by Ezra Pound
My Manly Wishes, and more vigorous Love;
In whom a cold Respect were Treason to
A Father’s Ashes, greater than to You;
Whose one Ambition ’tis for to be known
By daring Loyalty your Wilmot’s Son.
ANONYMOUS between 1680 and 1696
A PASTORAL In Imitation of the Greek of Moschus
Bewailing the Death of the Earl of Rochester.
Mourn, all ye Groves, in darker Shades be seen,
Let Groans be heard where gentle Winds have been:
Ye Albion Rivers, weep your Fountains dry,
And all ye Plants your Moisture spend and die:
Ye melancholy Flowers, which once were Men,
Lament, until you be transform’d agen,
Let every Rose pale as the Lily be,
And Winter Frost seize the Anemone:
But thou, O Hyacinth, more vigorous grow,
In mournful Letters thy sad Glory show,
Enlarge thy Grief, and flourish in thy Woe:
For Bion, the beloved Bion’s dead,
His Voice is gone, his tuneful Breath is fled.
Come, all ye MUSES, come, adorn the
Shepherd’s Herse,
With never-fading Garlands, never-
dying Verse.
* * *
The first effort of misguided ink-page scholars would be to FIND THE AUTHOR. Note that the author particularly refrained from signing the poem. As the great mediaeval architects and stone-cutters refrained from signing their work. One of the great maladies of modern criticism is this first rush to look for the person, and the corresponding failure EVER to look at the thing.
Mourn, ye sweet Nightengales in the thick Woods,
Tell the sad News to all the British Floods:
See it to Isis and to Cham convey’d,
To Thames, to Humber, and to utmost Tweed:
And bid them waft the bitter Tidings on,
How Bion’s dead, how the lov’d Swain is gone,
And with him all the Art of graceful Song.
Come, all ye MUSES, come, adorn the
Shepherd’s Herse,
With never-fading Garlands, never-
dying Verse.
Ye gentle Swans, that haunt the Brooks and Springs,
Pine with sad Grief, and droop your sickly Wings:
In doleful Notes the heavy Loss bewail;
Such as you sing at your own Funeral,
Such as you sung when your lov’d Orpheus fell.
Tell it to all the Rivers, Hills, and Plains,
Tell it to all the British Nymphs and Swains,
And bid them too the dismal Tydings spread,
Of Bion’s fate, of England’s Orpheus dead.
Come, all ye MUSES, come, adorn the
Shepherd’s Herse,
With never-fading Garlands, never-
dying Verse.
No more, alas, no more that lovely Swain
Charms with his tuneful Pipe the wondering Plain:
Ceast are those Lays, ceast are those sprightly Ayres,
That woo’d our Souls into our ravish’d Ears:
For which the list’ning Streams forgot to run,
And Trees lean’d their attentive Branches down:
While the glad Hills loth the sweet Sounds to lose,
Lengthen’d in Echoes ev’ry heav’nly close.
Down to the melancholy Shades he’s gone,
And there to Lethe’s Banks reports his moan:
Nothing is heard upon the Mountains now,
But pensive Herds that for their Master lowe:
Stragling and comfortless about they rove,
Unmindful of their Pasture, and their Love.
Come, all ye MUSES, come, adorn the
Shepherd’s Herse,
With never-fading Garlands, never-
dying Verse.
…..
…..
Whom has thou left behind thee, skilful Swain,
That dares aspire to reach thy matchless Strain?
Who is there after thee, that dares pretend
Rashly to take thy warbling Pipe in hand?
Thy Notes remain yet fresh in ev’ry Ear,
And give us all Delight, and all Despair:
Pleas’d Eccho still does on them meditate,
And to the whistling Reeds their sounds repeat;
Pan only e’er can equal thee in Song,
That task does only to great Pan belong:
But Pan himself perhaps will fear to try,
Will fear perhaps to be out-done by thee.
Come, all ye MUSES, come, adorn the
Shepherd’s Herse,
With never-fading Garlands, never-
dying Verse.
Fair Galatea too laments thy Death,
Laments the ceasing of thy tuneful Breath:
Oft she, kind Nymph, resorted heretofore
To hear thy artful Measures from the shore:
Nor harsh like the rude Cyclops’ were thy Lays,
Whose grating Sounds did her soft Ears displease:
Such was the force of thy enchanting Tongue,
That she for ever could have heard thy Song,
And chid the Hours that do so swiftly run,
And thought the Sun too hasty to go down,
Now does that lovely Nereid for thy sake
The Sea, and all her Fellow-Nymphs forsake.
Pensive upon the Beech, she sits alone,
And kindly tends the Flocks from which thou’rt gone.
Come, all ye MUSES, come, adorn the
Shepherd’s Herse,
With never-fading Garlands, never-
dying Verse.
and so on to fifteen pages.
Applied ornament? A few bits of ornament applied by Pietro Lombardo in Santa Maria dei Miracoli (Venice) are worth far more than all the sculpture and ‘sculptural creations’ produced in Italy between 1600 and 1950.
Rococo, by to-morrow you may be unable to remember a line of it BUT try to find in English another passage of melody sustained for so long, i.e., verse to SING. I have given only six strophes, the elegy runs on for fifteen pages. You can hardly read it without singing, there is no let up in the cantabile quality unless it be in one strophe containing a condensed history of British poetry.
The writer has more difficulty in stopping than in continuing to sing. It is with difficulty that he finds a conclusion.
Compare it with the regular star performance of Spenser’s that you can find in any anthology:
Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song.
By comparison the Spenser is declamatory, that is, to be spoken rhetorically rather than sung. You will find it very hard to make a satisfactory tune for his poem. It sings along, and then there is a clog.
The present verses wouldn’t serve a nineteenth-century composer, nor a composer of the first decades of the twentieth. They constrain one to music of the type of their time.
Dowland, Lawes, Young, Jenkins, the period of England’s musicianship.
The advantages of having decent musicians ought to be apparent. This composition is not reading matter, it is singing matter. Try to find another verbal manifestation that will permit one to make music for half an hour in order to set it.
I refrain from indicating the chief device here employed to induce clear melody. The student should find it for himself.
He can only find it by listening and looking. If he can’t find it for himself no amount of telling will make him understand it. There is a single clear principle employed.
It has been perceived that French verse went soggy and leaden, and that it tumefied when some literary lump was too dull to finger the lute; too inarticulate in the basic sense of the word. It is not a man’s fingers that stop him playing an instrument but his mind, his inability to grasp mentally the sixty or the twelve or six hundred bits of a whole, and to perceive their relations. The true imagination, whether visual or acoustic, ho
lds a piece of music as a watchmaker would mentally grasp a watch. The ‘dull and speechless tribe’ or the ‘inarticulate’ man has only an undifferentiated dumpling, a general sense of there being a certain mass or bulk of something or other before him.
The value of music as elucidation of verse comes from the attention it throws on to the detail. Every popular song has at least one line or sentence that is perfectly clear. This line FITS THE MUSIC. It has usually formed the music.
Pope falls back into the very faults of Boileau which Rochester had purged. The writer does this, not the singer.
Look once more at our anonymous elegy: it is song. Note how few useless words there are in it.
Try the same test on any writer’s poem. On any set of couplets written in a garret by an unmusical man, whose friends weren’t in the habit of playing good music.
We now come upon a
SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC PROBLEM
ADVANTAGES ACCRUING FROM THERE BEING A
‘STYLE OF THE PERIOD’
Ils n’existent pas, leur ambience leur confert une existence.
No social order will make a draughtsman like Picasso.
Note (a recent bureaucrat has run up a flag banning cubists and thereby shown himself unfit to conduct a postcard emporium).
But the use of having a ‘style of the period’ ought to be apparent both from our anonymous elegy and from Rochester’s ‘Welcome to Charles’, written at the age of twelve.
Both of these poems are made by ‘known process’. Their writers didn’t have to start by reforming anything.
The musical criteria of the times were of prime order.
Waller, who was a tiresome fellow, is probably telling the truth when he says that his poems were made for his own pleasure and that of his friends, and that he only published them when (or because?) bad copies had been rushed into print without his having seen them.
His natural talent is fathoms below My Lord Rochester’s.
BUT when he writes for music he is ‘lifted’; he was very possibly HOISTED either by the composer or by the general musical perceptivity of the time and of his acquaintances. His inborn lack of melody, if you compare it with Rochester’s, is emended. And he pays his debt in the quite imperfect poem to Lawes.
Verse makes Heroick Virtue live
But you can Life to Verses give.
…..
You, by the help of Tune and Time
Can make that Song which was but Rhime.
Noy1 pleading, no man doubts the Cause,
Or questions verses set by Lawes.
As a Church-window, thick with paint,
Lets in a Light but dim and faint,
So others, with Division, hide
The light of Sense,
But you alone may truly boast
That not a syllable is lost;
The Writer’s, and the Setter’s, Skill
At once the ravish’d ears do fill.
Let those which only warble long
And gargle in their Throats a Song,
Content themselves with UT, RE, MI;
Let words and sense be set by thee.
1 an advocate
* * *
It might be noted in passing that while Lawes set ‘Go lovely Rose’ he did not, so far as I know, bother with the above bit of first criticism wherefrom I have omitted several but not all of its encumbrances.
Note—on the state of the times.
‘… that in the midst of their Discourse a Servant has come in to tell him that such and such attended; upon which Cromwell would rise, and stop them, talking at the Door, where he would overhear him say, The Lord will reveal, The Lord will help, and several such Expressions; which when he return’d to Mr. Waller he excus’d, saying Cousin Waller, I must talk to these Men after their own Way.’
Campion set his own words. Lawes, not content with what he found in English, set, if I remember rightly, a number of Greek and Latin poems.
Thus illustrating the advantage the arts may take from a society having a focus. In an age of musical imbecility we find the aspiring poet in his garret, he never goes to a concert either from lack of curiosity, or because he can’t afford to buy concert tickets, that being the fault of a carious and wholly filthy system of economics, but in any case the level of general culture is so low that the poet’s impecunious friends are not musicians, or are accustomed only to an agglutinous or banal substitute for good melody.
Poetry AND music from Henry the Eighth’s time down to fat Anne’s were very generally an accomplishment. I use the singular, because they were so often united.
No one approach has all the advantages.
Rochester IMPROVES on Boileau by his English version, but he does not improve on Seneca’s
Post mortem nihil est, ipsaque mors nihil
for which only severe intellectual application such as Donne’s could have fitted him.
But, as you can see from an exhibit shown later out of its chronological order, there is nothing as good as Rochester, even when he is not writing lyrics, until …? (Let the student determine when.)
In all this matter the sonnet is the devil. Already by 1300 the Italian sonnet was becoming, indeed had become, declamatory, first because of its having all its lines the same length, which was itself a result of divorce from song.
The art of song, the Provencal art, sublimated by Sordello, stiffens when you get an habitual form. The sonnet was next used for letter writing, used for anything not needing a new tune perforce for every new poem.
You had to have a new tune when the strophes of each poem were different from those of any other, or were else regarded as plagiarism, or frankly sung to the precedent music and definitely labelled ‘Sirventes’, a poem ‘making use of’ the tune of say ‘L’Alemanda’.
The sonnet was first the ‘little tune’, the first strophe of a canzone, the form found when some chap got so far and couldn’t proceed. Steadily in the wake of the sonneteers came the dull poets.
Arriving by another declivity:
Time and again you will find the statement ‘The iambic was the metre of satire’. And it would seem as if humanity can for centuries read certain perfectly intelligent statements without ingurgitating the least drop of their meaning.
The Latin iambic pentameter descends into the modern ten- or eleven-syllable (so-called) ‘iambic’ pentameter. It is the metre of moral reproof.
It came handy or natural to Pope in a misborn world. Rochester, who had less moral urge, uses it better, mostly because he is used to singing.
There is nothing to be said against moral reform. Born in a town with bad sewers, the man with a good nose will certainly agitate for their improvement. It is not the pleasantest occupation, nor the highest use of human faculties.
But the man who agitates is an infinitely better fellow than the parasite who sabotages the work, or who waits till he can get a percentage on the contract for new cloacae.
There is something to be said against moral fervour that damages music. It is probably a fervour based on imperfect ethics, or on ethics not truly understood. Confucius saw something better and believed that the nastiness in a man’s character would damage his music.
Ineluctably song clarifies writing as long as they stick together. It forces the listener to attend to the words, if only by repetition, that is until you get to the last deliquescence, where the musician, despairing, possibly, of finding an intelligent author, abandons the words altogether, and uses inarticulate sound.
This occurs in modern opera. The fact that there is a printed libretto, means nothing.
The writing may be on paper, but it is not used by the musician. The words aren’t set. If examined they usually have no interest. The musician would probably be unable to set any words that had an interest. You wallow with Puccini and Giordano, etc….
In a decent period you find: Qui perd ses mots perd son ton, as an axiom. Who loses his words loses his note.
While on the subject of Rochester’
s technique, the student can by inspection of the complete text consider how little or how much has since been added. A great deal that Yeats has painfully worked out, he might have found there already. The best part of Heine’s technique is anticipated by Rochester and Dorset. It would surprise me greatly if FitzGerald had not read the address to Nothing, and indeed the whole of our poet. Ingenious comparers can enjoy themselves on the problem:
‘Hudibras’ by SAM BUTLER 1612-80
…..
As if Divinity had catched
The itch in order to be scratch’d,
Or like a mountebank did wound
And stab himself with doubts profound
Only to show with how small pain
The sores of Faith are cured again,
Although by woful proof we find
They always leave a scar behind.
He knew the seat of Paradise,
Could tell in what degree it lies
And, as he was dispos’d, could prove it
Below the moon or else above it:
What Adam dreamt of when his bride
Came from her closet in his side,
Whether the devil tempted her
By an High-Dutch1 interpreter.
If either of them had a navel,
Who first made music malleable2
Whether the serpent, at the fall
Had cloven feet or none at all,
All this without a gloss or comment
He could unriddle in a moment
In proper terms such as men smatter