Bring on the tough stuff - there’s not just one right answer.
- What do you think Pound means when he refers to modern people as "Thin husks I had known as men […] speaking a shell of speech…"? What is Pound's main beef with these guys?
- Of all Pound's Cantos, this is definitely one of the harder ones to follow. Why would Pound make this Canto so difficult?
- What about the themes might help us explain how obscure and all-over-the-place this Canto is?
- If Pound thinks of Helen of Troy as a symbol of classic beauty, why does he repeatedly refer to her as a destroyer of cities, ships, and men? Is he trying to make us think about classical beauty in new ways? How so?
- One of the major tropes in this poem is the poem's speaker wandering through an old house and searching for something (or someone)? What is the poet's speaker looking for? Do you think the speaker finds what he's looking for? Why or why not?
- In this poem, Pound draws a pretty clear line between things that are living and things that have no life in them. What does Pound tend to mean when he talks about life, so to speak? Is he literally talking about something with a pumping heart, or is his idea of life something more symbolic?
- What do you make of the final image in this poem, where Pound describes the Italian tyrant Alessandro de Medici as a pair of "Eyes floating in dry, dark air/[…] The stiff, still features" (122-124)? What kind of final thought or emotion does this give to the things Pound has been talking about in Canto VII?
- Do you think Canto VII is ultimately hopeful about the possibility of recovering our sense of classic beauty in the modern world, or is it pessimistic? What makes you say so?