Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry | Page 8

of the poet, but more precise, as an expression of frank disgust:
Go to the adolescent who are smothered in family.?O, how hideous it is?To see three generations of one house gathered together! It is like an old tree without shoots,?And with some branches rotted and falling.
Each poem holds out these cries of revolt or disgust, but they are the result of his still hoping and feeling:
Let us take arms against this sea of stupidities. Pound ... has experience of the folly of the Philistines who read his verse. Real pain is born of this stupid interpretation, and one does not realize how deep it is unless one can feel, through the ejaculations and the laughter, what has caused these wounds, which are made deeper by what he knows, and what he has lost....
The tone, which is at once jocund and keen, is one of?Pound's qualities. Ovid, Catullus--he does not disown them. He only uses these accents for his familiars; with the?others he is on the edge of paradox, pamphleteering, indeed of abuse....
This is the proper approach to the poems at the beginning of "Lustra," and to the short epigrams, which some readers find "pointless," or certainly "not poetry." They should read, then, the "Dance Figure," or "Near Périgord," and remember that all these poems come out of the same man.
Thine arms are as a young sapling under the bark;?Thy face as a river with lights.
White as an almond are thy shoulders;?As new almonds stripped from the husk.
Or the ending of "Near Périgord":
Bewildering spring, and by the Auvezère?Poppies and day's-eyes in the green émail?Rose over us; and we knew all that stream,?And our two horses had traced out the valleys;?Knew the low flooded lands squared out with poplars,?In the young days when the deep sky befriended.?And great wings beat above us in the twilight,?And the great wheels in heaven?Bore us together ... surging ... and apart ...?Believing we should meet with lips and hands ...
There shut up in his castle, Tairiran's,?She who had nor ears nor tongue save in her hands,?Gone, ah, gone--untouched, unreachable!?She who could never live save through one person,?She who could never speak save to one person,?And all the rest of her a shifting change,?A broken bundle of mirrors...!
Then turn at once to "To a Friend Writing on Cabaret Dancers."
It is easy to say that the language of "Cathay" is due to the Chinese. If one looks carefully at (1) Pound's other verse, (2) other people's translations from the Chinese (e.g., Giles's), it is evident that this is not the case. The language was ready for the Chinese poetry. Compare, for instance, a passage from?"Provincia Deserta":
I have walked
into Périgord?I have seen the torch-flames, high-leaping,?Painting the front of that church,--?And, under the dark, whirling laughter,?I have looked back over the stream
and seen the high building,?Seen the long minarets, the white shafts.?I have gone in Ribeyrac,
and in Sarlat.?I have climbed rickety stairs, heard talk of Croy,?Walked over En Bertran's old layout,?Have seen Narbonne, and Cahors and Chalus,?Have seen Excideuil, carefully fashioned.
with a passage from "The River Song":
He goes out to Hori, to look at the wing-flapping storks, He returns by way of Sei rock, to hear the new nightingales, For the gardens at Jo-run are full of new nightingales,?Their sound is mixed in this flute,?Their voice is in the twelve pipes here.
It matters very little how much is due to Rihaku and how much to Pound. Mr. Ford Madox Hueffer has observed: "If these are?original verses, then Mr. Pound is the greatest poet of this day." He goes on to say:
The poems in "Cathay" are things of a supreme beauty. What poetry should be, that they are. And if a new breath of imagery and handling can do anything for our poetry, that new breath these poems bring....
Poetry consists in so rendering concrete objects that the emotions produced by the objects shall arise in the?reader....
Where have you better rendered, or more permanently?beautiful a rendering of, the feelings of one of those?lonely watchers, in the outposts of progress, whether it be Ovid in Hyrcania, a Roman sentinel upon the great wall of this country, or merely ourselves, in the lonely recesses of our minds, than the "Lament of the Frontier Guard"?...
Beauty is a very valuable thing; perhaps it is the most valuable thing in life; but the power to express emotion so that it shall communicate itself intact and exactly is?almost more valuable. Of both these qualities Mr. Pound's book is very full. Therefore, I think we may say that this is much the best work he has done, for, however closely he may have followed his originals--and of that most of us have no means of judging--there is certainly a good deal of Mr. Pound in this little volume.
"Cathay" and "Lustra" were followed by the translations of Noh plays. The