Ezra Pound
Some Poems
Ité
Go, my songs, seek your praise from the young
and from the intolerant,
Move among the lovers of perfection alone.
Seek ever to stand in the hard Sophoclean light
And take you wounds from it gladly.
The Coming Of War: Actaeon
An image of Lethe,
and the fields
Full of faint light
but golden,
Gray cliffs,
and beneath them
A sea
Harsher than granite,
unstill, never ceasing;
High forms
with the movement of gods,
Perilous aspect;
And one said:
'This is Actaeon.'
Actaeon of golden greaves!
Over fair meadows,
Over the cool face of that field,
Unstill, ever moving
Hosts of an ancient people,
The silent cortège.
PHASELLUS ILLE
This papier-mâché, which you see, my friends,
Saith 'twas the worthiest of editors.
Its mind was made up in 'the seventies',
Nor hath it ever since changed that concoction.
It works to represent that school of thought
Which brought the hair-cloth chair to such perfection,
Nor will the horrid threats of Bernard Shaw
Shake up the stagnant pool of its convictions;
Nay, should the deathless voice of all the world
Speak once again for its sole stimulation,
Twould not move it one jot from left to right.
Come Beauty barefoot from the Cyclades,
She'd find a model for St. Anthony
In this thing's sure decorum and behaviour.
SURGIT FAMA
There is a truce among the gods,
Kore is seen in the North
Skirting the blue-gray sea
In gilded and russet mantle.
The corn has again it's mother and she, Leuconoe,
That failed never women,
Fails not the earth now.
The tricksome Hermes is here;
He moves behind me
Eager to catch my words,
Eager to spread them with rumour;
To set upon them his change
Crafty and subtle;
To alter them to his purpose;
But do thou speak true, even to the letter:
‘Once more in Delos, once more is the altar a-quiver.
Once more is the chant heard.
Once more are the never abandoned gardens
Full of gossip and old tales.’
CODA
O My songs,
Why do you look so eagerly and so curiously into
people's faces,
Will you find your lost dead among them?
