From The Seventh Canto
by Ezra Pound
And all that day, another day:
Thin husks I had known as men,
Dry casques2 of departed locusts
speaking a shell of speech . . .
Propped between chairs and table . . .
Words like the locust-shells, moved by no inner being,
A dryness calling for death.
Another day, between walls of a sham Mycenian,2
"Toc"3 sphinxes, sham-Memphis columns,
And beneath the jazz a cortex, a stiffness or stillness;
The older shell, varnished to lemon colour,
Brown-yellow wood, and the no colour plaster,
Dry professorial talk . . .
now stilling the ill beat music,
House expulsed4 by this house, but not extinguished.
Square even shoulders and the satin skin,
Gone cheeks of the dancing woman,
Still the old dead dry talk, gassed out
It is ten years gone, makes stiff about her a glass,
A petrification of air.
The old room of the tawdry class asserts itself.
The young men, never!
Only the husk of talk.
1. helmets
2. late Bronze Age era (circa 1600–1100 BCE)
3. imitation (French)
4. pushed out
What does the poet's use of ellipses suggest in the poem?
A.
a disdain for certain men's old ideas
B.
a voice pausing to emphasize a point
C.
a sense of frustration about speech
D.
a dryness of life like objects in the poem