Yeux Glauques
Yeux Glauques - meaning Summary
Fading Admiration and Objectification
The poem sketches a faded public world in which artistic taste and moral outrage coexist while a woman named Jenny becomes an object of painters and gossip. Pound notes how once-respected figures and artworks circulate her image—'faun-like' and vacant—while her personal suffering and adulteries provoke little genuine surprise. The tone is detached, observing cultural complicity in aestheticizing and dismissing a woman's decline.
Read Complete AnalysesGladstone was still respected, When John Ruskin produced 'King's Treasuries'; Swinburne And Rossetti still abused. Foetid Buchanan lifted up his voice When that faun's head of hers Became a pastime for Painters and adulterers. The Burne-Jones cartons Have preserved her eyes; Still, at the Tate, they teach Cophetua to rhapsodize; Thin like brook-water, With a vacant gaze. The English Rubaiyat was still-born In those days. The thin, clear gaze, the same Still darts out faun-like from the half-ruin'd face, Questing and passive. . . . ;Ah, poor Jenny's case' . . . Bewildered that a world Shows no surprise At her last maquero's Adulteries.
Feel free to be first to leave comment.