Ezra Pound

“ The Oxford Magazine:—"This is a most exciting book of poems."
The Evening Standard:—"A queer little book which will irritate many readers."
The Morning Post:—" Mr. Ezra Pound ... immediately compels our admiration by his fearlessness and lack of self-consciousness."
The Isis (Oxford) :—"This book has about it the breath of the open air,... physically and intellectually the verse seems to reproduce the personality with a brief fulness and adequacy. ”

“ Saw her stretched on her bed,—
it was no glimpse in a mirror;
No gawds on her snowy hands, no orfevrerie,
Sad garment draped on her slender arms.
Her escritoires lay shut by the bed-feet.
Sadness hung over the house, and the desolated female attendants
Were desolated because she had told them her dreams.
She was veiled in the midst of that place,
Damp wooly handkerchiefs were stuffed into her undryable eyes,
And a querulous noise responded to our solicitous reprobations.
For which things you will get a reward from me, Lygdamus?
To say many things is equal to having a home. ”

“ Pound
seems to us rather a scholar than a poet, and we should like to see him giving his unusual talent more to direct translation from the Provençal.
and Mr. J. C. Squire (now the literary editor of the New Statesman) , in an appreciative review in the New Age, had counselled the poet that he would
gain and not lose if he could forget all about the poets of Dante's day, their roses and their flames, their gold and their falcons, and their literary amorousness, and walk out of the library into the fresh air. ”

“ A petrification of air.
The old room of the tawdry class asserts itself.
The young men, never!
Only the husk of talk.
O voi che siete in piccioletta barca,
Dido choked up with sobs for her Sicheus
Lies heavy in my arms, dead weight
Drowning with tears, new Eros,
And the life goes on, mooning upon bare hills;
Flame leaps from the hand, the rain is listless,
Yet drinks the thirst from our lips,
solid as echo,
Passion to breed a form in shimmer of rain-blurr ”

“ My vote coming from the temple of Phoebus in Lycia, at Patara,
And in the mean time my songs will travel,
And the devirginated young ladies will enjoy them
when they have got over the strangeness,
For Orpheus tamed the wild beasts—
and held up the Threician river;
And Citharaon shook up the rocks by Thebes and danced them into a bulwark at his pleasure,
And you, O Polyphemus? Did harsh Galatea almost
Turn to your dripping horses, because of a tune, under Aetna?
We must look into the matter. ”

“ What is the use of talking! And there is no end of talking-
There is no end of things in the heart.
I call in the boy,
Have him sit on his knees to write and seal this,
And I send it a thousand miles, thinking.
(Translated by Ezra Pound from the notes of the late Ernest Fenollosa, with the decipherings of Professors Mori and Araga.)
Notes From Monroe, Harriet and Henderson, Alice Corbin (editors) (1917) . The New Poetry: An Anthology, (Macmillan, New York) . This work is in the public domain because it was published in the United States before 1923. ”

“ Probes for old wills and friendships, and the big locust-casques
Bend to the tawdry table,
Lift up their spoons to mouths, put forks in cutlets,
And make sound like the sound of voices.
Lorenzaccio
Being more live than they, more full of flames and voices.
Ma si morisse!
Credesse caduto da se, ma si morisse.
And the tall indifference moves,
a more living shell,
Drift in the air of fate, dry phantom, but intact,
O Alessandro, chief and thrice warned, watcher,
Eternal watcher of things,
Of things, of men, of passions.
Eyes floating in dry, dark air ”

“ If any man would be a lover
he may walk on the Scythian coast,
No barbarism would go to the extent of doing him harm,
The moon will carry his candle,
the stars will point out the stumbles,
Cupid will carry lighted torches before him
and keep mad dogs off his ankles.
Thus all roads are perfectly safe
and at any hour;
Who so indecorous as to shed the pure gore of a suitor? ”

“ As drops that dream and gleam and falling catch the sun,
Evan'scent mirrors every opal one
Of such his splendour as their compass is,
So, bold My Songs, seek ye such death as this.
La Fraisne [1] SCENE: The Ash Wood of Malvern.
For I was a gaunt, grave councillor
Being in all things wise, and very old,
But I have put aside this folly and the cold
That old age weareth for a cloak.
I was quite strong—at least they said so—
The young men at the sword-play ”

“ And we went on living in the village of Chokan:
Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.
At fourteen I married My Lord you.
I never laughed, being bashful.
Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.
Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.
At fifteen I stopped scowling,
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours
Forever and forever, and forever.
Why should I climb the look out?
At sixteen you departed,
You went into far Ku-to-Yen, by the river of swirling eddies,
And you have been gone five months.
The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead. ”

“ And of Hannibal,
and of Jove protected by geese.
And Phoebus looking upon me from the Castalian tree,
Said then “You idiot! What are you doing with that water;
“Who has ordered a book about heroes?
You need, Propertius, not think
“About acquiring that sort of a reputation.
“Soft fields must be worn by small wheels,
“Your pamphlets will be thrown, thrown often into a chair
“Where a girl waits alone for her lover;
“Why wrench your page out of its course?
“No keel will sink with your genius
“Let another oar churn the water,
“Another wheel, the arena; mid-crowd is as bad as mid-sea.” ”

“ Nor houses modelled upon that of Jove in East Elis,
Nor the monumental effigies of Mausolus,
are a complete elucidation of death.
Flame burns, rain sinks into the cracks
And they all go to rack ruin beneath the thud of the years.
Stands genius a deathless adornment,
a name not to be worn out with the years.
II
I HAD been seen in the shade, recumbent on cushioned Helicon,
the water dripping from Bellerophon’s horse,
Alba, your kings, and the realm your folk
have constructed with such industry
Shall be yawned out on my lyre—with such industry. ”

“ In Durance I am homesick after mine own kind,
Oh I know that there are folk about me, friendly faces,
But I am homesick after mine own kind.
"These sell our pictures"! Oh well,
They reach me not, touch me some edge or that,
But reach me not and all my life's become
One flame, that reacheth not beyond
Mine heart's own hearth,
Or hides among the ashes there for thee.
"Thee"? Oh "thee" is who cometh first
Out of mine own-soul-kin,
For I am homesick after mine own kind
And ordinary people touch me not.
Yea, I am homesick
After mine own kind that know, and feel
And have some breath for beauty and the arts. ”

“ Till now they send him dreams and no more deed;
So doth he flame again with might for action,
Forgetful of the council of the elders,
Forgetful that who rules doth no more battle,
Forgetful that such might no more cleaves to him
So doth he flame again toward valiant doing. ”

“ En robe de parade.
Samain.
Like a skein of loose silk blown against a wall
She walks by the railing of a path in Kensington Gardens,
And she is dying piece-meal
⁠of a sort of emotional anæmia.
And round about there is a rabble
Of the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor.
They shall inherit the earth.
In her is the end of breeding.
Her boredom is exquisite and excessive.
She would like someone to speak to her,
And is almost afraid that I
⁠will commit that indiscretion. ”

“ You came in out of the night
And there were flowers in your hands,
Now you will come out of a confusion of people,
Out of a turmoil of speech about you.
I who have seen you amid the primal things
Was angry when they spoke your name
In ordinary places.
I would that the cool waves might flow over my mind,
And that the world should dry as a dead leaf,
Or as a dandelion seed-pod and be swept away,
So that I might find you again,
Alone. ”

“ See also Book Review Digest, 1915, 1917, 1918, 1920. Ezra (Loomis) Pound—poet, critic.
Born at Hailey, Idaho, 1885. Of English descent; on his mother’s side distantly related to Longfellow. Ph. B., Hamilton College. Fellow of the University of Pennsylvania. Traveled in Spain, in Italy, in Provence, 1906-7; lived in Venice, and finally made his home in England. London editor of The Little Review, 1917-9, and foreign correspondent of Poetry, 1912-9.
Suggestions for Reading
1. Mr. Pound is an experimenter in verse, who has come under many influences and belonged to many schools. ”

“ The physician Astruc, father-in-law of the comptroller-general Silhouette, in his book, now very rare, entitled "Conjectures on Genesis," adds new objections, unsolvable to human wisdom; but not to humble submissive piety. The savants dare to contradict every line, the simple revere every line. Guard against falling into the misfortune of trusting our human reason, be contrite in heart and in spirit.
"And Abraham said that Sarah was his sister, and the king of Gerare took her to him." We confess, as we have said in our essay on Abraham, that Sarah was then ninety years old ”

“ Of course upon Sampson's return all would come out. Ezra reckoned, however, that it would be some time before the fisherman got back from his journey. What was a favourable wind going would be dead in his teeth coming back. It might take him a week's tacking and beating about before he got home. By that time Ezra hoped to be beyond the reach of all danger. He had a thousand five pound Bank of England notes sewn into the back of his waistcoat, for knowing that a crash might come at any moment, he had long made provision against it. ”

“ Broad as all ocean and leanin' man-kin'ards.
Heart that was big as the bowels of Vesuvius,
Words that were wing'd as her sparks in eruption,
Eagled and thundered as Jupiter Pluvius,
Sound in your wind past all signs o' corruption.
Here's to you, Old Hippety-hop o' the accents,
True to the Truth's sake and crafty dissector,
You grabbed at the gold sure; had no need to pack cents
Into your versicles.
Clear sight's elector!
Fifine Answers "Why is it that, disgraced they seem to relish life
the more?"—FIFINE AT THE FAIR, VII, 5. ”

“ Nell Gwynn's still here, despite the reformation,
And Edward's mistresses still light the stage,
A glamour of classic youth in their deportment.
The prudent whore is not without her future,
Her bourgeois dulness is deferred. ”

“ The clouds that are spray to its sea.
Na Audiart Que be-m vols mal.
NOTE: Any one who has read anything of the troubadours knows well the tale of Bertran of Born and My Lady Maent of Montaignac, and knows also the song he made when she would none of him, the song wherein he, seeking to find or make her equal, begs of each preeminent lady of Langue d'Oc some trait or some fair semblance: thus of Cembelins her "esgart amoros" to wit, her love-lit glance, of Aelis her speech free-running, of the Vicomptess of Chales her throat and her two hands, at Roacoart of Anhes her hair golden as Iseult's ”

“ Nor is it known if Benvenuto da Imola speaks for certain when he says En Arnaut went in his age to a monastery and sent a poem to the princes, nor if he wrote a satire on Boniface Castillane; but here are some of his canzos, the best that are left us; and he was very cunning in his imitation of birds, as in the poem "Autet," where he stops in the middle of his singing, crying: "Cadahus, en son us," as a bird cries, and rhyming on it cleverly, with no room to turn about on the words, "Mas pel us, estauc clus," and in the other versets. ”

“ The worm of the Procession bores in the soup of the crowd
The blue thin voices against the crash of the crowd
Et “Salve regina.”
In trellises
Wound over with small flowers, beyond Adige
In the but half-used room, thin film of images,
(by Stefano)
Age of unbodied gods, the vitreous fragile images
Thin as the locust’s wing
Haunting the mind ... as of Guido ...
Thin as the locust’s wing. The Centaur’s heel
Plants in the earth-loam.
THE FIFTH CANTO
GREAT bulk, huge mass, thesaurus ”

“ Transcriber's note: Ezra Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberley contains accents, diphthongs and Greek characters. Facsimile images of the poems as originally published are freely available online from the Internet Archive. ”

“ The author of Genesis conforms to popular error: he has the sun and moon made four days after the light. It is unlikely that there was a morning and evening before the sun came into being, but the inspired author bows to the vague and stupid prejudice of his nation. It seems probable that God was not attempting to educate the Jews in philosophy or cosmogony. He could lift their spirits straight into truth, but he preferred to descend to their level. One can not repeat this answer too often.
The separation of the light from the darkness is not part of another physical theory ”

“ We claim no glory. If the tempest rolls
About us we have fear, and then
Having so small a stake grow bold again.
We know not definitely even this
But 'cause some vague half knowing half doth miss
Our consciousness and leaves us feeling
That somehow all is well, that sober, reeling
From the last carouse, or in what measure
Of so called right or so damned wrong our leisure
Runs out uncounted sand beneath the sun,
That, spite your carping, still the thing is done
With some deep sanction, that, we know not how,
Sans thought gives us this feeling; you allow
That this not need we know our every thought ”