Women Before A Shop - Analysis

A hard, judging glance at desire

The poem’s central move is to show attraction and contempt happening at the same time. The speaker watches women drawn to shop trinkets and frames that attraction as almost chemically inevitable, but also as degrading. Even the first word choice, gew-gaws, shrinks what the women want into cheap clutter. The desire is real and active—these objects attract them—yet the speaker’s voice treats that desire as something mindless, a pull exerted by bad matter on susceptible people.

Falseness that still works

The most telling tension is that the poem insists on falseness—false amber, false turquoise—while admitting the fakes have power. If the stones are imitation, why do they still succeed? The poem’s answer is that the attraction is not to truth but to a surface effect: color, shine, a purchasable hint of preciousness. By repeating false, the speaker tries to strip the objects of aura; but the very need to repeat it suggests anxiety that the aura persists anyway. The women’s desire exposes a world where value can be manufactured and still felt.

Like to like nature: a proverb turned against them

The quoted phrase Like to like nature sounds like a borrowed maxim, as if the speaker is invoking a rule of the universe to explain (and dismiss) what he sees. The implication is blunt: the women are like the trinkets—ornamental, artificial, attracted to their own kind. That’s where the poem’s harshness concentrates. It isn’t only critiquing consumer goods; it slides into critiquing the consumers themselves, reducing them to a principle of resemblance rather than granting them individual motives or inner lives.

Sticky color and the disgust beneath it

The closing exclamation—these agglutinous yellows!—pushes the poem from observation into physical revulsion. Agglutinous suggests glue, clumping, something that sticks to you and won’t wash off. Yellow becomes not a cheerful hue but a viscous substance, as if the shop’s color is a kind of contamination. The tone here is not simply critical; it is almost allergic, turning a visual scene into a tactile disgust.

A sharper question the poem leaves hanging

If falseness is so obvious—if the amber and turquoise are plainly false—why is the speaker so bothered by the women responding to it? The poem seems to fear how easily imitation can organize feeling and identity, how quickly like finds like in a marketplace. The real target may be the modern power of surfaces: the possibility that what is not true can still be irresistibly, shamefully effective.