Canto VII Women & Femininity Quotes

In this first line of the poem, Pound alludes to the historical figure Eleanor of Aquitaine, who divorced her French husband and went to England to marry the king there. After the shine wore off on their relationship, though, the king imprisoned her while he had an affair with a younger woman. Basically, Pound seems to be suggesting that truly beautiful women are treated poorly by men who only care about getting what they want out of people instead of a true partnership.

In one of Canto VII's extended-iest metaphors, Pound finds himself wandering through an old house and looking for "a buried beauty." But as we find out, there is no hand to open a door for Pound. And as we can tell from the descriptions of the feminine hand, Pound is representing classical beauty with an attractive, graceful woman. The woman only has a sort of ghostly presence at this point in the poem, though, since she's not actually a real person, but only an ideal in Pound's mind.

This line can be a little tough to figure out, since it's actually a reference to another poem that Pound wrote in his bygone days. In this earlier poem, Pound basically talks about how the world becomes a completely dead and empty place following the death of a beautiful woman. He seems to bring it up at this point in Canto VII for the sake of showing how bare the world feels when beauty itself has died. Again, we're not talking about an actual woman here, but the idea of beauty itself.