The Social Order - Analysis

A small poem that sees society as performance

Pound’s central claim is blunt: what passes for social order is often just a set of polished gestures that hide appetite, hypocrisy, and petty theft. In Part I, the world of officials and handshakes looks “proper,” even flattering. In Part II, the world of death and mourning looks “proper,” even holy. But both scenes are shown as performances that let people take what they want—attention, respectability, property—while the truth of feeling and belief is either irrelevant or actively suppressed.

The official’s “caressing air” as a public mask

Part I is almost cruelly economical: we are given a government official, a wife several years his senior, and his caressing air when he shakes hands with young ladies. Pound’s details set up a social triangle—older wife, younger women, public touch—that reads like quiet scandal without ever naming a crime. The point isn’t adultery as such; it’s the way authority learns to feel intimate on cue. A handshake, supposedly neutral and civic, becomes a small sanctioned flirtation, a way power circulates through “politeness.” The tone here is dry and knowing: the speaker doesn’t moralize, just places the facts so the “caressing” quality registers as something practiced.

“Pompes Funèbres”: piety laid on top of unbelief

Part II announces itself with a subtitle, Pompes Funèbres, and immediately shifts into a darker, more crowded scene: an old lady who was so old that she was an atheist is now staged in death with six candles and a crucifix. The comedy is bitter: the only certainty we get about her inner life is unbelief, yet her body is wrapped in Christian theater. That mismatch is the poem’s key tension—private conviction versus the community’s need for a respectable script. In Pound’s telling, the funeral does not honor the woman so much as it manages appearances for the living.

Inheritance as a second ritual: “makes hay”

The poem’s satire sharpens when it moves from religious display to household scavenging. While the dead woman is “surrounded” by symbols, the second wife of a nephew makes hay with the objects in her house. The phrase makes the looting sound industrious, almost wholesome—another kind of social mask. Pound’s choice of family relation matters: not a grieving child, but a more distant connection, and not even the nephew himself, but his “second wife,” someone whose claim feels opportunistic and newly attached. In the poem’s world, death doesn’t produce reverence; it produces a scramble dressed up as propriety.

Cats to Avernus: the only loyal mourners, and even that is tainted

The strangest, most vivid passage belongs to the cats: Her two cats / Go before her into Avernus. The classical underworld turns this funeral into a mythic descent, but the grandeur is undercut by the next phrase, a sort of chloroformed suttee. Whatever exactly has happened to the cats—euthanized, disposed of, sacrificed by custom—it suggests that even companionship is dragged into the household’s brutal practicality. Yet Pound still grants them a kind of afterlife dignity: he hopes their spirits will walk with their tails up and with a gentle mewing. In a poem full of human falseness, the cats become the only figures allowed a clean, simple loyalty.

The last sound: not grief, but a “squabble”

The ending closes the moral account: the woman has left behind No sound except a squabble of female connections. That final noise is telling—not prayer, not remembered words, not genuine mourning, just quarrel. Pound’s tone here is almost contemptuous, but it’s also bleakly matter-of-fact: the social order, at the edge of the grave, reduces a life to property, argument, and ceremonial props. The poem’s two parts then rhyme: the official’s soft handshake and the funeral’s candles are both gestures that look tender, while the real human outcome is coercive—sexism, greed, and a community more skilled at managing surfaces than honoring truth.