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.

As with his other images of dead beauty, Pound draws on a classic figure of feminine beauty to talk about how beauty itself is gone from the modern world. According to legend, the attractive sea nymph named Tyro was actually immortal. But to suggest here that she's dead might mean that beauty—something we think of as timeless—has actually died, and that without it, there's not much point to modern life.

As he continues his search for beauty, Pound gives us a moment of hope by alluding to a love poem by the 12th-century Provencal poet Arnaut Daniel. In this poem, the poet talks about meeting his lover by lamplight and kissing her. So here, Pound seems to indulge himself in the fantasy of actually reaching the ideal of beauty that he's looking for. But as you can imagine, the moment doesn't last long.

As Canto VII unfolds, Pound begins to talk about his ideal of beauty as a dancing woman. Unfortunately, his hope of promoting this kind of beauty in modern life is prevented by the old men of the modern world, whose boring talk "makes stiff about her a glass." This basically means that the dry, emotionless talk of modern people just ends up turning beauty into a dead object to be studied, but never enjoyed or appreciated.