Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

In Ezra Pound's "Middle-Aged; A Study in Emotion," the narrator explores the emotional landscape of middle age, likening it to the buried and forgotten glory of a once-majestic king. The king's grave is disturbed only when tourists, in search of excitement or knowledge, tread upon it. This external disturbance only adds to the king's "useless riches," and so it is with the narrator's own internal world. The poem crafts a poignant metaphor for the emptiness that can accompany middle age, or indeed any period of life marked by lost dreams and faded passions.

The imagery of the tourists trampling over the pyramid, unearthing gold and taking photos, serves as a symbol for the hollowness of external validation or excitement in the face of internal barrenness. The tourists are fleeting, their merriment "transitory," while the dust that rises to coat the sarcophagus is permanent, becoming "yet another crust of useless riches for the occupant." These riches, like the narrator's memories and experiences, are beautiful but functionally worthless, gathering dust in the "hid cell" of his consciousness.

The idea that love now "rains down and so enriches some stiff case" further enhances the theme of emotional emptiness. In his younger years, the narrator's dreams and love were fires that lit his life. Now extinguished, they're replaced by a form of love that is as superficial and empty as gold flakes falling on a buried king. It doesn't change the essence of his emotional state, described as a "stiff case," but merely adorns it with "precious metaphors."

The concluding lines are especially evocative: "And so the space / Of my still consciousness / Is full of gilded snow, / The which, no cat has eyes enough / To see the brightness of." The metaphor of "gilded snow" captures the conflicted feelings perfectly. Snow is beautiful but cold, and when gilded, it's as if the surface beauty masks the underlying chill. His emotional landscape has become a thing of "invarious delight," attractive but monotonous, and so internally intricate that no one could ever truly see or understand its "brightness."

The overall tone of the poem is one of melancholic reflection. While clearly rich in experiences and emotional depth, the narrator feels disconnected from the vitality that once fueled his life. He's become a spectator of his own emotional world, which is now a relic of its former self, much like the sarcophagus of a long-forgotten king. Through intricate metaphor and vivid imagery, Pound encapsulates the existential ennui that can accompany periods of emotional stasis, creating a timeless snapshot of human emotion.

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