Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Mina Loy’s "Three Moments in Paris: 3. Magasins du Louvre" is an unsettling meditation on commodification, artificiality, and the tension between innocence and experience. Set in the grand department store Magasins du Louvre, the poem presents a world where dolls, mannequins, and women alike become objects of display, their gazes and gestures laden with unspoken meanings. The poem's refrain—"All the virgin eyes in the world are made of glass"—acts as both an indictment and an observation, suggesting that purity is not an organic state but a constructed illusion, a polished emptiness that conceals nothingness rather than insight.

The opening assertion is both stark and ironic. The phrase "virgin eyes" carries connotations of innocence, naivety, and untainted perception, yet Loy immediately undercuts this with the revelation that they "are made of glass." The image evokes dolls' eyes—unblinking, lifeless, manufactured rather than natural. This establishes a central paradox: the only gaze that appears truly innocent is one that is entirely artificial. These eyes do not see but only reflect, creating the illusion of vision while remaining inert.

Loy then builds a setting filled with eerie stillness and consumer excess: "Long lines of boxes / Of dolls / Propped against banisters / Walls and pillars / Huddled on shelves." The repetition of prepositional phrases—against, on, along—suggests an accumulation of objects, emphasizing their abundance and arrangement. The dolls are not animated but propped, huddled—words that imply both passivity and confinement. They are not positioned as individuals but as a mass-produced collective, evoking the mechanization of femininity in commercial culture. The addition of "composite babies with arms extended / Hang from the ceiling / Beckoning / Smiling / In a profound silence" intensifies the unease. These dolls, suspended above the floor, mimic human gestures—beckoning, smiling—yet their silence makes them ghostly, their supposed warmth undercut by their inability to truly communicate. They exist purely for display, their appeal designed but hollow.

The silence of the dolls is paralleled by the absence of human engagement: "Which the shop walker left trailing behind him / When he ambled to the further end of the gallery / To annoy the shop girl." The shop walker, a figure of authority in the store, is disengaged from the objects around him. His interest is not in the dolls but in the shop girl, whom he moves toward not to converse with but to "annoy." This hints at a gendered power dynamic—men in this space interact with women in ways that are dismissive, trivial, or objectifying. The shop girl, much like the dolls, is simply another presence in this commercialized tableau, her agency disregarded.

The refrain returns, now expanded: "All the virgin eyes in the world are made of glass / They alone have the effrontery to / Stare through the human soul / seeing nothing / Between parted fringes." The word "effrontery" suggests that the blank gaze of the glass eyes is intrusive, even arrogant in its unwavering focus. Yet, despite their intensity, these eyes "see nothing." There is no depth behind them, no understanding, no perception. The phrase "Between parted fringes" hints at a feminine presence—perhaps real women, perhaps dolls—but in either case, the eyes fail to register their humanity. This critique extends beyond the dolls themselves, suggesting that the cultural ideal of virginity, of unblemished femininity, is a constructed absence rather than a genuine state of being. It is a way of looking that negates rather than affirms, a purity that does not comprehend the world but merely reflects it back without insight.

Loy then shifts focus to two women passing by the dolls, observed by the speaker: "One cocotte wears a bowler hat and a sham camellia / And one an iridescent boa / For there are two of them / Passing." The word "cocotte"—a term for a courtesan or kept woman—immediately contrasts with the artificial virginity of the dolls. These women are experienced, aware, adorned in theatrical fashion, their bowler hat and boa suggesting both playfulness and performance. The bowler hat, a traditionally masculine accessory, might hint at subversion, while the "sham camellia"—a fake flower—reinforces the poem’s themes of artificiality. The contrast between these women and the dolls is clear: the cocottes possess experience, sexuality, a lived presence, yet they too are aware of the performative nature of their existence.

The next lines suggest a moment of recognition between the two women: "And the solicitous mouth of one is straight / The other curved to a static smile." One woman is serious, perhaps anxious; the other maintains a smile that, notably, is "static," as if fixed in place, not entirely natural. The contrast between these two expressions hints at an unspoken exchange—an awareness that is at once intimate and concealed.

This awareness is sharpened in the following passage: "They see the dolls / And for a moment their eyes relax / To a flicker of elements unconditionally primeval." The women momentarily drop their practiced expressions, revealing something raw, elemental—perhaps a recognition of their own commodification, or a fleeting recollection of childhood innocence before experience altered them. However, this moment does not last. "And now averted / Seek each other's surreptitiously / To know if the other has seen." The women check each other’s reactions in secrecy, unsure whether the moment of vulnerability was shared or only imagined. There is a tension here—an acknowledgment that must be carefully concealed, lest it expose too much. Their interaction is coded, delicate, existing in the margins of what can be openly expressed.

The speaker, too, is caught in this moment of recognition, but in a different way: "While mine are inextricably entangled with the pattern on the carpet / As eyes are apt to be / In their shame / Having surprised a gesture that is ultimately intimate." The speaker looks downward, ashamed to have witnessed this fleeting exchange. There is a sense of trespassing on something private, an "ultimately intimate" moment that was not meant to be observed. The phrase "entangled with the pattern on the carpet" suggests avoidance, the discomfort of having seen something too raw, too revealing. This reaction underscores the poem’s exploration of looking—what it means to gaze, to perceive, to recognize something unspeakable in another.

The poem closes with its refrain once more: "All the virgin eyes in the world are made of glass." This repetition now carries a deeper resonance. The glass-eyed dolls, with their unseeing stare, contrast with the human figures in the poem—the cocottes, the speaker, even the shop girl—all of whom experience complex, unspoken emotions. The so-called purity of glass eyes is revealed to be a lack, an inability to register the nuances of lived experience. True perception, true intimacy, exists in the flickers, the averted glances, the hesitant recognition of something real behind the masks of artifice.

"Magasins du Louvre" is a striking critique of femininity as a commodity, a meditation on the ways in which women are made into objects of display while still maintaining interior lives that defy such reduction. Loy’s modernist approach—her fragmented syntax, her juxtaposition of stillness and movement, her use of repetition—mirrors the tension between the artificial and the real, the aesthetic and the emotional. The department store setting, filled with lifeless dolls and wandering figures, becomes a microcosm for a broader societal structure, one in which women must navigate the fine line between being seen and being truly recognized. In the end, it is not the dolls' glass eyes that hold power, but the fleeting, vulnerable moment when two women meet each other’s gaze—and quickly, carefully, look away.

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