"For three years, out of key with his time/He strove to resuscitate the dead art/Of poetry" resonates with Pound's efforts to write in traditional forms (e.g., Canzoni, 1911) and subsequent disillusionment.
In the third stanza, Pound is said to have listened to the song of Homer's Syrens (quoted in Greek: "Ἴδμεν γάρ τοι πάνθ', ὅσ 'ένι Τροίη" – "We know all the things that belong to Troy"), to have confronted dangers and ignored the warnings of the prudent.
In Poems II and III, Pound turns the tables upon the philistine modern age, denouncing its materialism, consumerism, bad taste and betrayal of tradition.
Poems IV and V express Pound's outrage at World War I, a murderous product of that very age that has dismissed him: "There died a myriad/And of the best, among them,/For an old bitch gone in the teeth,/For a botched civilisation".
This section can be read as a wider attack upon the attitudes of society in the post-war period, on a "botched civilisation" – denounced as an intellectual and moral 'Waste Land' only two years later by T. S. Eliot.
seems to be a quip at the expense of those who continue to revere the idealistic "lies" and to dismiss works that draw on valuable traditional texts, such as Pound's own Homage to Sextus Propertius.
Poem II tells us of Mauberley's love-troubles, suggesting that he observed beauty but could not act at the right moment (as a Henry James character, see for example "The Beast in the Jungle", and Eliot's "Prufrock").
Mauberley in his passiveness is distinct from Pound, who however pursued for a while similar ideals of artistic perfection, and was attracted by life in beautiful and remote natural surroundings.