Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry | Page 4

the success or failure of his own. Pound's vers libre is such as is only possible for a poet who has worked tirelessly with rigid forms and different systems of metric. His "Canzoni" are in a way aside from his direct line of progress; they are much more nearly studies in mediaeval appreciation than any of his other verse; but they are interesting, apart from their merit, as showing the poet at work with the most intricate Proven?al forms--so intricate that the pattern cannot be exhibited without quoting an entire poem. (M. Jean de Bosschere, whose French is translated in the "Egoist," has already called attention to the fact that Pound was the first writer in English to use five Proven?al forms.) Quotation will show, however, the great variety of rhythm which Pound manages to introduce into the ordinary iambic pentameter:
Thy gracious ways,
O lady of my heart, have?O'er all my thought their golden glamour cast;?As amber torch-flames, where strange men-at-arms?Tread softly 'neath the damask shield of night,?Rise from the flowing steel in part reflected,?So on my mailed thought that with thee goeth,?Though dark the way, a golden glamour falleth.
Within the iambic limits, there are no two lines in the whole poem that have an identical rhythm.
We turn from this to a poem in "Exultations," the "Night?Litany":
O God, what great kindness
have we done in times past
and forgotten it,
That thou givest this wonder unto us,
O God of waters?
O God of the night
What great sorrow?Cometh unto us,
That thou thus repayest us?Before the time of its coming?
There is evident, and more strongly in certain later poems, a tendency toward quantitative measure. Such a "freedom" as this lays so heavy a burden upon every word in a line that it becomes impossible to write like Shelley, leaving blanks for the?adjectives, or like Swinburne, whose adjectives are practically blanks. Other poets have manipulated a great variety of metres and forms; but few have studied the forms and metres which they use so carefully as has Pound. His ballad of the "Goodly Fere" shows great knowledge of the ballad form:
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.
And from this we turn to a very different form in the?"Altaforte," which is perhaps the best sestina that has?been written in English:
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.
In hot summer have I great rejoicing?When the tempests kill the earth's foul peace,?And the lightnings from black heaven 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.
I have quoted two verses to show the intricacy of the pattern.
The Proven?al canzon, like the Elizabethan lyric, was written for music. Mr. Pound has more recently insisted, in a series of articles on the work of Arnold Dolmetsch, in the "Egoist," on the importance of a study of music for the poet.

Such a relation between poetry and music is very different from what is called the "music" of Shelley or Swinburne, a music often nearer to rhetoric (or the art of the orator) than to the instrument. For poetry to approach the condition of music?(Pound quotes approvingly the dictum of Pater) it is not?necessary that poetry should be destitute of meaning. Instead of slightly veiled and resonant abstractions, like
Time with a gift of tears,?Grief with a glass that ran--
of Swinburne, or the mossiness of Mallarmé, Pound's verse is always definite and concrete, because he has always a definite emotion behind it.
Though I've roamed through many places,?None there is that my heart troweth?Fair as that wherein fair groweth?One whose laud here interlaces?Tuneful words, that I've essayed.?Let this tune be gently played?Which my voice herward upraises.
At the end of this poem the author appends the note:
The form and measure are those of Piere Vidal's "_Ab?l'alen tir vas me l'aire_." The song is fit only to be?sung, and is not to be spoken.
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