by Ezra Pound
Here in the flurry of Fifth Avenue,
Here where they pass between their teas and teas.
Is it such madness? though you could not be
Ever in all that crowd, no gown
Of all their subtle sorts could be your gown.
Yet I am fed with faces, is there one
That even in the half-light mindeth me.
VII
THE HOUSE OF SPLENDOUR
’Tis Evanoe’s,
A house not made with hands,
But out somewhere beyond the worldly ways
Her gold is spread, above, around, inwoven,
Strange ways and walls are fashioned out of it.
And I have seen my Lady in the sun,
Her hair was spread about, a sheaf of wings,
And red the sunlight was, behind it all.
And I have seen her there within her house,
With six great sapphires hung along the wall,
Low, panel-shaped, a-level with her knees,
And all her robe was woven of pale gold.
There are there many rooms and all of gold,
Of woven walls deep patterned, of email,
Of beaten work; and through the claret stone,
Set to some weaving, comes the aureate light.
Here am I come perforce my love of her,
Behold mine adoration
Maketh me clear, and there are powers in this
Which, played on by the virtues of her soul,
Break down the four-square walls of standing time.
VIII
THE FLAME
’Tis not a game that plays at mates and mating,
Provençe knew;
’Tis not a game of barter, lands and houses,
Provençe knew.
We who are wise beyond your dream of wisdom,
Drink our immortal moments; we “pass through.”
We have gone forth beyond your bonds and borders,
Provençe knew;
And all the tales they ever writ of Oisin4
Say but this:
That man doth pass the net of days and hours.
Where time is shrivelled down to time’s seed corn
We of the Ever-living, in that light
Meet through our veils and whisper, and of love.
O smoke and shadow of a darkling world,
Barters of passion, and that tenderness
That’s but a sort of cunning! O my Love,
These, and the rest, and all the rest we knew.
’Tis not a game that plays at mates and mating,
’Tis not a game of barter, lands and houses,
’Tis not “of days and nights” and troubling years,
Of cheeks grown sunken and glad hair gone gray;
There is the subtler music, the clear light
Where time burns back about th’ eternal embers.
We are not shut from all the thousand heavens:
Lo, there are many gods whom we have seen,
Folk of unearthly fashion, places splendid,
Bulwarks of beryl5 and of chrysoprase.6
Sapphire Benacus,7 in thy mists and thee
Nature herself’s turned metaphysical,
Who can look on that blue and not believe?
Thou hooded opal, thou eternal pearl,
O thou dark secret with a shimmering floor,
Through all thy various mood I know thee mine;
If I have merged my soul, or utterly
Am solved and bound in, through aught here on earth,
There canst thou find me, O thou anxious thou,
Who call’st about my gates for some lost me;
I say my soul flowed back, became translucent.
Search not my lips, O Love, let go my hands,
This thing that moves as man is no more mortal.
If thou hast seen my shade sans character,
If thou hast seen that mirror of all moments,
That glass to all things that o’ershadow it,
Call not that mirror me, for I have slipped
Your grasp, I have eluded.
IX
(HORAE BEATAE INSCRIPTIO)8
How will this beauty, when I am far hence,
Sweep back upon me and engulf my mind!
How will these hours, when we twain are gray,
Turned in their sapphire tide, come flooding o’er us!
X
(THE ALTAR)
Let us build here an exquisite friendship,
The flame, the autumn, and the green rose of love
Fought out their strife here, ’tis a place of wonder;
Where these have been, meet ’tis, the ground is holy.
XI
(AU SALON)
Her grave, sweet haughtiness
Pleaseth me, and in like wise
Her quiet ironies.
Others are beautiful, none more, some less.
I suppose, when poetry comes down to facts,
When our souls are returned to the gods
and the spheres they belong in,
Here in the every-day where our acts
Rise up and judge us;
I suppose there are a few dozen verities
That no shift of mood can shake from us:
One place where we’d rather have tea
(Thus far hath modernity brought us)
“Tea” (Damn you)
Have tea, damn the Caesars,
Talk of the latest success, give wing to some scandal,
Garble a name we detest, and for prejudice?
Set loose the whole consummate pack
to bay like Sir Roger de Coverley’s.9
This our reward for our works,
sic crescit gloria mundi:10
Some circle of not more than three
that we prefer to play up to,
Some few whom we’d rather please
than hear the whole aegrum vulgus11
Splitting its beery jowl
a-meaowling our praises.
Some certain peculiar things,
cari laresque, penates,12
Some certain accustomed forms,
the absolute unimportant.
XII
(AU JARDIN)
O you away high there,
you that lean
From amber lattices upon the cobalt night,
I am below amid the pine trees,
Amid the little pine trees, hear me!
“The jester walked in the garden.”
Did he so?
Well, there’s no use your loving me
That way, Lady;
For I’ve nothing but songs to give you.
I am set wide upon the world’s ways
To say that life is, some way, a gay thing,
But you never string two days upon one wire
But there’ll come sorrow of it.
And I loved a love once,
Over beyond the moon there,
I loved a love once,
And, may be, more times,
But she danced like a pink moth in the shrubbery.
Oh, I know you women from the “other folk,”
And it’ll all come right,
O’ Sundays.
“The jester walked in the garden.”
Did he so?
REDONDILLAS, OR SOMETHING OF THAT SORT
I sing the gaudy to-day and cosmopolite civilization
Of my hatred of crudities, of my weariness of banalities,
I sing of the ways that I love, of Beauty and delicate savours.
No man may pass beyond
the nets of good and evil
For joy’s in deepest hell
and in high heaven,
About the very ports
are subtle devils.
I would sing of exquisite sights,
of the murmur of Garda:1
I would sing of the amber lights,
or of how Desenzano2
Lies like a topaz chain
I sing of natural forces
I sing of refinements
I would write of the various moods
of nuances, of subtleties.
I would sing of the hatred of dullness,
of the search for sensation.
I would sing the American people,
God send them some civilization;
I would sing of the nations of Europe,
God grant them some method of cleansing
The fetid extent of their evils.
I would sing of my love “To-morrow,”
But Yeats has written an essay,
Why should I stop to repeat it?
I don’t like this hobbledy metre
but find it easy to write in,
I would sing to the tune of “Mi Platz”3
were it not for the trouble of riming,
Besides, not six men believe me
when I sing in a beautiful measure.
I demonstrate the breadth of my vision.
I am bored of this talk of the tariff,
I too have heard of T. Roosevelt.
I have met with the “Common Man,”
I admit that he usually bores me,
He is usually stupid or smug.
I praise God for a few royal fellows
like Plarr4 and Fred Vance and Whiteside,
I grant them fullest indulgence
each one for his own special queerness.
I believe in some lasting sap
at work in the trunk of things;
I believe in a love of deeds,
in a healthy desire for action;
I believe in double-edged thought
in careless destruction.
I believe in some parts of Nietzsche,5
I prefer to read him in sections;
In my heart of hearts I suspect him
of being the one modern christian;
Take notice I never have read him
except in English selections.
I am sick of the toothless decay
of God’s word as they usually preach it;
I am sick of bad blasphemous verse
that they sell with their carols and hymn tunes.
I would sing of the soft air
and delight that I have in fine buildings,
Pray that God better my voice
before you are forced to attend me.
I would turn from superficial things
for a time, into the quiet
I would draw your minds to learn
of sorrow in quiet,
To watch for signs and strange portents.
Delicate beauty on some sad, dull face
Not very evil, but just damned, through weakness,
Drawn down against hell’s lips by some soft sense;
When you shall find such a face
how far will your thought’s lead fathom?
Oh, it’s easy enough to say
’tis this, that and the other,
But when some truth is worn smooth
how many men really do think it?
We speak to a surfeited age,
Grant us keen weapons for speaking.
Certain things really do matter:
Love, and the comfort of friendship.
After we are burnt clear,
or even deadened with knowledge;
After we have gone the whole gamut,
exhausted our human emotions,
Still is there something greater,
some power, some recognition,
Some bond beyond the ordinary bonds
of passion and sentiment
And the analyzed method of novels,
some saner and truer course
That pays us for foregoing blindness.
Whenever we dare, the angels crowd about us.
There is no end to the follies
sprung from the full fount of weakness;
There is great virtue in strength
even in passive resistance.
God grant us an open mind
and the poise and balance to use it.
They tell me to “Mirror my age,”
God pity the age if I do do it,
Perhaps I myself would prefer
to sing of the dead and the buried:
At times I am wrapped in my dream
of my mistress “To-morrow”
We ever live in the now
it is better to live in than sing of.
Yet I sing of the diverse moods
of effete modern civilization.
I sing of delicate hues
and variations of pattern;
I sing of risorgimenti,6
of old things found that were hidden,
I sing of the senses developed,
I reach towards perceptions scarce heeded.
If you ask me to write world prescriptions
I write so that any can read it:
A little less Paul Verlaine,7
A good sound stave of Spinoza,
A little less of our nerves
A little more will toward vision.
I sing of the fish and the sauce,
I sing of the rôti de dindon;8
I sing of delectable things that
I scarcely ever can pay for.
I love the subtle accord
of rimes wound over and over;
I sing of the special case,
The truth is the individual.
Tamlin9 is the truest of ballads,
There is more in heaven and earth
Than the priest and the scientists think of.
The core in the heart of man
Is tougher than any “system.”
I sing devils, thrones and dominions
At work in the air round about us,
Of powers ready to enter
And thrust our own being from us.
I sing of the swift delight
Of the clear thrust and riposte in fencing,
I sing of the fine overcoming,
I sing of the wide comprehension.
I toast myself against the glow of life
I had a trace of mind, perhaps some heart
Nature I loved, in her selected moods,
And art,
perhaps a little more than need be.
I have no objection to wealth,
the trouble is the acquisition,
It would be rather a horrible sell
to work like a dog and not get it.
Arma, virumque cano, qui primus, etcetera, ab oris,10
Even this hobbledy-hoy
is not my own private invention.
We are the heirs of the past,
it is asinine not to admit it.
O Virgil, from your green elysium
see how that dactyl stubs his weary toes.
I too have been to the play-house,
often bored with vapid inventions;
I too have taken delight
in the maze of the Russian dancers.
I am that terrible thing,
the product of American culture,
Or rather that product improved
by considerable care and attention.
I am really quite modern, you know,
despite my affecting the ancients.
I sing of the pleasure of teas
when one finds someone brilliant to talk to.
I know this age and its works
with some sort of moderate intelligence,
It does nothing so novel or strange
except in the realm of mechanics.
Why should I cough my head off
with that old gag of “Nascitur ordo”?11
(The above is not strictly the truth
I’ve just heard of a German named Ehrlich.12
Medical science is jolted,
we’ll have to call back Fracastori
To pen a new end for “De Morbo.”)13
But setting science aside
To return to me and my status;
I’m not specifically local,
I’m more or less Europe itself,
More or less Strauss and De Bussy.
I even admire and am
Klimt and that horrible Zwintscher.
Shall I write it: Admiror, sum ergo?14
Deeds are not always first proof,
Write it thus: By their Gods ye shall know them.
The chief god in hell is convention,
’got by that sturdy sire Stupidity
Upon pale Fear, in some most proper way.
Where people worship a sham
There is hardly room for a devil.
You’ll find some such thing in Hen. Ibsen.
I’m sorry Dame Fashion has left him
and prefers to imbibe him diluted
In ... Why name our whole tribe of playwrights?
Mistrust the good of an age
That swallows a whole code of ethics.
Schopenhauer’s15 a gloomy decadent
Somewhat chewed by the worms of his wisdom.
Our mud was excreted of mind,
That mudless the mind should be clearer.
Behold how I chivvy Lucretius,16
Behold how I dabble in cosmos.
Behold how I copy my age,
Dismissing great men with a quibble.
I know not much save myself,
I know myself pretty completely.
I prefer most white wine to red,
Bar only some lordly Burgundy.
We all of us make mistakes,
Give us reasonable time to retrieve them.
The future will probably meet
With people who know more than we do.
There’s no particular end
To this sort of a statement of being,
no formal envoi or tornata17