by Ezra Pound
And calls the utmost singing from the boughs
That ’thout him, save the aspen, were as dumb
Still shade, and bade no whisper speak the birds of how
“Beyond, beyond, beyond, there lies ...”
REVOLT
Against the Crepuscular Spirit in Modern Poetry
I would shake off the lethargy of this our time,
and give
For shadows—shapes of power
For dreams—men.
“It is better to dream than do”?
Aye! and, No!
Aye! if we dream great deeds, strong men,
Hearts hot, thoughts mighty.
No! if we dream pale flowers,
Slow-moving pageantry of hours that languidly
Drop as o’er-ripened fruit from sallow trees.
If so we live and die not life but dreams,
Great God, grant life in dreams,
Not dalliance, but life!
Let us be men that dream,
Not cowards, dabblers, waiters
For dead Time to reawaken and grant balm
For ills unnamed.
Great God, if we be damn’d to be not men but only dreams,
Then let us be such dreams the world shall tremble at
And know we be its rulers though but dreams!
Then let us be such shadows as the world shall tremble at
And know we be its masters though but shadow!
Great God, if men are grown but pale sick phantoms
That must live only in these mists and tempered lights
And tremble for dim hours that knock o’er loud
Or tread too violent in passing them;
Great God, if these thy sons are grown such thin ephemera,
I bid thee grapple chaos and beget
Some new titanic spawn to pile the hills and stir
This earth again.
SESTINA: ALTAFORTE
LOQUITUR1: En2 Bertrans de Born.
Dante3 Alighieri put this man in hell for that he was a stirrer up of strife.
Eccovi!4
Judge ye!
Have I dug him up again?
The scene is at his castle, Altaforte. “Papiols” is his jongleur.5
“The Leopard,” the device of Richard Cœur de Lion.
I
Damn it all! all this our South stinks peace.
You whoreson dog, Papiols, come! Let’s to music!
I have no life save when the swords clash.
But ah! when I see the standards gold, vair, purple, opposing
And the broad fields beneath them turn crimson,
Then howl I my heart nigh mad with rejoicing.
II
In hot summer have I great rejoicing
When the tempests kill the earth’s foul peace,
And the lightnings from black heav’n flash crimson,
And the fierce thunders roar me their music
And the winds shriek through the clouds mad, opposing,
And through all the riven skies God’s swords clash.
III
Hell grant soon we hear again the swords clash!
And the shrill neighs of destriers6 in battle rejoicing,
Spiked breast to spiked breast opposing!
Better one hour’s stour than a year’s peace
With fat boards, bawds, wine and frail music!
Bah! there’s no wine like the blood’s crimson!
IV
And I love to see the sun rise blood-crimson.
And I watch his spears through the dark clash
And it fills all my heart with rejoicing
And pries wide my mouth with fast music
When I see him so scorn and defy peace,
His lone might ’gainst all darkness opposing.
V
The man who fears war and squats opposing
My words for stour, hath no blood of crimson
But is fit only to rot in womanish peace
Far from where worth’s won and the swords clash
For the death of such sluts I go rejoicing;
Yea, I fill all the air with my music.
VI
Papiols, Papiols, to the music!
There’s no sound like to swords swords opposing,
No cry like the battle’s rejoicing
When our elbows and swords drip the crimson
And our charges ’gainst “The Leopard’s” rush clash.
May God damn for ever all who cry “Peace!”
VII
And let the music of the swords make them crimson!
Hell grant soon we hear again the swords clash!
Hell blot black for alway the thought “Peace”!
PIERE VIDAL OLD
It is of Piere Vidal, the fool par excellence of all Provence, of whom the tale tells how he ran mad, as a wolf, because of his love for Loba of Penautier, and how men hunted him with dogs through the mountains of Cabaret and brought him for dead to the dwelling of this Loba (she-wolf) of Penautier, and how she and her Lord had him healed and made welcome, and he stayed some time at that court. He speaks:
When I but think upon the great dead days
And turn my mind upon that splendid madness,
Lo! I do curse my strength
And blame the sun his gladness;
For that the one is dead
And the red sun mocks my sadness.
Behold me, Vidal, that was fool of fools!
Swift as the king wolf was I and as strong
When tall stags fled me through the alder brakes,
And every jongleur knew me in his song,
And the hounds fled and the deer fled
And none fled over-long.
Even the grey pack knew me and knew fear.
God! how the swiftest hind’s blood spurted hot
Over the sharpened teeth and purpling lips!
Hot was that hind’s blood yet it scorched me not
As did first scorn, then lips of the Penautier!
Aye ye are fools, if ye think time can blot
From Piere Vidal’s remembrance that blue night.
God! but the purple of the sky was deep!
Clear, deep, translucent, so the stars me seemed
Set deep in crystal; and because my sleep
—Rare visitor—came not,—the Saints I guerdon1
For that restlessness—Piere set to keep
One more fool’s vigil with the hollyhocks.
Swift came the Loba, as a branch that’s caught,
Torn, green and silent in the swollen Rhone,
Green was her mantle, close, and wrought
Of some thin silk stuff that’s scarce stuff at all,
But like a mist wherethrough her white form fought,
And conquered! Ah God! conquered!
Silent my mate came as the night was still.
Speech? Words? Faugh! Who talks of words and love?!
Hot is such love and silent,
Silent as fate is, and as strong until
It faints in taking and in giving all.
Stark, keen, triumphant, till it plays at death.
God! she was white then, splendid as some tomb
High wrought of marble, and the panting breath
Ceased utterly. Well, then I waited, drew,
Half-sheathed, then naked from its saffron sheath
Drew full this dagger that doth tremble here.
Just then she woke and mocked the less keen blade.
Ah God, the Loba! and my only mate!
Was there such flesh made ever and unmade!
God curse the years that turn such women grey!
Behold here Vidal, that was hunted, flayed,
Shamed and yet bowed not and that won at last.
And yet I curse the sun for his red gladness,
I that have known strath, garth, brake, dale,
And every run-away of the wood through that great madness,
Behold me shrive
lled as an old oak’s trunk
And made men’s mock’ry in my rotten sadness!
No man hath heard the glory of my days:
No man hath dared and won his dare as I:
One night, one body and one welding flame!
What do ye own, ye niggards! that can buy
Such glory of the earth? Or who will win
Such battle-guerdon with his “prowesse high”?
O Age gone lax! O stunted followers,
That mask at passions and desire desires,
Behold me shrivelled, and your mock of mocks;
And yet I mock you by the mighty fires
That burnt me to this ash.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Ah! Cabaret! Ah Cabaret, thy hills again!
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Take your hands off me! ... [Sniffing the air.
Ha! this scent is hot!
BALLAD OF THE GOODLY FERE
Simon Zelotes1 speaketh it somewhile after the Crucifixion
Fere=Mate, Companion.
Ha’ we lost the goodliest fere o’ all
For the priests and the gallows tree?
Aye lover he was of brawny men,
O’ ships and the open sea.
When they came wi’ a host to take Our Man
His smile was good to see,
“First let these go!” quo’ our Goodly Fere,
“Or I’ll see ye damned,” says he.
Aye he sent us out through the crossed high spears
And the scorn of his laugh rang free,
“Why took ye not me when I walked about
Alone in the town?” says he.
Oh we drunk his “Hale” in the good red wine
When we last made company,
No capon priest was the Goodly Fere
But a man o’ men was he.
I ha’ seen him drive a hundred men
Wi’ a bundle o’ cords swung free,
That they took the high and holy house
For their pawn and treasury.
They’ll no’ get him a’ in a book I think
Though they write it cunningly;
No mouse of the scrolls was the Goodly Fere
But aye loved the open sea.
If they think they ha’ snared our Goodly Fere
They are fools to the last degree.
“I’ll go to the feast,” quo’ our Goodly Fere,
“Though I go to the gallows tree.”
“Ye ha’ seen me heal the lame and blind,
And wake the dead,” says he,
“Ye shall see one thing to master all:
’Tis how a brave man dies on the tree.”
A son of God was the Goodly Fere
That bade us his brothers be.
I ha’ seen him cow a thousand men.
I have seen him upon the tree.
He cried no cry when they drave the nails
And the blood gushed hot and free,
The hounds of the crimson sky gave tongue
But never a cry cried he.
I ha’ seen him cow a thousand men
On the hills o’ Galilee,
They whined as he walked out calm between,
Wi’ his eyes like the grey o’ the sea.
Like the sea that brooks no voyaging
With the winds unleashed and free,
Like the sea that he cowed at Genseret
Wi’ twey words spoke’ suddently.
A master of men was the Goodly Fere,
A mate of the wind and sea,
If they think they ha’ slain our Goodly Fere
They are fools eternally.
I ha’ seen him eat o’ the honey-comb
Sin’ they nailed him to the tree.
“BLANDULA, TENULLA, VAGULA”
What hast thou, O my soul, with paradise?
Will we not rather, when our freedom’s won,
Get us to some clear place wherein the sun
Lets drift in on us through the olive leaves
A liquid glory? If at Sirmio,1
My soul, I meet thee, when this life’s outrun,
Will we not find some headland consecrated
By aery apostles of terrene delight,
Will not our cult be founded on the waves,
Clear sapphire, cobalt, cyanine,
On triune2 azures, the impalpable
Mirrors unstill of the eternal change?
Soul, if She meet us there, will any rumour
Of havens more high and courts desirable
Lure us beyond the cloudy peak of Riva?3
UND DRANG
Nay, dwells he in cloudy rumour alone?
Binyon1
I
I am worn faint,
The winds of good and evil
Blind me with dust
And burn me with the cold,
There is no comfort being over-man;
Yet are we come more near
The great oblivions and the labouring night,
Inchoate truth and the sepulchral forces.
II
Confusion, clamour, ’mid the many voices
Is there a meaning, a significance?
That life apart from all life gives and takes,
This life, apart from all life’s bitter and life’s sweet,
Is good.
Ye see me and ye say: exceeding sweet
Life’s gifts, his youth, his art,
And his too soon acclaim.
I also knew exceeding bitterness,
Saw good things altered and old friends fare forth,
And what I loved in me hath died too soon,
Yea I have seen the “gray above the green”;
Gay have I lived in life;
Though life hath lain
Strange hands upon me and hath torn my sides,
Yet I believe.
. . . . . . .
Life is most cruel where she is most wise.
III
The will to live goes from me.
I have lain
Dull and out-worn
with some strange, subtle sickness.
Who shall say
That love is not the very root of this,
O thou afar?
Yet she was near me,
that eternal deep.
O it is passing strange that love
Can blow two ways across one soul.
And I was Aengus2 for a thousand years,
And she, the ever-living, moved with me
And strove amid the waves, and
would not go.
IV
ELEGIA
“Far buon tempo e trionfare”
“I have put my days and dreams out of mind”3
For all their hurry and their weary fret
Availed me little. But another kind
Of leaf that’s fast in some more sombre wind,
Is man on life, and all our tenuous courses
Wind and unwind as vainly.
I have lived long, and died,
Yea I have been dead, right often,
And have seen one thing:
The sun, while he is high, doth light our wrong
And none can break the darkness with a song.
To-day’s the cup. To-morrow is not ours:
Nay, by our strongest bands we bind her not,
Nor all our fears and our anxieties
Turn her one leaf or hold her scimitar.
The deed blots out the thought
And many thoughts, the vision;
And right’s a compass with as many poles
As there are points in her circumference,
’Tis vain to seek to steer all courses even,
And all things save sheer right are vain enough.
The blade were vain to grow save toward the sun,
And vain th’ attempt to hold her green forever.
All things in season and no thing o’er long!
Love and desire an
d gain and good forgetting,
Thou canst not stay the wheel, hold none too long!
V
How our modernity,
Nerve-wracked and broken, turns
Against time’s way and all the way of things,
Crying with weak and egoistic cries!
All things are given over,
Only the restless will
Surges amid the stars
Seeking new moods of life,
New permutations.
See, and the very sense of what we know
Dodges and hides as in a sombre curtain
Bright threads leap forth, and hide, and leave no pattern.
VI
I thought I had put Love by for a time
And I was glad, for to me his fair face
Is like Pain’s face.
A little light,
The lowered curtain and the theatre!
And o’er the frail talk of the inter-act
Something that broke the jest! A little light,
The gold, and half the profile!
The whole face
Was nothing like you, yet that image cut
Sheer through the moment.
VIb
I have gone seeking for you in the twilight,