Ezra Pound

Shop Girl

Shop Girl - meaning Summary

Fleeting Encounter Reframed

Pound presents a brief, charged encounter in which a young shop girl leans against the speaker for an instant. The poem contrasts that immediate, vulnerable human presence with literary talk and famous poetic archetypes—Swinburne’s women, a shepherdess, Baudelaire’s harlots—suggesting how culture frames and perhaps diminishes real persons by fitting them into literary types. The tone is concise, observant and quietly distancing.

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For a moment she rested against me Like a swallow half blown to the wall, And they talk of Swinburne's women, And the shepherdess meeting with Guido. And the harlots of Baudelaire.

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