sham Mycenian,/ 'Toc' sphinxes, sham-Memphis columns." The repetition of the word "sham" alone should do the trick for us. If the people just ignored the past and made their homes ultra-modern, that'd be one thing. But the fact that these people try to recapture the beauty and greatness of the past and do such a terrible job is what really bothers Pound. 
• Line 89: By this point, Pound is starting to feel a glimmer of hope for the future of humanity in general. But just when things might get a little better, "The old room of the tawdry class asserts itself." Pound is still talking about the connection between lame modern people and the tacky rooms they tend to hang out in. And overall, the message seems to be: if you spend all of your time hanging out in tacky rooms, how do you ever expect to be something other than a tacky person?
• Lines 109-110: One last time, Pound can't help but mention "the tawdry table" that's being occupied by the same old men whom Pound blames for the problems with the modern world. To learn more about these men, check out our analysis of "Locusts and Shells" in Canto VII. Pound sees himself as a poet trying to jar these boring people back to life. But all they want to do is sit around their boring dinner table and "put forks in cutlets" without speaking to one another about anything worthwhile. And we all know how brutal a boring dinner conversation is, right?