Moeurs Contemporaines - Analysis

Modern mores as a set of case files

Pound’s Moeurs Contemporaines reads like a dossier of social “types” collected by a sharp, slightly merciless observer. The central claim running through these numbered pieces is that contemporary sophistication is often a costume: people borrow the outward signs of culture, purity, vigor, or freedom, but their inner lives remain oddly stunted—sexually, intellectually, or morally. The poem keeps showing characters who are surrounded by symbols of refinement (estates, harps, cults, books, famous names) while acting with a kind of childish dependency or hollow appetite. The tone is satiric and clipped, as if each portrait is pinned down and labeled.

At the same time, the poem is not pure mockery. It eventually turns toward a quieter, almost tender attention to what is passing away. The work’s sting comes from that tension: the speaker’s disgust with fashionable emptiness sits beside a real grief for older forms of seriousness and courtesy.

Mr. Styrax: strength without aesthetics, purity without depth

The first sketch sets the pattern: a big, socially “correct” figure whose life is absurd at the core. Mr. Hecatomb Styrax is both muscular and socially ambitious—a ‘blue’ and a climber of mountains—yet he marries at twenty-eight still a virgin, and the poem makes a point of the bureaucratic pedantry around it, noting that Virgo has been “made male” in medieval Latin. That detail matters because it frames his “purity” as a technicality, almost a scholastic joke, not a spiritual accomplishment.

His wife ricochets from one extreme to another: she drops the vicar because he lacks “vehemence” and becomes high-priestess of a modern and ethical cult. The comedy is that everyone is hunting for intensity—religious excess, ethical cults, mountain climbing—while no one seems capable of ordinary, grounded perception. The punchline that Mr. Styrax does not believe in asthetics makes him a kind of emblem: the modern man can be strong, earnest, and “ethical,” yet fundamentally unable to recognize art, form, or subtle feeling. Even the aside about the brother “tak[ing] to gipsies” and the son-in-law objecting to “perfumed cigarettes” turns rebellion into consumer preference: the poem makes vice and virtue look equally like lifestyle choices.

Clara and the stuck door: neither in nor out

In the “Clara” section, the satire becomes less flamboyant and more bleak. Clara begins with the promise of public shine—a potential celebrity at sixteen—paired with a telling emotional deficit: a distaste for caresses. She ends up writing “from a convent,” but the convent does not read as sanctuary; her life is obscure and troubled, her second husband won’t divorce her, and her mind remains uncultivated. The repeated blockage culminates in the line She will neither stay in, nor come out, which turns her into a human threshold: unable to commit to renunciation, unable to return to life, and unable to desire her own children.

The contradiction here is cruelly clear. The convent and the language of “issue” and “divorce” imply heavy moral frameworks, but Clara’s real crisis is not theological—it’s a failure of desire and direction. Pound’s tone is cold, but it also suggests pity: the modern subject can have options (celebrity, marriage, religion) and still remain fundamentally unformed.

The clever bunch: culture as party chatter

“Soirée” compresses the poem’s social diagnosis into a single exclamation. The room contains people adjacent to art—mother and father who “wrote verses,” a son in “a publisher’s office,” a daughter’s friend “undergoing a novel”—and the visiting American responds: This is a darn’d clever bunch! The word “clever” lands like a verdict on an entire class. Everything becomes résumé material, proof of being “in” the literary world, while the poem withholds any evidence of actual insight or feeling.

“Sketch 48 b. 11” sharpens the indictment by shifting from cleverness to arrested development. Here is a twenty-seven-year-old whose “home mail” is opened by a “maternal parent,” and whose “office mail” may be opened by the other parent—yet the person is also an officer, / and a gentleman, / and an architect. The social titles are intact, but the basic adulthood of privacy and autonomy is missing. Pound’s comedy works by stacking these facts without comment; the absurdity is the comment.

Harps, satin bows, and unopened books: the museum of purity

The “Nodier raconte…” sequence is the poem’s richest emblem of cultivated emptiness. It begins with a “faded” photograph: a lady at a harp, an infant in a satin-lined basket, and a mutual gaze where the parent “re-beams” at the child. The details—satin, the “satin-like bow on the harp,” the careful costume of the era—feel tender at first, like a relic of domestic intimacy.

Then the poem repeats the harp-bow detail in a contemporary novelist’s home, and the repetition turns sinister. You pass through hall after hall, conservatory follows conservatory; lilies lift “symbolical cups” whose “symbolical pollen has been excerpted,” an image of beauty sterilized into pure sign. Near the harp sit a copy of Hatha Yoga and neat piles of unopened, unopening books. The house is a shrine to refinement and spirituality, but it is also a place where nothing is actually read, absorbed, or lived. When the novelist speaks of “the monarch” and the purity of her soul, the poem invites us to hear purity as performance—another satin bow pinned to the room.

The hinge: from social satire to the sea’s blunt inscription

“Stele” is the poem’s turn. After the crowded interiors—estates, soirées, conservatories—the scene opens to the shore: a man who, After years of continence, throws himself into a sea of six women, and now lies quenched by the “poluphloisboious” coast. The learned Homeric echo sits beside raw exhaustion: appetite burns out, the body cools, and the grand comedy of “mores” suddenly looks like mortality.

The inscription SISTE VIATOR (stop, traveler) makes the reader, too, pause. It’s as if Pound is saying: you can laugh at the masks, but the end of the story is always a body on the shoreline, the noise of the sea, and a brief command to attend.

Old men with beautiful manners: nostalgia that refuses to be cheap

In “I Vecchii,” the tone changes again—less acid, more mournful. They will come no more, the speaker says of the old men with beautiful manners, and suddenly the poem values something it previously treated with suspicion: the small disciplines of speech, memory, and public behavior. These old men are vivid not because they’re “great,” but because they are particular—one like a “tout petit garçon” with a blouse full of apples, calling out Oh! Abelard! as if it were too abstruse; another like a “Texas colonel,” dropping practical wisdom—Why flay dead horses?—and then, unexpectedly, There was once a man called Voltaire.

Their talk is messy, comic, historically layered, and alive. They remember cheering Verdi in Rome, and the guards who “couldn’t stop them”; their civility contains a kind of public spirit. Against the earlier portraits—mail opened by parents, books never opened—these men represent a world where culture is not décor but lived memory and argument, something carried on a morning walk along the Row or the Chelsea Embankment.

Ritratto: fame’s footprints, and a speaker who can’t keep the past

The final “Ritratto” seals the elegiac mood with a small encounter. An old lady asks about Mr. Lowell, then recounts him stomp[ing] into my bedroom, insisting: Do I… Care too much for society dinners? The name-dropping is comic, but it’s also a record of how history survives: not in monuments, but in anecdotes with scuffed edges. When she adds, Shelley used to live in this house, the poem lets the past hover in the room like a ghostly credential—half reverence, half parlor talk.

The closing fact—I never saw her again—matters because it repeats the poem’s deepest feeling: people, manners, and living links to culture disappear, leaving behind only stories, objects, and secondhand proofs. The satire at the start hasn’t been revoked; it has been complicated. Pound can’t quite forgive modern pretension, but he also can’t quite stop wanting a world where culture is more than a satin ribbon on a harp.

A sharper question the poem leaves behind

If the novelist’s books are unopened, unopening and Clara is neither “in” nor “out,” what counts as a real opening in this poem—what actually breaks the sealed life? The bleak answer suggested by “Stele” is that the body opens first: continence flips to excess, excess to quenching, and the traveler is told to stop only at the edge of death. Everything else—ethics, spirituality, cleverness—can remain perfectly arranged and perfectly shut.