¶ … beauty in a place or in external trappings, we will eventually be disappointed since external beauty is based on an unachievable standard that, even if it were achievable, would soon be overrun by aging over time. There is an overarching conceptualization of the past as something beautiful, but irretrievable, which could be felt as melancholic or just nostalgic. The effects of age and ruin are not unfamiliar, such that there can be "…no surprise, then, that the House of Beauty is burning."
The speaker does not encounter the forces of time and aging until well into the poem "…the objects in their dresses of disaster / anything clothed in its own passage." Yet, the transformation "…however far these fires proceed/reducing history to powder" conveys the same relentless, unforgiving, irreversible inevitability as death. The reader is made to wonder, "…what does it matter if the house is burning?" The customers of the House of Beauty once found life and possibility within its walls, "…under the perfected heads rowed along the walls" and changes that were made to their countenances cannot be undone. Even the destructive flames that begin with just a "…billow of dark thought rising/from the broken forehead of the House of Beauty" cannot reach back into time and undo what was done -- what was accomplished "…among the cremes and thrones, the helmet and clippers and combs." Life goes on around the fire, against the "…trestle arcing the steel river and warehouses/truck lots and Indian groceries."
House of Beauty -- beauty is a thing located within a place
Paraphrase: Some unknown person violently started the fire
The fire begins small and goes unnoticed for a time
Soon the structures and objects that supported the beautification are distorted
Beauty cannot be saved from the fire
Beauty is not what is being destroyed
Connotation: Personification - the salon is beauty personified
Symbolism -- the photos of perfect models represent possibilities to the customers
Imagery -- the equipment in the salon stand in for the customers
Attitude: The author's mood is reminiscent of the gawkers at an actual fire, in which people are transfixed by the spectacle, but generally can't grasp the reach of the devastation.
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