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Ezra Pound and women (weakness (compared with ephemeral/versatile things,…
Ezra Pound and women
weakness
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And she is dying piece-meal
of a sort of emotional anemia
=> identation : emptiness
=> anemia : lack
=> piece-meal : slow agony
The paired butterflies are already yellow with August
[...]
They hurt me. I grow older.
=> again, the woman is hurt by the absence of a man's affection
=> the two short sentences stand out ; the rhythm conveys the sharpness of her suffering
some interest ; that leads nowhere ; might prove
=> in Portrait d'une Femme, which could be seen as a poem of emancipation, Pound keeps weakening the power of the woman through diminishments
the same goes with her possessions :
The tarnished, gaudy, wonderful old work.
=> antithesis : show the paradoxical aspect of her possesions
=> some sort of a paraphenalia
"Make it new"
That never fits a corner or shows use,
Or finds its hour in the loom of days.
=> reference to the Fates ?
Uses fragmentation as a new way to create a portrait, a blason
topos of the woman and the sea (Horace, Ode to Pyrrha)
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objectification
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Your mind and you are our Sargasso Sea,
=> "our" : idea of possession
but altogether not so satisfactory lady
=> the compound adjective gives the impression that she is supposed to satisfy him, as would an object
the solitude
in The Garden : the woman is alone, surrounded by numerous children of the lower classes
Of the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor.
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power/emancipation
And I will come out to meet you
As far as Cho-fu-Sa.
=> indentations = distance
=> can be seen as a sign of emancipation, BUT it is still liked with a man : the woman does not exist by hersel. Also, she is still waiting for his autorisation.
in Portrait d'une Femme
London has swept about you this score years
=> central position, even in a "masculin" world
Great minds have sought you - lacking someone else.
=> the paradox is accentuated by the dash cutting the line, creating some sort of suspens
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And now you pay one. Yes, you richly pay :
=> in a capitalistic society, money and possesions give power
=>the repetition of the same statement (+same verb), strenghten the idea
Yet this is you.
=> with the volta, Pound recenters the text on the woman as a complete identity
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imprisonment
social norms
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played about the front gate
=> as opposed to the man's attitude (you came by on bamboo stilts)
=> trapped in the home even as a child
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I never laughed, being bashful.
=> the woman fits in society
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You have been second always.
=> clear reference to the usual role of women in patriarchal societies
=> she accepts it.
wedding
Go to the hideously wedded,
[...]
Go to the unluckily mated
Go to the bought wife
Go to the woman entailed.
=> "hideously"
=> passive voice shows the weakness
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No. You preferred it to the usual thing:
One dull man, dulling and uxorious.
=> marriage is seen as a boring prison
=> the feeling of boredom is accentuated by the use of the polyptotons
pregnancy
Pregnant with mandrakes, or with something else
=> makes reference to her refusal of having children
=> mandrakes are plants linked with the symbol of witches (who also were supposed not to want children)
=> Pound shows this lack of children as strange, especially with the use of the undefined pronoun and adverb
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