When first introduced to T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound many years ago in college, I could find little that I liked in Eliot’s works, though I bought The Complete Poems and Plays, and nothing in Pound’s poems to even justify buying even a single one of his works.

My attitude towards Pound was not improved any when I had to give up my favorite poetry text in high school because the publisher decided to place his poem “Ancient Music” prominently on the opening page:

ANCIENT MUSIC

Winter is icummen in,
Lhude sing Goddamm,
Raineth drop and staineth slop,
And how the wind doth ramm!
Sing: Goddamm.
Skiddeth bus and sloppeth us,
An ague hath my ham.
Freezeth river, turneth liver,
Damn you, sing: Goddamm.
Goddamm, Goddamm, ’tis why I am, Goddamm,

So ‘gainst the winter’s balm.
Sing goddamm, damm, sing Goddamm.
Sing goddamm, sing goddamm, DAMM.

Nora: This is not folk music, but Dr. Ker writes that the tune is to be found under the Latin words of a very ancient canon.

Strictly speaking, I find the poem rather amusing, though nothing special enough to justify its prominent placement in the textbook. Still, in some strange, perhaps archaic, sense it does seem to capture the power of Spring breaking up the frozen rivers. Still, it struck me as a dumb poem to begin a high school text with. If they’d buried it back a few pages, no parent would ever had the patience to find it.

Although I could probably have saved the text by calling in favors from several parents and administrators, I decided to give in to the demands of a group of conservative patrons rather than starting a witch hunt among all the texts that I had approved as department chairman and turning myself into a human lightning rod.

That said, I have found myself running into so many references to Pound’s influence lately, particularly recommendations from people whose opinions I respect, that I finally decided to take another look at Pound’s poetry, if for no other reason than to help me more clearly understand the poetry of other, more-beloved poets.

Unwilling to devote the rest of my life to trying to interpret, or even make sense of, Pound’s Cantos, I settled on Selected Poems of Ezra Pound, a New Directions Paperbook that claims to offer a “compact yet representative selection of Ezra Pound’s poems and translations.” I’ll be spending at least the next few days exploring this work.

Surprisingly, I had little trouble finding short poems written early in Pound’s career that I truly enjoyed reading. There is certainly something delightful in his “The Garden:”

THE GARDEN
En robe de parade.
Samain

Like a skein of loose silk blown against a wall
She walks by the railing of a path in Kensington Gardens,
And she is dying piece-meal
of a sort of emotional anaemia

And round about there is a rabble
Of the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor.
They shall inherit the earth.

In her is the end of breeding.
Her boredom is exquisite and excessive.
She would like some one to speak to her,
And is almost afraid that I
will commit that indiscretion.

I can remember being strangely attracted to women like this in college, believing, for some strange reason, that a rich sophisticated woman held more appeal than girls I had known in the past, only to discover how shallow some people really are.

“Salutation” also attacks the kind of superior smugness that I’ve recently come to identlfy with the Bush Administration’s white elitists:

SALUTATION

O generation of the thoroughly smug
and thoroughly uncomfortable,
I have seen fishermen picnicking in the sun,
I have seen them with untidy families,
I have seen their smiles full of teeth
and heard ungainly laughter.
And I am happier than you are,
And they were happier than I am;
And the fish swim in the lake
and do not even own clothing.

Although economically I probably no longer belong to the “working class,” I still identify myself with that class, so it’s hard not to identify with the insight offered in the poem.

Ironically, of course one of my ultimate complaints about Pound’s poetry is precisely its “elitism.” His later poetry seems written for a “select” group of artists and critics who view themselves as the “cultural elite.” Pounds is no “man of the people.” You can damn well bet that none of the fishermen depicted here are going to be lying on the beach reading Pound’s Cantos.

Although I admit I never connected Pound with Whitman until I re-read his poetry, Pound does adapt Whitman’s style in some interesting ways. As many critics have pointed out Pound was quite ambivalent about Whitman, as can be seen in:

PACT

I make a pact with you, Walt Whitman-
I have detested you long enough.
I come to you as a grown child
Who has had a pig-headed father;
I am old enough now to make friends.
It was you that broke the new wood,
Now is a time for carving.
We have one sap and one root-
Let there be commerce between us.

Pound’s referral to Whitman as a “pig-headed father” makes it clear that though he recognizes Whitman’s power that there is still much about him that he doesn’t like. Still, Pound seems to realize that Whitman offered modern poets a chance to transcend their poetic past.

While borrowing Whitman’s style, Pound uses it for very different effects than Whitman did:

SALUTATION

O generation of the thoroughly smug
and thoroughly uncomfortable,
I have seen fishermen picnicking in the sun,
I have seen them with untidy families,
I have seen their smiles full of teeth
and heard ungainly laughter.
And I am happier than you are,
And they were happier than I am;
And the fish swim in the lake
and do not even own clothing.

While the first line certainly sounds like Whitman, the message seems nearly diametrically opposed to anything that you might find in Whitman’s poetry. Though I’m sure that Whitman resented certain people in life, there is very little sign of it in his poetry. By attacking the rich, upper class in the first line and then following it with praise for the common fisherman’s family, Pound changes the whole thrust of Whitman’s message. Instead of serving as a message of affirmation and transcendence, it becomes a message of condemnation. Instead of showing the “oneness” of mankind, it splits people into the “haves” and the “have-nots,” a split Whitman tried desperately to overcome in his poetry.

Pound’s “The Rest” employs Whitman’s style to convey a message that may well have been spoken by either Whitman or Pound:

THE REST

O helpless few in my country,
O remnant enslaved!

Artists broken against her,
A-stray, lost in the villages,
Mistrusted, spoken-against,

Lovers of beauty, starved,
Thwarted with systems,
Helpless against the control;

You who can not wear yourselves out
By persisting to successes,
You who can only speak,
Who can not steel yourselves into reiteration;

You of the finer sense,
Broken against false knowledge,
You who can know at first hand,
Hated, shut in, mistrusted:

Take thought:
I have weathered the storm,
I have beaten out my exile.

The truth is that both artists, but particularly Whitman, never received the recognition they thought they deserved. In fact, it’s hard to deny that art is often neglected for entertainment in America, and certainly poetry has lost the position it once had in society.

Still, to me, this poem seems much closer to the Beat poets who claim Pound, than to Whitman. It doesn’t take much imagination to see the genesis of Ginsberg’s “Howl” in the poem. A poem like “Coitus,” though it doesn’t seem very Whitmanesque, certainly shows how Pound could have served as an important bridge between Whitman and Allen Ginsberg:

COITUS

The gilded phaloi of the crocuses
are thrusting at the spring air.
Here is there naught of dead gods
But a procession of festival,
A procession, 0 Giulio Romano,
Fit for your spirit to dwell in.
Dione, your nights are upon us.

The dew is upon the leaf.
The night about us is restless.

It’s hard to imagine that Gerard Manly Hopkins was writing poems like "Spring" nearly at the same time Pound was writing this. While the emerging crocuses may very well appear to look like "gilded penises," it’s still a frighteningly surrealistic image. It’s also difficult to believe that the poem’s phallic imagery wouldn’t have shocked Pound’s audiences in England and America. The imagery is much closer to that of the Beats than to that of most of Pound’s contemporaries. Pushing the Beat connection a little further, it doesn’t seem too far from Pound’s brochure Blast to the magazines and brochures published by the Beat generation.

When I first considered discussing Pound’s Chinese translations I naturally thought I would discuss his translation of Li T’ai Po’s "The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter" since it might well be my favorite Pound poem. After a few minutes browsing the net, however, I decided I would leave well-enough alone, and simply point to Modern American Poetry’s various interpretations as well as other translations of the poem, a very concrete illustration of the difficulty of accurately translating a poem from one language to another (in particular note the “literal” translation at the end of the article).

Although I felt it unnecessary to discuss my favorite Pound poem, I am still quite impressed by his Chinese translations. More than most of his poems, they seem to focus on universal feelings and emotions and illustrate his considerable talent in conveying these feelings concretely and succinctly. The feelings can be as common and everyday as saying goodbye to a friend:

TAKING LEAVE OF A FRIEND

Blue mountains to the north of the walls,
White river winding about them;
Here we must make separation
And go out through a thousand miles of dead grass.

Mind like a floating wide cloud,
Sunset like the parting of old acquaintances
Who bow over their clasped hands at a distance.
Our horses neigh to each others
as we are departing.
-Li T’ai-po

For me, the hazy mountains with the river winding through them is an excellent symbol, objective correlative, if you will, of great distances, the kind of distance that will soon separate them. At such moments, it’s hard to stay focused, so many thoughts drifting through your mind, thoughts of the future, thoughts of the past, but always is almost always a sudden sorrow at such partings, though words of parting may be as casual and non-commital as the horses’ neighs.

Or they can be as dramatic as standing guard over a desolate wasteland:

LAMENT OF THE FRONTIER GUARD

By the North Gate, the wind blows full of sand,
Lonely from the beginning of time until now!
Trees fall, the grass goes yellow with autumn.
I climb the towers and towers
to watch out the barbarous land:
Desolate castle, the sky, the wide desert.
There is no wall left to this village.
Bones white with a thousand frosts,
High heaps, covered with trees and grass;
Who brought this to pass?
Who has brought the flaming imperial anger?
Who has brought the army with drums and with kettle-drums?
Barbarous kings.
A gracious spring, turned to blood-ravenous autumn,
A turmoil of wars-men, spread over the middle kingdom,
Three hundred and sixty thousand,
And sorrow, sorrow like rain.
Sorrow to go, and sorrow, sorrow returning,
Desolate, desolate fields,
And no children of warfare upon them,
No longer the men for offence and defence.
Ah, how shall you know the dreary sorrow at the North Gate,
With Rihoku’s name forgotten,
And we guardsmen fed to the tigers.
by Rihaku ( Li T’ai Po)

It wouldn’t be hard to imagine an American soldier, if soldiers still wrote poetry, standing guard in some lonely outpost in Afghanistan penning this poem. The loneliness and sense of alienation would be a familiar feeling for soldiers, one I felt in Vietnam nearly forty years ago, one nearly as old as the “sands of time.” Surely the desolation left by such barbarous wars is as old as the Mongolian invasions of China, as new as the bombing of Iraq. Nearly as predictable as the seasons, man’s wars turn a “gracious spring … to blood-ravenous autumn.”

And in this “turmoil of war” it is always “sorrow, sorrow like rain./ Sorrow to go, and sorrow, sorrow, returning,/Desolate, desolate fields.” Strangely, though, new generations somehow manage to forget this sorrow as the names of the poets disappear and the old soldiers fade away, forgotten memories and lost opportunities.

While looking up a poem for Shelley the other day in Brooks and Warren’s Understanding Poetry, I coincidentally ran into an Ezra Pound poem that I had just finished reading. The comments in the book reminded me of what is paradoxically one of Pound’s greatest strengths and greatest weaknesses. In short, the authors pointed out that there was a direct connection between Pound’s “Envoi” and Edmund Waller’s “Go Lovely Rose,” a connection specifically pointed out in the poem for those that were aware that “Go, Lovely Rose” was set to music by Henry Lawes, a 17th century musician and friend of Milton.

Here’s Pound’s poem:

ENVOI

Go, dumb-born book,
Tell her that sang me once that song of Lawes:
Hadst thou but song
As thou hast subjects known,
Then were there cause in thee that should condone
Even my faults that heavy upon me lie,
And build her glories their longevity.

Tell her that sheds
Such treasure in the air,
Recking naught else but that her graces give
Life to the moment,
I would bid them live
As roses might, in magic amber laid,
Red overwrought with orange and all made
One substance and one color
Braving time.

Tell her that goes
With song upon her lips
But sings not out the song, nor knows
The maker of it, some other mouth,
May be as fair as hers,
Might, in new ages, gain her worshippers,
When our two dusts with Waller’s shall be laid,
Siftings on siftings in oblivion,
Till change hath broken down
All things save Beauty alone.

and here’s Waller’s poem:

GO, LOVELY ROSE
Edmund Waller [1606-1687]

Go, lovely Rose,

Tell her that wastes her time and me,
That now she knows,
When I resemble her to thee,
How sweet and fair she seems to be.

Tell her that’s young,
And shuns to have her graces spied,
That hadst thou sprung
In deserts where no men abide,
Thou must have uncommended died.

Small is the worth
Of beauty from the light retir’d:
Bid her come forth,
Suffer herself to be desir’d,
And not blush so to be admir’d.

Then die, that she
The common fate of all things rare
May read in thee,
How small a part of time they share,
That are so wondrous sweet and fair.

The connection suggested by Brooks and Warren simultaneously enlightened me to the meaning of the poem and irritated the hell out of me.

Although I had originally been puzzled by the reference in the second line, I did not have enough background to make the connection, particularly the connection to the poem “Go, Lovely Rose.”; It’s obviously an “aha” moment when a poet’s audience makes a connection like this. For at least one moment, the reader can feel a direct connection to the past; we share our humanity with others. More importantly, Pound seems to use the past to leap frog to new insights, contrasting the transience of mere mortal beauty to the transcendence of artistic beauty.

When Pound says, “I would bid them live/ As roses might, in magic amber laid,/ Red overwrought with orange and all made/ One substance and one color/ Braving time” he suggests that the beauty of the rose, and of a woman’s loveliness, can only become eternal when captured and transmitted by art. Art, in this case poetry, is the “magic amber” that both preserves and transmits the original beauty. A carpe diem poem is transmuted into a statement of how art provides a means of transcending time. The two poems, when seen together, do reflect on each other, both poems mean more when taken together. And that’s certainly a good thing.

My complaint about Pound’s poem, though, is that parts of it seem nearly incomprehensible without realizing that the poem is linked to Waller’s poem and it’s conversion to a song by Henry Lawes. The poem would seem to appeal to an artistic literati, not to the average reader who would be unaware of the poem’s heritage. Unfortunately, this poem merely foreshadows Pound’s increasing tendency to imbed literary allusions into his poetry, to the point where the poems become to most readers, as Louis Untermeyer states in Modern American Poetry, “a masterpiece of obfuscation, a jig saw puzzle with the important pieces missing.”