ABC of Reading

by Ezra Pound

  Fear was his ruling passion: yet was love,

  Of timid kind, once known his heart to move;

  It led his patient spirit where it paid

  Its languid offerings to a listening maid;

  She, with her widow’d mother, heard him speak,

  And sought a while to find what he would seek:

  Smiling he came, he smiled when he withdrew,

  And paid the same attention to the two;

  Meeting and parting without joy or pain,

  He seem’d to come that he might go again.

  * * *

  Presentation, description, in place of Popean comment.

  CRABBE’S The Borough, 1810

  Lo! yonder shed; observe its garden-ground,

  With the low paling, form’d of wreck, around:

  There dwells a fisher; if you view his boat,

  With bed and barrel’t is his house afloat;

  Look at his house, where ropes, nets, blocks, abound,

  Tar, pitch, and oakum—’t is his boat aground:

  That space enclosed, but little he regards,

  Spread o’er with relics of masts, sails, and yards:

  Fish by the wall, on spit of elder, rest,

  Of all his food, the cheapest and the best,

  By his own labour caught, for his own hunger dress’d.

  Here our reformers come not; none object

  To paths polluted, or upbraid neglect;

  None care that ashy heaps at doors are cast,

  That coal-dust flies along the blinding blast:

  None heed the stagnant pools on either side,

  Where new-launch’d ships of infant sailors ride:

  Rodneys in rags here British valour boast,

  And lisping Nelsons fright the Gallic coast.

  They fix the rudder, set the swelling sail,

  They point the bowsprit and they blow the gale:

  True to her port the frigate scuds away,

  Change from Pope to Crabbe, change from Voltaire to Stendhal and Flaubert. Crabbe conveying information, not yet eschewing comment on principle, though much more effective where he doesn’t insert it.

  Perfectly clear even from these two excerpts that he is doing the novelist’s work, Dickens, Disraeli, etc. History of the state of England at the start of the nineteenth century, Michelet’s method already in use.

  That window view!—oil’d paper and old glass

  Stain the strong rays, which, though impeded, pass

  And give a dusty warmth to that huge room,

  …..

  Pale and faint upon the floor they fall

  Or feebly gleam on the opposing wall,

  The floor, once oak, now piec’d with fir unplaned

  Crabbe’s dates 1754 to 1832—Jane Austen’s 1775 to 1817.

  But The Borough did not appear till 1810. It would be far easier to counterfeit Crabbe’s poem than to write a Jane Austen novel.

  And these novels are, with perfect justice, the more widely read a century after Crabbe’s death. Crabbe is undeniably reading matter, not singing matter, and he is well worth reading though I don’t imagine he is greatly re-read. Jane’s novels don’t either replace him or wipe him from the map. Rhymed couplets are unlikely to compete with De Maupassant, let alone with Hollywood.

  If one is convinced that the film offers, in the present century, a better form than the stage, he is unlikely to advise anyone to write any more rhymed couplets.

  On the other hand, given a curiosity about the social condition of England in 1810, can you find a more condensed account than Crabbe’s of the whole social order?

  The British novelists’ dates are (for comparison)

  Richardson 1689-1761

  Fielding 1707-54

  Smollett 1721-71

  Sterne 1713-68

  Reading Crabbe is a bit like trying to go somewhere on Fulton’s first steamboat; he does, nevertheless, get you somewhere, and on the whole if you compare him with English prose fiction of an earlier date, his verse is as readable as anything save possibly the first part of Tom Jones, Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, and Tristram Shandy as far as that interminable sermon wherein many readers must afore now have been boggit.

  The Rev. Crabbe had, by contrast to Landor, no Greek, as he tells us in ‘The Borough’ (Prison).

  Homer, nay Pope! (for never will I seek

  Applause for learning—naught have I with Greek)

  Gives us the secrets of his pagan hell

  Where ghost with ghost in sad communion dwell

  …..

  When a new spirit in that world was found

  A thousand shadowy forms came flitting round

  But his early medical training came in handy at least once when he was visiting a country house and the midwife failed to arrive…. Landor would not in such case have been of signal assistance.

  * * *

  The child was called Lemuel in reference to intervention if not of heaven, at least to an ordained subaltern.

  WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR 1775-1864

  From Alcaeus

  Wormwood and rue be on his tongue

  And ashes on his head,

  Who chills the feast and checks the song

  With emblems of the dead!

  Be young and jovial, wise and brave,

  Such mummers are derided.

  His sacred rites shall Bacchus have

  Unspared and undivided.

  Caught by my friends, I fear no mask

  Impending from above,

  I only fear the latter flask

  That holds me from my love.

  LANDOR 1775-1864

  Epithalamium

  Weep Venus and ye

  Adorable Three

  Who Venus for ever environ.

  Pounds, shillings and pence

  And shrewd sober sense

  Have clapt the strait waistcoat on * * *

  Asterisks left by the author and concealing nothing.

  Off Lainot and Turk

  With pistol and dirk,

  Nor palace nor pinnace set fire on,

  The cord’s fatal jerk

  Has done its last work

  And the noose is now slipped upon * * *

  Asterisks left by the author and concealing nothing.

  CLXXXIV

  God’s laws declare

  Thou shalt not swear

  By aught in heaven above or earth below.

  Upon my honour! Melville cries;

  He swears, and lies;

  Does Melville then break God’s commandment?

  No.

  LANDOR: Poems and Epigrams,

  probably edition of 1846

  CLXXXIX

  Does it become a girl so wise,

  So exquisite in harmonies,

  To ask me when I do intend

  To write a sonnet? What? my friend!

  A sonnet? Never. Rhyme o’erflows

  Italian, which hath scarcely prose;

  And I have larded full three-score

  With sorte, morte, cuor, amor.

  But why should we, altho’ we have

  Enough for all things, gay or grave,

  Say, on your conscience, why should we

  Who draw deep seans along the sea,

  Cut them in pieces to beset

  The shallows with a cabbage-net?

  Now if you ever ask again

  A thing so troublesome and vain,

  By all your charms! before the morn,

  To show my anger and my scorn,

  First I will write your name a-top,

  Then from this very ink shall drop

  A score of sonnets; every one

  Shall call you star, or moon, or sun,

  Till, swallowing such warm-water verse,

  Even sonnet-sippers sicken worse.

  CCXX

  …..

  Since Chaucer was alive and hale

  No man hath walkt along our roads with step

  So active, so enquiring eye
, or tongue

  So varied in discourse.

  But warmer climes

  Give brighter plumage, stronger wing: the breeze

  Of Alpine heights thou playest with, borne on

  Beyond Sorrento and Amalfi, where

  The Siren waits thee, singing song for song.

  (From his lines to Robt. Browning)

  LANDOR 1775-1864

  The Duke of York’s Statue

  Enduring is the bust of bronze,

  And thine, O flower of George’s sons,

  Stands high above all laws and duns.

  As honest men as ever cart

  Convey’d to Tyburn, took thy part

  And raised thee up to where thou art.

  XIV From Last Fruit off an old tree

  Ireland never was contented …

  Say you so? you are demented.

  Ireland was contented when

  All could use the sword and pen,

  And when Tara rose so high

  That her turrets split the sky,

  And about her courts were seen

  Liv’ried Angels robed in green,

  Wearing, by St. Patrick’s bounty,

  Emeralds big as half a county.

  II From Dry Sticks

  Macaulay’s Peerage

  Macaulay is become a peer;

  A coronet he well may wear;

  But is there no one to malign?

  None: then his merit wants the sign.

  Heroic Idylls with Additional Poems

  XIII

  ’Twas far beyond the midnight hour

  And more than half the stars were falling,

  And jovial friends, who’d lost the power

  Of sitting, under chairs lay sprawling;

  Not Porson so; his stronger pate

  Could carry more of wine and Greek

  Than Cambridge held; erect he sate;

  He nodded, yet could somehow speak:

  ‘’Tis well, O Bacchus! they are gone,

  Unworthy to approach thy altar!

  The pious man prays best alone,

  Nor shall thy servant falter.’

  Then Bacchus too, like Porson, nodded.

  Shaking the ivy on his brow,

  And graciously replied the godhead:

  ‘I have no votary staunch as thou.’

  LANDOR 1775-1864

  Past ruin’d Ilion Helen lives

  Alcestis rises from the Shades;

  Verse calls them forth; ’tis Verse that gives

  Immortal Youth to mortal Maids.

  Soon shall Oblivion’s deepening Veil

  Hide all the peopled Hills ye see,

  The gay, the proud, while Lovers hail

  These many summers you and me.

  The tear for fading Beauty check

  For passing Glory cease to sigh,

  One Form shall rise above the Wreck,

  One name, Ianthe, shall not die.

  LANDOR 1775-1864

  Old Style

  Aurelius, Sire of Hungrinesses!

  Thee thy old friend Catullus blesses,

  And sends thee six fine watercresses.

  There are those who would not think me quite

  (Unless we were old friends) polite

  To mention whom you should invite.

  Look at them well; and turn it o’er

  In your own mind … I’d have but four …

  Lucullus, Caesar, and two more.

  * * *

  Landor, the man of letters, usually invoked as model of the ‘lapidary style’ or of the ‘well-turned verse’. The effect of his severe classical studies never deserts him, and the cantabile quality never wholly deserts the verses of his shorter poems, even when they are manifestly inscribed.

  DIRCE

  Stand close around, ye Stygian set

  With Dirce in one bark convey’d,

  Or Charon seeing, may forget

  That he is old, and she a shade.

  Moral: a man wanting to conserve a tradition would always do well to find out, first, what it is.

  A man preferring ‘a manner of writing’ to the living language, runs considerable danger if he have not a culture as thorough as Landor’s, and a great part of Landor’s longer poems are still inaccessible because the language is so far removed from any speech ever used anywhere.

  You go to Crabbe for England of 1810, you can go to Landor for an epitome; all culture of the encyclopedists reduced to manageable size, in the Imaginary Conversations and full of human life ventilated, given a human body, not merely indexed.

  A figure to put against Voltaire. BUT for the Chronology! Voltaire was at WORK shovelling out the garbage, the Bourbons, the really filthy decayed state of French social thought.

  Voltaire: 1694-1778.

  Landor: 1775-1864

  They are mental contemporaries. Landor comes after the work is done, Rabelais, Peter Bayle, Voltaire, Diderot, Holbach, or further back Bude, Lorenzo Valla, Landor gathers it up, and if you want a handy introduction you have it in his Conversations; written in Stendhal’s time (1783-1842).

  Voltaire’s English contemporary was chronologically Samuel Johnson (1709-84) listed as ‘moralist, essayist and lexicographer’, a figure of fun, an absurdity, the stage Englishman of Goldoni, 1707-93, admirable because he will not lick boots, but intellectually ‘fuori del mondo’, living in the seventeenth century, so far as Europe is concerned.

  Very possibly the best mind in England of his day, save for those months that Voltaire spent in London.

  . . . . .

  Landor’s Dialogues are richer than Fontenelle’s, but Fontenelle was born in 1657 and died in 1757.

  Landor’s addition differs from that which Chaucer infused into his continental matter, but the parallel is worth inspecting. In Landor’s case the time lag must be computed. He was so far ahead of his British times that the country couldn’t contain him, and Anatole France was still in a certain sense going on in wake of Landor, within living memory, and indeed down to the day of his death, a man of much slighter importance.

  TO RECAPITULATE

  CHAUCER contemporary, participant in the continental life of his time, in the mind of the continent, though his technique was in part centuries old.

  SHAKESPEARE (Jacques Père, spelling it Shaxpear, because J is either pronounced hard or confused with I) making sixteenth-century plays out of fifteenth-century Italian news. The Italian stage had given the commedia dell’ arte, and Italian oratory, law court stuff, the example of ornate speeches. Shakespeare already looking back to Europe from the outside.

  LANDOR 80 per cent retrospective, though this mustn’t be taken to mean that he wasn’t driving piles into the mud, and preparing foundations—which have been largely unused by his successors.

  EXHIBIT

  In Mantua territory half is slough, Half pine-tree forest, maples, scarlet oaks Breed o’er the river-beds, even Mincio

  chokes

  With sand the summer through, but ’tis

  morass

  In winter up to Mantua walls. There

  was,

  Some thirty years before this evening’s

  coil,

  One spot reclaimed from the surrounding

  spoil;

  Goito, just a castle built amid

  A few low mountains; firs and larches

  hid

  Their main defiles and rings of vineyard

  bound

  The rest …..

  You gain the inmost chambers, gain at

  last

  A maple-panelled room; that haze which

  seems

  Floating about the panel if there gleams

  A sunbeam over it, will turn to gold

  And in light-graven characters unfold

  The Arab’s wisdom everywhere; what

  shade

  Marred them a moment, those slim pillars

  made,

  Cut like a company of palms to prop

  The roof, each kissing top en
twined with

  top,

  Leaning together; in the carver’s mind

  Some knot of bacchanals, flushed cheek

  combined

  With straining forehead, shoulders purpled,

  hair

  Diffused between, who in a goat skin bear

  A vintage; graceful sister-palms! But

  quick

  To the main wonder, now. A vault,

  see; thick

  Black shade about the ceiling, though

  fine slits

  Across the buttress suffer light by fits

  Upon a marvel in the midst. Nay,

  stoop—

  A dullish grey-streaked cumbrous font, a

  group

  Round it—each side of it, where’er one

  sees—

  Upholds it; shrinking Caryatides

  Of just-tinged marble like Eve’s lillied

  flesh

  Beneath her maker’s finger when the fresh

  First pulse of life shot brightening the

  snow,

  The font’s edge burthens every shoulder, so

  They muse upon the ground, eyelids half

  closed,

  Some, with meek arms behind their backs

  disposed,

  Some, crossed above their bosoms, some,

  to veil

  Their eyes, some, propping chin and cheek

  so pale,

  Some, hanging slack an utter helpless