CHAPTER IV Imagism in Pra cticeshodhganga.inflibnet.ac.in/bitstream/10603/104325/7/07...141 I have...
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CHAPTER IVIm a g is m i n P ra c t ic e
IMAGISM IN PRACTICE
In the previous chapter an attempt has been made to examine the
moving philosophy behind the Imagist movement in the writing of poetry
and the role taken by Ezra Pound in the formulation of the concepts and
techniques of this movement. In that examination a comprehensive enquiry
was made to see how far the poets involved in the movement, particularly
Ezra Pound, tried to explore the poetic potentials of Images and Language in
the writing of a new kind of poetry in the twentieth century. In this chapter
ten of the best Imagist poems of Ezra Pound will be taken up and subjected
to a critical assessment to see how and to what extent Ezra Pound suceeded
in writing the kind of poetry that he wanted to write in his age. The poems
that have been taken up for analysis are, 'The Tree', 'Acopia', 'The Return',
'Tenzone', 'The Garden', 'Les Millwin', 'Liu Ch'e', 'In a Station of The Metro',
'Fan-Piece for Her Imperial Lord', and 'Papyrus'.
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THE TREE
I STOOD still and was a tree amid the wood,Knowing the truth of things unseen before ;Of Daphne and the laurel bough
And that God feasting couple old.The grew elm-oak amid the wold.‘I was not until the gods had been Kindly entreated, and been brought within Onto the hearth of their heart’s home,That they might do this wonder thing ;Nathless I have been a tree amid the wood And many a new thing understood That was rank folly to my head before
I Collected Early Poems, 19261
The first poem to be examined is 'The Tree' which was one the earliest
poems of Pound. This poem has stood first in the many collections of his
poems that Pound published after 1908. The poem which has been regarded
as one of the early successful poems of Ezra Pound, was written before
Pound's Imagist period, but the technique of presenting intense emotional
states and upsurges in the form of verbal pictures and inviting the attention
of the readers to a psychic and emotional experience has shown a definite
movement towards Imagism. In this poem Pound has tried to explore the
intimate relationships of the natural objects as adequate symbols for human
emotions and other internal experiences. In this connection it will be proper
to remember that the use of myths of metamorphoses as correlatives to subtle
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human emotions and feelings is a favourite technique of the Imagists. Pound
was deeply involved in such intellectual exercises into various myths and
cultures. In this respect, the present poem can be read along with other
poems of Pound like, 'La Fraisne', 'Masks', 'Piere Vidal Old', 'A Girl', 'Dance
Figure', 'Constellations of Heaven', and some parts of the 'Hugh Selwyn
Mauberley' and the 'Cantos', in which the myth of metamorphoses has been
used as an important pivot of the poetic structure. Pound himself in his Spirit
of Romance expressed the view that the Greek myth originated, 'when
someone having passed through delightful psychic experience, tried to
communicate it to others and found it necessary to screen himself from
persecution'.1
'The Tree' has poetically embodied this theory of myth. The story in
the Metamorphosis of Ovid has been recollected and creatively used by
Pound in tis poem. In that mythological story Apollo tried in vain to seduce
Daphne, a chaste and beautiful nymph, who was the daughter of the river
God Penieus. When she refused to submit to Apollo he attempted to ravish
her, but she fled. Appolo chased and overtook her and when the poor girl
felt the eager arms of the God around her, she called on the venerable Gaea
(Mother Earth) to help her. Immediately the earth gaped opened, Daphne
disappeared, and in her place a laurel tree sprang up from the ground.
Ezra Pound, Spirit o f Romance. Quoted in Christine Froula, A Guide to Ezra Pound’s Selected Poems (NewYork : New Directions, 1983) p.22.
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Apollo made the plant sacred to him.2 This myth has been used by Andrew
Marvell in his poem The Garden' :
The gods, that mortal beauty chase,Still in a tree did end their race :Apollo hunted Daphne so,Only that she might laurel grow :
[The Garden]
According to Marvell the myth has been invented by the poets because
Laurel is the emblem of poetry, and Apollo, the God of poetry. Pound on the
other hand has claimed that by virtue of his own transformation into a tree,
he could visualize the myth.
I stood still and was a tree amid the wood,Knowing the truth of things unseen before.
There is also a reference to another story of Ovid's Metamorphoses in the
poem. In Ovid's story, an old couple, Philemon anf Baucis earned their
immortality together by their kindness to the weary travellers while the
travellers were Mercury and Jove in disguise.
And that god-feasting couple old That grew elm-oak amid the wold ‘T was not until the gods had been kindly entreated, and been brought wither Unto the hearth of their heart’s home.
Robert Graves, The Greek Myths : v o l.] (1955 rpt; Harmondsworth : Pcmguin Books Ltd.. 1977) p.7X.
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Thus we find two kinds of transformations in the poem. One is the
transformation of Daphne and the old couple while the other is Pound's own
transformation. Pound distinguishes and confronts these two kinds of
transformations. By changing himself into a tree, the poet is enable to see the
gods changing human life into perpetual forms of organic life. Such
metamorphoses of percieved natural objects is Pound's favorite way of
building up 'image complexes' in his Imagist poems. His imagination is
extraordinarily volatile and equally his capacity to distinguish imaginative
modes extremely acute. In this respect Pound bears comparison with Robert
Browning. Michael Alexander has said:
The coda of the poem is a staged gesture from Browning;
but the dramatic persona who speaks the beginging is
near to its maker's heart's home.3
He is also of the view that Pound was as conscious as that of Milton's
'Lycidas' or Marvell's in 'The Garden', when Pound made Daphne making
her famous bow here ; she was never to be far away from Pound's
imagination.
However, Thomas H. Jackson is of the opinion that the poem is a direct
soot from Yeats' poem 'He Thinks of His Past Greatness' :4
3 Michael Alexander. The Poetic Achievement o f Ezra Pound, p .21.
4 J 10ma^ o , JaCkc°n’ m Eady P° e,ry °f E z m Pound' A b r i d g e , Massachusettes : Harvard University Press. 1968) p. 151.
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I have drunk ale from the country of the young And weep because I know all things now :I have been a hazel tree and they hung
The pilot star and the Crooked Plough Among my leaves in times out of mind:
[The Wind Among the ReedsJ
In spite of Pound's successful emulation of Yeats in the treatment of
symbolism Pound's poem remains too abstract. 'The Tree of Pound is
different from the original poem of Yeats in two fundamental respects. First,
Yeats is more concrete in his portrayal of the tree symbol and it has no
apparent connection with the myth of metamorphoses ; and it is an ordinary
tree which has leaves. It is worth mentioning here, that W.B. Yeats has also
used the tree as one of his most favourite symbols indicating old age. But
Pound's poem is a general statement of an event. The transformation of
Daphne into a laurel tree and that of Bauci and Philemon, whom Zeus
rewarded for their kindness by changing them into two intertwining trees
upon their death are the incidents Pound wanted to emphasize in the poem.
So the tree of Pound is more of an image in the line of Imagist poetics.
However, -the phenomenon of metamorphoses is not convincingly
demonstrated by Pound in both the cases of Daphne and the old couple.
Perhaps that may be the reason why Jackson says that the Tree could almost
have been written by Yeats trying to write like someone else.6 Secondly, the
5 W .B . Yeats, The Wind Among the Reeds, 1899.
6 Thomas H. Jackson, The Early Poetry o f Ezra Pound, p. 152.
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technique of 'The Tree' approaches 'the direct treatment of the Thing'. Ft is
simple, precise and the implications can be extended to encompass a larger
perspective of human emotions.* Besides the Greek mythology, it also
corresponds to the Hindu mythology. The imprisonment of human souls into
trees as a result of a divine curse and the consequent redemption by another
supernatural interference are the stories frequently found in the Upanishads.
But in the Hindu mythology their transformations into trees are never
■regarded as rewards as in Ovid's Metamorphoses. And, God descending on
earth and changing into human form as seen by Pound through his own
transformation also strikes a similar note in the Hindu concept of Avatara
(incarnation). Thus the poem explores a very vast realm of the psychology of
the readers by providing 'Luminous details' to the consciousness.
Pound, at this stage asserts that he has seen god ; he takes the
Metamorphosis seriously enough and wishes to explain how his experience
differs from Ovid's. This can be known from one of his essays on 'Arnold
Dolmetsch'. Pound started the essay with the sentance 'I have seen the god
(sic) Pan and it was in this manner' and narreted his experience in the forest
where he came across the God.
It was only when men began to distrust the myths and
to tell nasty lies about the Gods for a moral purpose that
these matters became hopelessly confused. Then some
unpleasing Semite or Parsee or Syrian began to use
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myths for social propaganda, when the myth was
degraded into an allegory or a fable, and that was the
beginning of the end. And the Gods no longer walked in
men's gardens. The first myth arosed when a man
walked sheer into 'nonsense', that is to say, when some
very vivid and undeniable adventure befell him, and he
told someone else who called him a liar. Thereupon, after
bitter experience, perceiving that no one could
understand what he meant when he said that he 'turned
into a tree' he made a myth — a work of art that is — an
impersonal or objective story woven out of his own
emotion, as the nearest equation that he was capable of
putting into words.
'The Tree' embodies this theory of myth. The speaker walks 'sheer into
nonsense' and suddenly understands the myth. According to Christine
Froula Pound has sensed that vital, almost sexual, sympathy bewteen divine,
human and natural forms. He makes himself the indicator of such sympathy.
It is worth mentioning here that Animisim and Pantheism of this sort was
very common during the ninteenth century England. Victorians believed in
fairies, Edwardians in Fauns. It is reported that, even Lawrence and Foster
saw caperings among the flora , Foster with a frisson and Lawrence
without anxiety as to whether it was "rank folly to anyone's head".8 But
Pound said :
1 Ezra Pound, Literary Essays, ed. T.S. Eliot, p.431.
8 M icheal Alexander, The Poetic Achievement o f Ezra Pound, p. 21.
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That was rank lolly to my head before.
With reference to this Michael Alexander has commented that 'Rank folly'
betrays the date of The Tree', as clearly as growth-ring.9 However the tree as
an image is quite familiar. The imaginative identification with a natural thing
leads to illumination, an illumination expressed in fantacy. One tree
perceived the rapt poet is a girl, another pair of trees has grown together, and
dreamer now understands the stories of Metamorphosis in Ovid. But the
juxtaposition of these images to form another compact and whole image
requires a skillful handling of language: When Jackson had said that Pound
has diluted Yeats' poem his observation was mainly concerned with the
language from the point of view of traditional poetry of the nineteenth
century. He also gave a hint of Rossetti in Pound's language from the sixth
line to the end of the poem. But he did not examine Pound's exploration of
language as an image. Michael Alexander has also commented :
The language of The Tree' is indeed dusty, the mode a
little musty, yet it is a charming poem. It is a slight
enough gesture, but well made, and an appropriate
gesture to welcome guests to Pound's world.10
But Pound's world of iconoclasm as we find in the Blast period has
not yet arrived. That is why Micheal Alexander continued :
Michael Alexander, The Poetic Achievement o f Ezra Pound, p.21.
Michael Alexander, The Poetic Achievement o f Ezra Pound, p.21.
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The diction is archaic, though not consistently so ; if
words are old-fashioned, their combinations are
picturesque, as in 'god-feasting' and 'elm-oak'.11
Moreover, it is pertinent to mention here that the rhythmic and syntactic
confidence, with which these conventional materials are handled, raises them
into something very definite. Moreover, the emphasis given in the first line is
dramatic. Once detected the theme of the poem will arouse interest to any
reader who can understand the significance of the pivot, which is the myth of
Metamorphosis. Old English words such as 'wold' (Wood) may conceal to
some extent the poem's charm, as well as what may be called its thought. Xet
the poem runs from beginning to end as a single utterance, in a sense a
unified single Image,
Later on, Pound dismissed the poem along with other early poems as
'Stale Creampuffs'.
" Michael Alexander, The Poetic Achievement o f Ezra Pound, p.22.
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Acopia
BE in me as the eternal moods of the bleak wind, and not
As transient things are — gaiety of flowers.
Have me in the strong loneliness of sunless cliffs
And of grey waters.Let the gods speak softly of us
In days hereafter,The shadowy flowers of Orcus
Remember thee.
[Selected Poems, 1926]
'Doria' is a poem first appeared in the Ripostes of 1912. It was also
included in the collection of Des Imagistes published in March, 1914. In this
first Imagist anthology, there was no preface or introduction to explain the
new techniques of Imagism. Moreover the title of the poem, given in Greek,
seemed to be too precious and cryptic.
As observed by F.S. Flint, this is one of the three best poems in the
volume of Ripostes (the other two being 'Apparuit' and The Return'), 'they
stand, I think, as Mr. Pound's finest work'.12 But he did not explain why
'Doria' is considered as one of the finest poems of Ezra Pound, except that it
translates pure emotion perfectly. 'In it he has attained a skill in handling
words that is astonishing to those who understand' wrote Flint, and also
F.S. Flint, review. Poetry and Drama, March, 1913. Eric Homburger, ed.. The Critical Heritage, (London Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd., 1972) p.96.
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commented that 'from the Personae to the Ripostes, there is evidence of a
determination towards a mastery of his medium'. And this is related to
Pound's belief in a principle that runs throughout his early poetry and
underlies even the Cantos. Apart from being absorbed in the Imagist
technique of a perfection in style and diction, Pound here, expresses his belief
that the poetic power apprehends a transcendent flow of spirit, or energy, or
divine power and he calls it 'the gods'. 'His poetic imagination attempts to
live in an animate universe', says Louis L. Martz, in the introduction to the
Collected Early Poems of Ezra Pound, 'where things of nature and beyond
nature can be merged with inner man'.14
The Dorians were one of the ancient Greek peoples living in Sparta
and Crete. And it was from the dialect of their language that the Greek choral
lyric appeared. In course of time, they evolved a culture that valued
discipline, simplicity, and strength. It gave birth to the rich and glorious
tradition and the remarkable cultural heritage of Sparta, which is marked by
valour and straightforwardness. Perhaps Pound was inspired by Victor
Plarr's book In the Dorian Mood, and he took the title from it. Christine
Froula says, 'Pound knew Victor Plarr's In the Dorian Mood and was also
familiar with T.E. Hulme's theory of abstract art'.15 The early writings of
13 Eric Homburger, ed„ The Critical Heritage, p.96.
Louis L. Martz, ‘Introduction’, Collected Early Poems o f Ezra Pound, cd.. MichacI John King (1926 rnlLondon : Faber and Faber. 1977), xiv
15 Christine Froula, A Guide to Ezra Pound’s Selected Poems, p.39.
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Hulme and Pound show that they were seeking not objects to correlate with
their emotional states, but a means of presenting objects that in some sense
embodied emotion.16 However the objects, when they become the
embodiments of emotions, naturally come closer to the Symbolist line of
interpretation. Certain controversies and vaguesness can not be avoided as to
what type of objects would evoke a particular kind of emotion. Here the
reader's personal judgment will play an important role. This element of
subjectivity can be eliminated only when the symbols have fixed values.
And, according to Pound 'the natural object is always the adequate symbol'.
Here,the poem seems to address a beloved in a ceremonial invocation
of a ritualistic traditon. It is the thirst for an eternal bond between them ; and
as it is not an easy union, the invocation of the soul or inner spirit of the lover
required rituals and ceremonies. It is the Pagan tradition. It has been
suggested that Pound wrote this poem for his bride-to-be, Dorothy
17Shakespear. Pound here makes the experiment in the 'equation' of imagery
and emotion. The language appears to have been chiselled and words having
a certain starkness in their attributes. The eternal moods of the 'bleak wind' is
contrasted to the transient things — the gaiety of flowers. Here the words
'bleak' and 'gaiety' are given as epithets to denote the qualities of
permanence and temporariness respectively. A bleak wind is cold and
16 Alan Robinson, Symbol to Vortex, (New York : St. Martin’s press) p.221.
17 Christine Froula, A Guide to Ezra Pound's Selected Poems, p.39
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cheerless. Figuratively, it also means 'dreary'. 'The eternal moods of the
bleak winds' is therefore, a new amalgamation of 'eternal moods' and the
'bleak winds', associated with the symbol of dreary, dull and gloomy aspects
of life and contrasted to 'gaiety'. And with this forced fusion Pound tried to
give the image of a desirable state of mind, the emotional fulfilment, of the
permanence of love.
Be in me as the eternal moodsof the bleak wind, and not
As transient things are — gaiety of flowers.
This is brought by Pound in comparison to the 'gaiety' of flowers,
traditionally associated with merry, lively and cheerful countenance. It also
gives us a hint of the showy and sportive nature of the lover, light hearted
and addicted to pleasure. Pound, like the traditional romantic poets was
worried about the fickleness of beauty and pleasure, which are transitory. So
the images of 'sunless cliffs' and 'grey waters' give the significance of the
everlasting relationship of love ; and without the interference of other
complexities, mingled with pleasure:
Have me in the strong loneliness Of sunless cliffs
And of grey waters ...
Pound here attains a new dimension of consciousness in his emotionally
surcharged sensibility, for he wants to escape from this world. His craving
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for 'eternal things' makes him detached from the transient gaiety of earthly
beauty. The poem therefore ends in a highly abstract form, an experiment in
the equation of imagery and emotion.
Let the Gods speak softJy of us In days hereafter,
The shadowy flowers of Ocrus Remember thee.
The poetic association of the beloved with the eternal flowers of the
underworld, as opposed to the transient gaiety of earthly flowers gives the
impression of 'Bergsonian Theory of Art', which was probably supplied by
Hulme to Pound.18 In it Bergson asserted that, 'art lifts man into a zone of
activity', where 'perceptions become habituated and require the new eyes of
the artist to liberate them', and when the 'human perception gets crystallised
along certain lines, it has certain fixed habits, certain fixed ways of seeing
things, and is so unable to see things as they are'.19 This was the leading idea
of the source of Imagism,because 'the intellectual and emotional complex' of
the image could be formed out of such introspection. In 'A Lecture on
Modern Poetry', Hulme said that the modern poetry 'has become definitely
and finally introspective and deals with expression and communication of
momentary phases in the poet's mind' and also in 'Notes on Language and
Style', he said that poetry 'is a transitory artificial impression' which is
18 Thomas H. Jackson. The Early Poetry o f Ezra Pound, pp.108-109.
1V Thomas H. Jackson, The Early Poetry o f Ezra Pound, p.146.
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deliberately cultivated into an emotion and written about.2" The duty of the
poet is to catch the experience on the wing ; and for Pound, 'the mytho-poetic
mentality'21 is true to the evanescence of real experience. In an essay on
'Arnold Dolmetch', Pound wrote, 'The undeniable tradition of
metarmophoses teaches us that things do not always remain the same. They
22 • *become other things by swift and unanalysable process. It also gives rise to a
concept of the harmony of the universe, and the natural laws controlling it,
corresponding to the theory of oneness in the Hindu philosophy, where the
Jagati (ceaselessly moving world) becomes the partial manifestation of Ekam Sat
(the Ultimate and the Absolute One Being).23 The exact nature of this Absolute
One Bieng, whether feeling or unfeeling, conscious or unconscious, intelligent or
unintelligent can not possibly be definitely known, nor can it be directly
contacted by the ways of the world (Jagaf). Indeed the driving power or force of
the world itself is cognized not directly but only inferentially as the cause of the
sensations which alone are experienced directly and intimately. The Absolute
power is thus, impenetrably veiled from us. Having failed to attain this Absolute
and Omnipotent Being [the Hindus call it Ishwara], we try to understand the
universal laws on physical terms in our quest for permanent values in this
T.E. Hulme, Further Speculations, ed., Sam Hines, (Meanopolis : University of Minnesota Press 1995) pp.72, 94.
21 The term is used extensively by Thomas H. Jackson. See The Early Poetry o f Ezra Pound.
22 Ezra Pound, Literary Essays, p. 431.
-3 J.C. Chatterjee, The Wisdom of the Vedas, (New Delhi : Vikas Publishing House) p .l .
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creation and all changing perceptions. Pound wrote in a note in his San Trovaso
Notebook :
... of such perception rise the ancient myths of the origin
of demi-gods. Even as the ancient myths of meta-24morphosis rise out of flashes of cosmic consciousness.
However, Pound was referring to the Greek mythology rather than the
Hindu mythology when he talked of the myths of metamorphosis. But the
theory of cosmic consciousness bears close resemblance to the Sanskrit word,
chit, (meaning awareness or consciousness) from which derived the concept
of Sat-chit-ananda, obviously regarded as the true nature of Ishwara
[Almighty god]. Pound has got a yearning for this state of supreme bliss,
which in eternal. As in this poem throughout the early phase of his poetic
career, Pound's longing for eternity can be seen. Pound also wrote in the San
Trovaso Note Book:
All art begins in the physical discontent (or torture) of
loneliness and partiality [i.e. being only a separate past
of existence].
It is to fill this lack that man first spun shapes out
of the void. And with the intensity of this longing
gradually came into him power, power over the essences
Quoted by Louis L. Martz, ‘Introduction’, Collected Early Poems o f Ezra Pound, ed., Michael lolin Kinu xiv.
153
of the dawn, over the filaments of light and the wrap of
melody .. .25
Though Pound hated emotions to be expressed in the straight manner he was
a highly emotional poet in his love poems. He often adopts the image of an
ideal woman as his inspiration, after the manner of Dante or Cavalcante or
the troubardours of Provence.
In the present poem, the immediate experience of a sublime desire of
becoming one with the beloved, gives birth to a concept; and the conceptual
discourse, for obvious reasons congeals into an image. Such an image gives
us the advantage, that it presents us, in the concrete and understandable
form:
The shadowy flowers of Orcus
Orcus is Hades, the underworld and the flowers are shadowy and
suggets the darkness. It is to be understood in correlation with the 'bleak
wind', 'sunless cliff' and 'grey waters' and intutively it evokes the sense of
affinity to an eternal world different from our temporal world. Here the
desire to transcend the flux of nature and the longing for immortality is
ultimately to be evoked. The technique of using certain equations for certain
moods and the creation of appropriate images for various conceptions make
~5 Quoted bV Louis L - Martz- ‘Introduction’ , Collected Early Poems o f Ezra Pound, ed„ Michael John King. xiv.
154
the poem an example of perfect Imagist poetry. Ealier in his essay on
'Vorticism' Pound wrote:
By the 'image', I mean such an equation ; not an equation
of mathematics, not something about a, b, and c, having
something to do with form, but about sea, cliffs, night,26having something to do with mood.
'Doria' is a perfect example of this statement. The poem expresses the
personal feeling, but the imcapabilities it reaches towards are given
classicised values, and these values tend to objectify the otherwise private
feelings.
Just as Pound has an easy command over rugged language in
translation in Old Enlglish, so too in 'Doria' he asserted substantively rugged
positions, especially rugged in view of the consistent romanticism of his
earliest poetry. K.K. Ruthven says that in this little poem, the Greek title is
ambiguous, possibly meaning a 'gift', possibly meaning in the 'Dorian
manner', possibly being a reference to Dorothy Shakespear. Pound 'rejected
the transient attractions of romantic love in favour of something that is closer
to harsh reality and therefore more likely to be durable. But the language as
well is tougher, leaner'.27 Pound's desire to have 'poetry as much like granite
-‘’ Ezra Pound, ‘Vorticism’, Ezra Pound : A Critical Anthology , ed., J.P. Sullivan, (London : Faber and Fa!>cr 1970) p.57.
27 Burton Raffel, Ezra Pound: The Prime Minister o f Poetry. (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books. 1984) p.38.
155
as it can be' becomes something more than a mere precept in poems like this.
Burton Raffel wrote, "The rhetorical tone is controlled, sparce ; and the
rhythms are strong not unlyrical so much as securely powerful. The prosody
too is securely measured, in units very speechlike, composed 'in the sequence
28 • • t of the musical phrase, not in squence of a metronome". Pound did not like
the rhythmic structure destroying the shape of the words, or their natural
sound or their meaning. In a letter to Harriet Monroe, he wrote :
Rhythm must have meaning. It can't be merely a careless
dash off, with no grip and no real hold to the words and
sense, a tumty-tum-tumpty-tum-tum ta .
Burton Raffel, Ezra Pound: The Prime Minister o f Poetry, p.38.
K/ra Pound, Selected Utters, ed. D.D. Paige (1950 rpt. ; London : Faber and Faber, 1978) p.49.
15ft
THE RETURN
SEE, they return ; ah, see the tentative Movements, and the slow feet.
The trouble in the pace and the uncertain Wavering !See, they return, one, and by one, with fear, as half-awakened;As if the snow should hesitate And murmur in the wind,
and half turn back;These were the “Wing’d-with-Awe,”
Inviolable.Gods of the winged shoe !With them the silver hounds,
sniffing thr trace of air !Haie! Haie!
These were the swift to harry;These the keen-scented;These were the souls of blood.Slow on the leash,
pallied the leash-men!
[ Collected Shorter Poems, 1926)
'The Return' is one of the best known poems of Ezra Pound in his
Imagist period. Ezra Pound said that he had written this poem in a quarter of
an hour. Yeats saw it as soon as it was published in the English Review in
June, 1912. It was one of the favorite poems of Yeats and when he read it
aloud at a Poetry banquet in Chicago in 1914, he commended the poem as
'the most beautiful poem that has been written in the free form, one of the
few in which I find a real organic rhythm'.30 Philips Grover commented that
30 Philips Grover, ed., Ezra Pound Conference, 1st, Sheffield University, 1976. p.27.
157
this poem was 'an excellent example of the development from the static or
spatial image to the dynamic or kinetic image.31 The poem has recorded a
visionary experience rather than a sense experience.
The poem can be distinguished from the other shorter Imagist poems
not merely in length only but by the destinctive free-verse rhythm, and 'a
musical cadence of the sort which a two or three line poem can not exhibit to
any notable degree'.32 Many critics on Pound's shorter poems quote the
comment given by Pound himself on 'The Return', that appeared in the
Forthrrightiy Review (September, 1914) in which he observed that the poem
is 'an objective reality and has a complicated sort of significance, like Mr.
Epstien's 'Sun God' or Mr. Brzeska's 'Boy with a Coney'. Pound composed
the poem before he knew the work of Brzeska. So, the statement given here
by Pound seems to be difficult to analyse, and many of the interpretations arei%/j
'as opaque as Pound's own statement'.
When Pound claimed that he had written the poem in a quarter of an
hour, he also mentioned that he had been shaping it to the rhythms of Henri
de Regnier's introductory poem to Les Medailles d'Argile. John Espey gives
31 William Pratt, ‘Ezra Pound and the Image’, Ezra Pound : The Umdon Years 190S-1920 ed Philip Grover (New Y ork : AMS Press ) p.27.
32 William Pratt, ‘Ezra Pound and the Image’, Ezra Pound: The London Years 1908-1920. p.28.
33 John Espey, “Some Notes on ‘The Return’”, Paideuma, 15 (1) Spring, 1982, p.35.
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the opinion that 'perhaps the very openness of this admission has led to its
being ignored.34 And he continued to say :
But a glance at Regnier's lines suggest^ffwtat least some
of the less complicated aspects of the 'The Return' may
be explicated through them ; and over the past thirty
years this excercise has proved a fruitful one in the
classroom for illustrating Pound's use of a 'source' as he
adopts in both directly and in reverse, as well as his
tendency to fasten or whatever visual detail is present,
and to range farther than his precise citation, carrying35away echoes of image, language and theme.
Regnier's original poem, 'La Couronne' as reproduced in Paideuma [15(1)
Spring, 1982] has 51 lines. But Pound Compresses it in 21 lines, less than half
of his original model to be pedantic in his 'poem'. John Espey says, 'The
Return' has the effects of echoing rhythm and metric of Regnier's poems Les
Medailles d ' Argile. This collection was largely made up of poems written in
standard metres and stanzas but most probably Pound did not read all.
When Pound wrote, 'See, they return, one, and by one/With fear half
awakened', the repitition of 'one, and by one' might have been influenced by
the line ' Une a Und from the Madrigal Lyrique. It is a favourite mannerism
of Regnier to repeat words in such way as tour a tour and John Espey brings
14 John Espey, “Some Notes on 'The Return” ’, Paideuma, 15 (1) Spring, 19X2, p.35.
35 John Espey, “Some Notes on 'The Return’”, Paideuma, 15 (1) Spring, 1982, p.35.
159
out similar phrases as examples throughout The Return'. And for the
hesitating paces of the succession of semi-divine figures,
The trouble in the pace and the uncertain Wavering!
Espey points out another expression ‘a pas lentd from Le Centaure, among
other similar expressions from Regnier. According to Espey, while writing
the phrase 'Gods of the winged shoe', Pound would have come upon both
‘La rapide sandale ou vibre et tremble encor/L'aile double jadis qui 1'a fait
divine'and ‘La sandale terrestre a I'aile aeriennd in La Pensee. 'If he needed
a further reminder', Espey continues, 'he would have found it in la sandale
ailee, the closing phrase of Via. in Regnier's book. When Pound Wrote :
Gods of the winged Shoe !With them the silver hounds.
Sniffing the trace of air !
Epsey further commented that though the silver hounds can hardly be
related to the pointer, the spaniel, and the mastiff found in Regnier's ‘Le
Chasseur1, the title itself is suggestive of Pound's returning huntsman, and
the colour'of the hounds echoes one of the metals Regnier uses for a
medallion, just as the pallor of the leashmen seems to reflect ‘pale', one of
Regnier's favourite adjectives as well as his use from time to time of the verb
'paliz'.36
John Espey, “Some Notes on 'The Return”', Paideiuna, 15 (1) Spring, 1982, p.36.
160
The poem is subjective and visionary in origin, but the image is
concrete and dynamic. It depicts a picture of the return of the gods to earth,
like hunters coming back wearily from a chase. Tts effectiveness depends
upon the co-ordination of the rhythm and imagery, with the trouble and
hesitant motion of the gods and their hounds, returning exhausted, it seems,
from the hunt, like ghostly figures in a snowy landscape, yet carrying with
them a sense of bravery and prowess, of being "Wing'd-with-A we' and
'Inviolable', virtues still visible even in defeat.37 The first stanza of the poem
exemplifies the sort of thing Pound meant, attempting to align form and
emotion precisely. He troubles the pace of the first line with imperatives,
interjections, commas, and semicolon:
See, they return; ah, see the tentative Movements, and the slow feet,The trouble in the pace and the uncertain
Wavering!
Black Lelend, referring to it wrote :
In keeping with the motion that gods/states of mind,
when then take form, appears to the sense of vision —
what he calls the phantastikon, or phanopoeia — he
directs us to 'See'. We are commanded to see the
rhythmic, temporal,, linguistic processes and techniques
of the poems as if they were divine figures. From the
William P ratt,‘Ezra Pound and the Image’. Ezra Pound : The London Years 1908-1920 ed Philip Grover pp. 28-29.
161
very beginning this poem evokes both the visual and
religious dimensions of the Icon, and Pound Imagism
and Iconicity here aspire not to a merely visual but to a
visionary condition.38
Pound wrote:
I made poems like 'The Return', which is an objective
reality and has a complicated sort of significance, like
Mr. Epstien's 'Sun God', or Mr. Brzeska's 'Boy with a
Coney'.39
Here we find the 'objective reality' of Ezra Pound as a combination of
'organic and inorganic forms'. The comparision of this poem with Epstein's
'Sun God' or Brzeska's 'Boy with a Coney' illustrates the correspondences
between the aims of the visual and verbal parts of the Vorticist movement.
Christine Froula, in this regard, says:
Just as Gaudier's small statue (two photographs of which
appear in Gaudier-Brzeska [(G.B.), plate XXIII] abstracts
the natural forms of the kneeling boy and the rabbit he
. holds to a 'hasmony of planes in relation', Pound's poem
abstracts a narrative of the revenants into a harmony of
carved verbal rhythms. It is these rhythms, and not
narrative events, which emobody the return, and the
38 Blake Lelend, “Psychotic Apotheosis : Visionary Iconicity and Poet’s Fear in Ezra Pound’s ‘The Return ". Twentieth Century Literature [38(2) Summer, 1992] pp. 179-180.
39 Ezra Pound, ‘Vorticism’, Ezra Pound: A Critical Anthology, ed. J.P. Sullivan, p.50.
163
Whether Pound copied it from an unknown Greek poem or Regnier s
French poem is not very significant and how seriously we should take
Pound's 'quarter of an hour' in composing the poem, is unimportant. But
what is clear about the poem even in the first reading is its fineness of
imagery and sauvity of music, its elegant visual and verbal harmony. The
exploration of language can be seen in forming new verbal coinages to give a
visual equivalent of the image :
These were the "Wing’d-with-Awe"Inviolable
As Christine Fraula has suggested in this, Pound has imitated (or abstracted)
the Homeric epithet, the formulaic descriptive phrase attached to the names
of mortals and immortals, and used repeatedly as a metrical unit ; e.g.,
'many-minded Odysseus', 'grey-eyed Athena', 'Helen shaped by Heaven',
and so on. His use of quotation marks measures the conscious distance of his
own poem form the ancient poetry to which the phrase alludes.
Haie! Haie!These were the swift to harry
These the keen-scented;These were the souls of blood
Slow on the leash pallid the leash-men!
163
Whether Pound copied it from an unknown Greek poem or Regnier's
French poem is not very significant and how seriously we should take
Pound's 'quarter of an hour' in composing the poem, is unimportant. But
what is clear about the poem even in the first reading is its fineness of
imagery and sauvity of music, its elegant visual and verbal harmony. The
exploration of language can be seen in forming new verbal coinages to give a
visual equivalent of the image :
These were the "Wing'd-with-Awe"Inviolable
As Christine Fraula has suggested in this, Pound has imitated (or abstracted)
the Homeric epithet, the formulaic descriptive phrase attached to the names
of mortals and immortals, and used repeatedly as a metrical unit ; e.g.,
many-minded Odysseus', 'grey-eyed Athena', 'Helen shaped by Heaven',
and so on. His use of quotation marks measures the conscious distance of his
own poem form the ancient poetry to which the phrase alludes.
Haie! Haie!These were the swift to harry
These the keen-scented;These were the souls of blood
Slow on the leash pallid the leash-men!
164
The interjection, 'Haie !' is explained by Robert Fitzgerald in an interesting
way, " 'Ai ! 'Greek for 'Ha !' English — he put them together".44 The colour
words 'silver' and 'pallid' give the image the quality of an etching or line-
drawing, a sort of brief twilight of the Gods sketched in grey and white.
Pound says 'see', and invites the readers to follow his vision, irrespective of
when or why it happened to come to him. 'Much of Pound's poetry does
have this kind of obscurity about it, of seeming detached and isolated from
time', says William Pratt, 'but this, too, may be seen as the Imagist principle
at work: it is the moment of vision or perception crystallized and 'liberated'
from time, extracted from the flux or continuity of experience which
surrounds it'45 And the image, thus given, out of the Poet's experience we
are expected to supply the context out of our own experience. In the case of
the present poem, we need not be at a loss for long. The image of the heroic
defeat is a tragic one, compelling admiration and sympathy, an image of lost
grandeur out of the past. Christine Froula also says, 'The Return' is, 'the
return of a past which survives only as fragments of an ancient statue
survive, and which is transfigured by the modern poetic landscape which
• / 46contains i t .
Christine Froula, A Guide to Ezra Pound's Selected Poems, (New York : New Directions, 1983) p.43
William Pratt, 'Ezra Pound and the Image’ , Ezra Pound: The London Years, 1908-1920 p 29
46 Christine Froula, A Guide to Ezra Pound's Selected Poems, p.43.
165
This past glory is recovered momentarily through the poet's evocation,
preserving it in the memory for all time. Yeats provided his own context for
the poem when he printed it at the end of the preface entitled, A packet for
Ezra Pound' in his later edition of A Vision, where it served as a symbol of
the cyclical motions of his gyres of history and human personality. In
presenting it he said :
You will hate these generalities, Ezra, which are
themselves, it may be, of the past — the abstract sky —
yet you have written 'The Return' and though you but
announce in it some change of style, perhaps, in book
and picture it gives me better words than my own. (.A
Vision, 1937, p. 29).47
Pound himself provided a further context for the poem when he wrote, in
one of the very last Cantos, near the end of his immensely productive,
controversial, and personally tragic life:
The Gods have not returned. ‘They have never left us'They have not returned.
[Canto CXIII]
The strength of the poetic image, as Pound conceived it, is that, being
independent of time, it can endure through time, gathering meaning as it
goes.
47Quoted in William Pratt, F.zra Pound and the Image'. Ezra Pound: the London Years, pp.29-30
166
TENZONE
WILL people accept them ?(i.e. these songs).As a timorous wench from a centaur
(or a centurion),Already they flee, howling in terror.
Will they be touched with the verisimilitudes ?Their virgin stupidity is untemptable.
I beg you, my friendly critics,Do not set about to procure me an audience.
I mate with my free kind upon the crags ; the hidden recesses
Have heard the echo of my heels, in the cool light,
in the darkness.
[Selected Poems, 1926]
'Tenzone' is one of the twelve poems published in Poetry, in April,
1913 as 'Contemporania', which included the best known imagist poem 'In a
Station of the Metro' and other well known poems like 'Salutation', 'A Pact',
'Dance Figure' and 'The Garret'. It is the first poem in Lustra, published in
October, 1916, in London. Lustra appeared in print later than Cathay, a series
of translations, from the notes of Earnest Fenollosa and the decipherings of
the professors Mori and Ariga (1915).48 But Lustra represents original work
48 Ezra Pound wrote in the introduction of Cathay ‘CATHAY, TRANSLATION BY EZRA POUND. FOR THE MOST PART FROM THE CHINESE OF RIHAKU, FROM THE NOTES OF THE I-ATF ERNFST FENOLLASA, AND THE DECIPHERINGS OF THE PROFESSORS MORI AND ARIGA’................................
167
done before the translations, as well as the work done at approximately the
. . 49same time.
'Tenzone' is often described as Pound's counter-attack, though in a
mild way, on the public consciousness! It also illustrates the workings of his
mind. Pound is always considered to be an impersonal poet and is an expert
in wearing masks and his beautiful poems are all spoken by a persona.
However, in Lustra we can hear Pound's voice more often and in that sense
Lustra is a mixed book and 'Tenzone' is an original composition ; it is filled
with echoes from Latin., Provencal, and the late nineteenth-century English
poets. Glenn Hugh says, ' ... not mere imitations but echoes,in which the
voice of Pound is blended with older voices'.50
'Tenzone' is truely Pound's song. Pound who was called 'a poet in
rebellion against emotion' by Carl Sandburg becomes undoubtedly emotional
in this poem.51 For more than twenty years he has conducted a running fight
with the public — a fight in which he, naturally enough, has taken more
interest than the public and in which he has done the running.52
49 Glenn Hughes, Imagism and the Imagists, (New York : The Humanities Press, 1960) p. 236.
“ Glenn Hughes, Imagism and thelmagists, p.239.
51 Eric Homberger, ed., Ezra Pound: The Critical Heritage, (London : Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd.. 1972) p. 126.
5‘ Glenn Hughes, Imagism and the Imagists, p.239.
168
A 'Tenzone' is a provencal poetic form, a dialogue or debate in verse
which may either be interiorized (as in soliloquy or monologue) or take place
between two rivals. In the present poem it is interiorized. Pound uses it to
treat the antagonism between the modern poet and the society in a larger
context. But it reflects his own personal sentiments and self-introspection.
Will people accept them ?(i.e. these songs)
As a timorous wench from centaur.( or a centurion),
Already they flee, howling in terror.
The mythological creature, Centaur, half man and half horse, was
Pound's image for poetry, which required the union of Apollonian clarity
and order with Dionysian instinct and sensuality. Pound wrote in his essay
'The Serious Artist' :
Poetry is a centaur. The thinking word-arranging,
clarifying faculty must move and leap with the
energizing, sentient, musical faculties. It is precisely the
difficulty this of amphibious existence that keeps down
the census record of good poets ...
Likewise if a good marksman only mounted a few
times he might never acquire any proficiency in shooting
from the saddle. Or leaving metaphor, I suppose that
what, in the long run, makes the poet is a sort of
169
persistence of the emotional nature, and, joined with this,53a peculiar sort of control.
Here Pound is emphasising the importance of experiments in the
craftsmanship of poetry where emotions are to be evoked and controlled.
According to Pound a lyric poet,who experiences new and interesting
emotions at the early age seldom continues to write in the emotional nature
after thirty years of age. Because as the mind gets heavier, a greater volatage
of emotional energy is required to harmonise a constantly more complicated
structure. But Pound was not yet thirty when he wrote this poem. He said, 'It
is certain that the emotions increase in vigour as a vigorous man matures'.54
Perhaps, that may be the reason why Pound introduced the Image of centaur
in his poetry. Here the centaur is not only the symbol of wisdom and strength
but an image also. In addition to the Satyrs and Sileni, centaurs formed a part
of the corteges of Dionysus. Their monstrous apearance with the torso and
head of a man and the rest of the body of a horse were of later origin. They
had not always been like this. The first representations of centaurs show
them as giants with hairy bodies ; then they were depicted as men with the
hind-quarters of a horse. Some have interpreted all this as a Hellenistic
equivalent of the Vedic Gandharvas. But it is more likely that the centaurs
whose name etymologically signifies those who round up bulls, were a
53 Ezra Pound, Literary Essays, cd. T.S. Eliot (London, Faber & Faber Ltd., 1968), p.52
54 Ezra Pound, Literary Essays, p.52
170
primitive population of cowmen, living in Thessaly, who like American
cowboys, rounded up their cattle on horseback. Their behaviour was rudt
and barbarous.
Micheal Alexander says that a 'Tenzone' is a challenge to a flyting, or,
in the case of Bertnans de Born, to actual fighting. Pound is less serious. He
further says:
Propertius will make the mock-heroic aside and the
overheard query familiar ; likewise the de-mytho-
logizing transposition of 'Centaur' into 'Centurion' and
the hyperbole of 'timorous', 'already' and 'howling'.56
The comparision with Propertius is the Latin transliteration of the
well-known legend in the manner of Horatius and Catullus. When the
American critic Floyd Dell praised the series of Lustra first published in
Chicago Evening Post, (11 April, 1913) as having brought back into the
world a grace which probably never existed, but which we discover by an
imaginative process in Horatius and Catullus,57 Pound found his praise
'very consoling' and astute in detecting 'the Latin tone'.58
Will they be touched with the verisimilitudes ?
55 Michael Alexander, The Poetic Achievement o f Ezra Pound, p.84.
56 Michael Alexander, The Poetic Achievement of Ezra Pound, p.84.
57 Eric Homburger, ed., Ezra Pound : The Critical Heritage, (London : Routledge & Regan Paul I97">) p p
98-99
* Pound wrote to Harriet Monroe on 12“* April, 1913. ‘Dell is very consoling. It is clever of him to delect ihc Latin tone’ . Ezra Pound, Selected Letters, p. 19
171
Their virgin stupidity is untemptablc.Michael Alexander, again points out the words 'procure' and 'recesses' in the
lines which follow and gives the comment that it is 'also part of
conspirational joking relationship with the Latin epigramatists Tenzone
59continues in similar vein with a play on virgo intacta.
According to Michael Alexander in English poetry this play with
invisible inverted commas and the provenance of phrases is done best by
Pope and he quotes an incident in the Epistle to Arbuthnot (11. 39-44) when
the poet, besieged by poetasters who importune him for a recommendation
for their plays, is forced to reply:
And drop al last, but in unwilling ears,This saving counsel, keep your piece “nine years”.Nine years ! cries he, who high in Drniy-lane Lull’d by soft Zephyrs thro’ the broken Pane,Oblig’d by hunger, and Request of friends,Rhymes e’re he wakes, and print before term ends.
Pound writes:
I beg you, my friendly critics,Do not set about to procure me an audience.
Pope's play on 'saving' and 'piece' both re-states and improves on Horace's
advice to poets, without making fun of it. Pound's assimilation of the spirit of
Catallus exemplifies the vitality of his amateur knowledge of the classics
and the freedom of his use of them. At the same time, curiously, his comic
59 Michael Alexander, The Poetic Achievement o f Ezra Pound, p. 11.
172
use of translatorese acknowledges their antiquity and remoteness, their need
to be brought up to date. Yet his mock-heroic style is not by a modern use of
the classics.60 In fact Pound affects an aloof insouciance about his lack of
audience, which he pictures fleeing from his poems and their 'verisimilitude'
; he wrote to Harriet Monroe, editor of Poetry, "I don't know that America is
ready to be diverted by the ultra modern, ultra-effete tenuity of
'contemporania'" .61
Michael Alexander, The Poetic Achievement of Ezra Pound, p. 85.
61 Ezra Pound, Selected Letters, p. 11.
173
THE GARDENEn robe de parade.
Samain
LIKE a skein of loose silk blown against a wallShe 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 rabbleOf the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor.They shall inherit the earth.
In her is the end of breeding.Hot boredom is exquisite and excessive.She would like some one to speak to her,And is almost afraid that I will commit that indiscretion.
[Selected Poems, 1913]
This poem is one of the well known Imagist poems of Pound. The
poem presents an encounter with a contemporary woman and its approach
to her is both pointedly satirical and more than compossionate . The tone of
the poem is a detached impersonal observation. This almost excessive air of
detachment in the poem gives an impression of coldness, of almost bitter
allofness from the common run. However, his rebelliousness is purely
aesthetic and intellectual. As observed by G.W. Cronin it is against 'stupidity
and banality — one suspects ----- against simplicity itself'.62 Pound is
determined to accept no emotion at its face value. Carl Sandburg called
6‘ G.W. Cronin, ‘Classic Free Verse’ , Eric Homburger, ed„ The Critical Heritage, p.126.
174
Pound, 'A poet in rebellion against emotion'.63 With his Imagist technique of
viewing the characters from an external point of view, Pound wanted to
recreate an inner experience on the reader and his new approach was more
objective. 'The Garden' is a poem as an example of such an objective
approach. Here, the woman's social position has schooled her in rules so
narrow and repressive that she is trapped by her own fear and scorn.
Christine Froula says, "The 'Garden' of title, epigraph, and opening line
quickly turns to a satiric scenario of a bourgeois sensibility delicately
decaying amid the robust avatars of the future".64 The epigraph comes
from the French poet Albert Samain's Au Jardin de l'lnfante, which as a full
sentence reads —Maan ame est une infante en robe de parade — (my soul is
a child in promenade dress). There is a moment of identification with the
women suggested at the poem. Pound praised the original French poem in
The Little Review in 1918, but later criticised Samain in an article on 'The
Hard and Soft in French Poetry' first published in Poetry, 1918, for his going
'soft' by following the hard lines of Heredia. Pound wrote, "Samain follows
him and begins to go 'soft', there is just a suggestion of muzziness".65
63 Eric Homburger, ed.. The Critical Heritage, p. 112.
Christine Froula, A Guide to Ezra Pound's Selected Poems, p.45
65 Ezra Pound, Literary Essays, p. 285.
175
The first section of the poem focusses on the movement of the woman
and it is seen from a perspective, which is fascinating at the beginning, but
immediately revolting and dull.
Like a skein of loose silk blown againts a wall She walks by the railing of a path in Kensington Gardens And she is dying piece-meal of a sort of emotional ansmia.
The first two lines establish her position precisely, as she walks in
Kensington Gardens like 'silk blown againts a wall', B. Foggleman has
observed that with a flexibility that the formal patterns and archaisms of
much of his earlier verse did not quite allow, each of the four lines presents
facets of the woman's character.66 As Foggleman has pointed out in the first
half of the first line, the delicate interply of s, k, and 1 sounds projects the
lilting elegance of her appearence, which is violently ruptured by the
perception of her helplessness, 'blown against a wall'.67 But the second line
projected the compulsive quality of her movement, keeping in line 'by the
railing of a path'. It is not the majestic movement of 'Kung' in the Cantos:
Kung Walkedby the dynastic temple
and in to the Cedar groveand then out by the lower river
[Canto XIII]
Bruce Foggleman, Shapes o f Power : The Development o f Ezra Pound’s Poetic Sequences (Ann. A rbor: UMI Research Press, 1988) p.27.
67 Bruce Foggleman, Shapes o f Power, p.27.
176
but rather a diminutive step, without vitality or self-direction. James F.
Knapp is of the opinion that, had the silk been a discarded newspaper, and
the walk in Soho instead of the elegant Kensington, her nature would have
seemed very different indeed.68 But Pound uses a cloth which is rich and
insubstantial and the next two lines reveal two more facets. She is not
simply dying, but dying 'piece-meal', since she can do nothing fully, and
'her malaise is a hybrid, cultivated deficiency, a sort of emotional anaemia'.
The next section introduces 'the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very
poor' who frighten and disgust this delicate lady. And it is recorded
decisively, yet unobtrusively from her point of view.
And round about there is a rabbleOf the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poorThey shall inherit the earth.
"Another poet might have written, 'And round about her is a rabble' ", said
Foggleman, 'but we are given the scene through her eyes'.70 Here, we
know that all that she sees in contrast with herself : 'a rabble' lacking her
social correctness, 'filthy, sturdy' and 'unkillable', not, like her, delicate and
'anaemic'. Ironically, Pound is saying that these weak people shall inherit the
earth ; but it is a point of view of the meek and their reason is the Biblical
prediction in Mathew 5:5 :
68 James F. Knapp, Ezra Pound, (Boston : Twayne Publishers, 1979) p.67.
69 Bruce Foggleman, Shapes o f Power, p.27.
70 Bruce Foggleman, Shapes o f Power, p.27.
177
Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth
However, according to those who are 'very poor', the earth is 'filthy' and
these weaklings are rooted in the earth.71 Then 'with the sharp pun of the
next line, 'the end of breeding', the poem returns to an observer's perspective
and Pound's techniques becomes clearly Imagistic. The woman's character
and her internal crisis with a mounting sense of desperation becomes a
subject to be analysed more carefully. The poem is a response that moves
beyond empathy and it progresses toward action.
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.
The break in the final line, 'I/will commit', pivoting its emphasis on 'will',
implies a contrast between the observer's reponsiveness and the woman's
anaemia, and suggests a desire to help which she is equipped to perceive
• • * 72only as an 'indiscretion'. This can be compared with another situation in
Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,
No instinct has survived in her Older than those her grandmother Told her would fit her station.
[Mr. Nixon, XI]
71 Bruce Foggleman, Shapes o f Power, p.27.
72 Bruce Foggleman, Shapes o f Power, p.28.
178
Here, the ideogrammic method is at work not only in the portrayal of
the woman through juxtaposed facets of her character as observed in her
movement, but also in the poem's presentation of an encounter between the
speaker (may be Pound) and the character (the woman) through
juxtaposition of their perspectives. The ideogrammic method also clarifies the
perspectives and introduces the poem's central current of empathy.
However, the greatest misunderstanding of Imagism, by readers as well as
by poets who quickly began to imitate it was that they concentrated on
visual images to the virtual exclusion of every thing else. For Pound,
Imagism meant the achievement of a precise, economical, verbal equation
for a motion and idea. Though he often used visual images, the Image
was not a picture, but a structure of words. It was also a 'direct treatment
of the thing whether subjective or objective'. His doctrine was far more
flexible and subtle than what some of his imitators understood. The
concluding stanza of 'The Garden' is a good illustration. James F. Knapp
says:
, While the first two lines do sound closer to
generalisation than we might expect the rest of the stanza
evokes the subtle complexity of the woman's social and
emotional life by creating a complex of words which is
73 Bruce Foggleman, Shapes of Power, p.28.
179
fully as 'luminous' as any detail of physical
description.74
The ambiguity of the phrase 'almost afraid' the suggestion of restriction in a
syntax appropriate only to the very formal usage that I will commit that
indiscretion' — of language, the connotations of 'indescretion' itself, a word
used mostly to define the social properties of the upper classes also
contribute to the complex personality of the woman. Just as her spontaneous
humanity has been stifled by the demands of her class, the pathetic
temptation for human contact that 'she would like some one to speak to her',
is drowned out by the very words and patterns of words. And has it kept her
fearful and isolated.75 If the 'Garden' dismisses her, it does not do so lightly,
for she represents an aesthetic of refinement out of existence, as it were, into
exclusion, with which some of Pound's early works have an affinity'. Even
up to the period of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley during 1920, Pound was
struggling to explore this aesthetic of refinement.
For three years, out of key with his time,He strove to resuscitate the dead art Of poetry ; to maintan “the sublime”
[E.P. Ode Pour L ’election De Son Sepulchre]
The precision of characterisation and feeling in this poem and the
completeness, depth and complexity of its presentation testify to a strength of
74 James F. Knapp. Ezra Pound, p.68.
75 James F. Knapp. Ezra Pound, p.68.
1X0
vision that comes from the attempt to reproduce exactly the thing which has
been clearly seen. The structure of the poem is perfectly suited to the
inner form of its vision, because Pound does not talk about the woman s
world ; he shows it to us in the very kind of language which had shaped her
view of its reality. His friend Rchard Aldington parodied 'The Garden in
The EgoJstin 1914, as follows :76
Like an armfiil of greasy engineer’s-cottonRung by a typhoon against a broken crate of ducks’ eggsShe stands by the rail of the old Bailey dock.Her intoxication is exquisite and excessive,And delicate her delicate sterlityHer delicacy is so delicate that She would feel affrontedIf I remarked nonchalantly, “Saay, stranger,
ain’t you dandy”77
Pound enjoyed the parodies, In an earlier letter to Harriet Monroe, in October
1913, Pound wrote, 'In fact, good art thrives in an atmosphere of parody.
Parody is, I suppose, the best criticism — it shifts the durable from the
78apparent'. Perhaps Pound wanted all to go together and to present the best
in the midst of the recalcitrent materials, as Kenner said, 'Things explain
themselves by the company they keep".79
Christine Froula, A Guide to Ezra Pound’s Selected Poems, p. 45.
77 K.K. Ruthven, A Guide to Ezra Pound’s Personae (1926), (Berkeley : University of California Press 1969) p. 168.
H K/.ra Pound. Selected Letters, p .13
' Hugh Kenner, 77ie Poetry of Ezra Pound, p. 220.
LES MILL WIN
THE little Millwins attend the Russian Ballet The mauve and greenish souls of the little Millwins Were seen lying along the upper seats
Like so many unused boas.
The turbulent and undisciplind host of art students —The rigorous deputation from “Slade” —Was before them.
With arms exalted, with fore-armsCrossed in great futuristic X ’s, the art studentsExulted, they beheld the splendours of Cleopatra.
And the little Millwins beheld these things;With their large and anaemic eyes they look out
upon this configuration.
Let us therefore mention the fact,For it seems to us worthy of record.
[Selected Poems, 1926|
This poem portrays the recalcitrent and dull attitude of the Millwins,
against the art students' axhilaration at a performance of a Russian Ballet,
Cleopatra. Christine Froula has written :
Pound, here follows Henry James in the role of American
expatriate as social observer, a role which turns a
detached point of view and unaccustumed eye to the
•advantage.80
Chns,ln̂ — ;—” tide to Ezra Pound's Selected Poenvs. p. 49.
1X2
The Millwins are socialites who attend the ballet out of a sense cultural duty,
without proper appreciation of the ballet as art. They belong to a particular
class of bourgeoise. 'Les Millwin' relates to a passing remark by Ezra Pound
on the social relativity of value in Patria Mia, The Russian dancers present
their splendid luxurious paganism, and everyone with a pre-Raphaelite or
Swinburnian education is in raptures'.81 As an Imagist poem, it has an
objective image which can be contrasted with an image which represents a
subjective response. The central contrast is between two different kinds of
spectators at the ballet, each characterised by a startling image. The passive
Millwins, whose limp souls and inactivity, conveyed by the image of 'unsued
boas' [boas are long, narrow wraps of dyed fur or feathers, usually worn by
woman], are contrasted with the enthusiastic art students, conveyed by
'Slade' (The Slade School of Fine Art in London) and their actions are
equated with a religious ceremony. The students consider the ballet as an art
form worthy of their adoration. On the other hand, the Millwins are spiritless
and can't comprehend the ballet.
The mauve and greenish souls of the little Millwin.
The Millwins are weak, exhausted and diluted (mauve and greenish soul) as
against the 'primary colours' of the art students' response.82 Pound
disapproves both. The Millwins are condemned for being ostentatious. Their
81 Ezra Pound, Selected Prose. 1909-1965. ed„ William Cookson (New York : New Directions, 197!!) P.l<)3.
"■ Christine Froula, A Guide to Ezra Pound's Selected Poems, p.50.
1X3
cultural pretence is like a boa, worn only for appearance. The students are
condemned for thinking that a gaudy production is great art. Therefore, their
display of enthusiasm is just as inapropriate as the apathetic response of the
Millwins.
The turbulent and undisciplined host of art students The rigorous deputation of the ‘Slade’.
Here the students from the Slade School of Fine Art in London are over-
enthusiastic, almost to the point of disapproval.
With arms exalted, with fore-armsCrossed in great futuristic X ’s, the art studentsExulted, they beheld the splendours of Cleopatra.
Christine Froula comments on the futuristic X, 'The Italian Futurist
movement hit London in 1912 with the Sackville Gallery's Futurist Exhibition
• • • 83and lectures by F.T. Marinetti, its leader'. Pound did not like furturism as it
was 'a kind of accelerated impressionism' and 'a surface art as opposed to
vorticism'. He wrote :
I have no doubt that Italy needed Mr. Marinetti, but he
did not sit on the egg that hatched me, and as I am
wholly oppossed to his aesthetic principles I see no
reason why I, and various men who agree with me,
should be expected to call overselves futurists.84
** Christine Froula. A Guide to Ezra Pound's Selected Poena. p.50.
H/xa Found. ‘Vorticism', E v a Pound : A Critical Anthology, ed. J.F. Sullivan, p.50.
1X4
That is why Pound condemned the 'luxurious paganism' of the ballet
Cleopatra** as he condemned the inactivity of the 'the little Millwins . When
the little Millwins attend the Russian Ballet production of Cleopatra in
London, they sit in the upper seats where they can be apart from the rest of
the audience and look down upon both the audience below and the
performance. At this elevated position, they too are 'exalted like the
students, but passively. They have come only to view the event rather than
to indulge in enjoying it. The Millwins' assumption of social superiourity is
undercut by Pound's comparision of their souls to 'unused boas'. Robert
Coltrane, wrote in Paideuma :
The description of the souls as 'mauve and greenish'
suggests the colors [sic] of bruised skin or perhaps the
reptile which the scarf resembles. The comparision of
souls to boas reinforces our recognition of the Millwin's
inability to experience art, for their souls are like clothing
worn only for decoration and then draped casually over
the back of the seat when not in use.86
Down below are the students who by means of their enthusiastic
response represent the opposite reaction from that of the Millwins. In contrast
to the image which associates the Millwins with Boas (dull and lowly
85 Cleopatra was a one-act ballet first performed by Ballet Russe in 1909 and is a production of Diaghilev. Christine Froula A Guide to Ezra Pound’s Selected Poems, and Paideuma. 18(3) Winter, 1989, p. 125.
“6 Robert Coltrane, ‘The Imagist Relationship between Pound’s ‘Les Millwin’ and Kliot’s ‘Morning at the Window-. Paideuimi 18(3), Winter, 1989, p. 126.
185
snakes), the students create an entirely different image, one associated with
religious fervour. For them the ballet is a religious experience, suggested in
the stanza three by the words 'exalted' and 'exulted'. The waving of arms in
which the students 'exalt' the ballet has the religious connotation of 'to praise
and glorify'. To exult is literally to 'leap for joy', but in a religious context, it
also means to rejoice. In Hindu mythology too, god loves singing and
applauding (with raised arms):
87mad bhakta jatra gayanti tatra tisthami, Narda.
The students are waving their arms above their heads (arms exalted)
so that their forearms cross to form a series of X's, which Pound calls
'futuristic'. According to Pound, it was a mechanical process which had no
depth ( a surface art). The poem suggests that the art students are creating a
mechanical art form with their bodies. Since ballet also creats art through
body movements the comparision condemms Diaghilev's production of
Cleopatra, by associating it with the mechanistic action of the students.
K.K. Ruthven says that this ballet was famous for its 'exotic sumptuousness'88
and was effective through a surface appearance and spectacle rather than by
being the creation of a genuine work of art. As students of art, they should have
87 Lord Krishna said to Narda, 'I am there where my devotees go in procession and sing’.
WK.K. Ruthven, A Guide to Ezra Pound's Personae (1926), (Barkeley : University of California Press. 1969)p.68.
186
been able to see the difference. Thus "Furturistic X's" is a comment on the ballet
and on the students w ho are reacting mechanically.
Regarding the sharp contrast of images, this poem can be compared
with Eliot's poem, 'Morning at the window' (1916). In a letter to Marianne
Moore written in 1918, Pound stated that his poem 'Les Millwin' had directly
influenced Eliot's 'Morning at the window'. Pound wrote, "T.S.E. first had
his housemaids dropping like the boas in my 'Millwin' and it was only after
inquisition of this sort that he decided, to the improvement of his line, to
have them sprout".89 According to Grover Smith, this poem was the first
poem 'in which Eliot showed any indebtedness to Ezra Pound.90
They are rattling breakfast plates in basement kitchens,And along the trampled edges of the street I am aware of the damp souls of housemaids Sprouting despondently at area gates.
The brown waves of fog toss up to me Twisted faces from the bottom of the street,And tear from a passer-by with muddy skirts An aimless smile that hovers in the air And vanishes along the level of the roofs.
[Morning at the Window, 1916 |91
Eliot's poem about an early morning in London presents a contrast
between things unseen that creats objective impression (stanza one) and
119 F.zra Found, Selected letters, p. 142.
Grover Smith, T.S. kliot s Poetry and Plays : A study in Sources and Meaning. (1950, rnl. Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1956), p.31.
91 T.S. FJiot. Complete Poems and Plays (New York : Harcourt Brace, 1958) p.16.
1X7
M 2 • t *
things seen that create subjective response (stanza two). Eliot's primary
debt to Pound can be seen, as Pound noted, in the poem s most effective
image 'the damp souls of house maid'. The image recalls Pound s depiction
of the little Millwins having 'mauve and greenish souls'. Robert Coltrane
points out that the influence of Pound's poem is even more evident in the
first published version of 'Morning at the Window' (September, 1916 issue of
Poetry), where the housemaid's damp souls are described as 'hanging
despondently', calling up an image of wet laundry. Eliot's change from
'hanging' to 'sprouting' eliminates the association with the passivity of the
Millwins, and suggest) the more repulsive connotations of soggy weeds or
fungus resulting from the dampness. The change implies not only inactivity
but also decay, an association which further contributes to the negative
impression of London portrayed in the poem.93 Pound discouraged those he
knew from borrowing poetically from him or each other as indicated in the
letter to Marianne Moore cited above.94 But, Robert Coltrane says :
while an earlier example of Eliot's debt to Pound may
exist, such debt have apparently been intentionally
obscured by mutual agreement. The relationship
between 'Les Millwin' and 'Morning at the Window' is
- Robert Coltrane. ‘The Imagist Relationship Between Pound’s ‘Les Millwin’ and Eliot’s ’Morning at the Window’, Paideuma, 18(3) Winter, 1989, p. 124.
M Robert Coltrane, Paideuma. 18(3) Winter, 1989, p. 124.
4 H/.ra Pound, Selected Letters, p. 142.
I8S
the earliest provable example of Pound s direct influence
on Eliot's Poetry.95
Structurally, Pound's poems consists of fourteen lines, which fall into
units of 4 lines, 3 lines, 3 lines and 2 lines. Pound may have intended the
poem to be a free verse sonnet in which a contrast is offered in the first
twelve lines, followed by a comment on this contrast in what would
traditionally be the concluding couplet. Stanza one describes the little
Millwins followed by two three-line stanza, devoted to a description of the
students. The fourth stanza is a couplet and joins the two contrasting
groups in a manner similar to that of the two lines Imagist poems modelled on
the Japanese haiku. And a general statement is given:
And the little Millwins beheld these things.
It is made concrete in the following line.
With their large and anaemic eyes they look out upon this configuration
The things which the little Millwins beheld are the activities of the
students in front of them ; and the word 'anaemic', suggests the primary
Millvvin characteristics. And the description of the 'things' that these
'anaemic eyes' behold is a 'configuration', of a series of X's formed by the
students' arms, an image which has identified and characterised them, just as
15 Robert Collrane, 'The Imagist relationship between Pound’s ‘Les Millwin’ and Kliot’s Morning at the window’. Paideuma, 18 (3) winter, 1989. p. 127
1X9
the boas characterised the Millwins. And these images are based on the
explorations of language, because Pound believed that the speech itself is the
Image.
190
LIU CH’E
THE rustling of the silk is discontinued,Dust drifts over the court-yard,
There is no sound of foot-fall, and the leaves Scurry into heaps and lie still.And she the rejoicer of heart is beneath them :
A wet leaf that clings to the threshold.
[Selected Poems, 1926|
This is one of the many poems Pound composed in the Chinese
manner and also in the haiku technique. This poem was included in Des
Imagiste and is a very beautiful example of Imagism.
The poem gives a series of delicately suggestive images super
imposing each other giving in effect a more beautiful one. The first five lines
present a scene both actual and emotional, according to the Imagist hygiene,
which will give the 'intellectual complex'. Martin A. Kayman thinks that the
first stanza, "with the controlled presence of metonymic signifiers of 'natural
objects' and sensual inpressions, in their presence and absence, invoking a
concrete scehe of the couryard and its drama",96 examplifies the technique of
transforming metonymic details into a metaphor. After this stanza comes a
gap and the last line. As readers of the poem we are confronted with a
syntactical discontinuity. But it is overridden by an emotional coherence,
* Martin A. Kayman, The Modernism o f Ezra Pound, p.44.
191
and the overall strategy of the poem. In this regard, John T. Gage is of the
opinion that, "As far as the 'image' itself is concerned, the strategy in97 « . • •
question is the use of comparision as a figure of speech". What is in issue in
reading the poem is not how one recreates the poet's emotion or experience,
based on the inadequate evidence, but how one responds to the formal
strategies of the poem. The persistent motion of the image as a special device
for rendering the poet's emotion through sensual evocation allows the reader
to neglect the fact that their interpretation depends more on what they have
in common with other kinds of poetry than on how they differ. The first four
lines suggest the absence of life's activities, where once 'the rustling of silk'
was there. Only the wind is blowing gathering dust and the 'leaves/scurry
into heaps and lie still'. There is no sign of vitality. The opening lines of
Canto CXX,
Do not moveLet the wind speak.
can be helpful in explaining the significance. The movement of the wind and
the succession of emotive patterns associated with it becomes the sole image
upon which the later sense of stillness is imposed.
And she the rejoicer of the heart is beneath them.
97jobn T-Ga«c* ln ‘^ A n rs lm g Eye : The Rhetoric o f bmgism (Baton Rouge : Louisiana Slate University P re s s 19X1) p.83. 1
192
If 'she' is the cause of the activiy which has just been replaced by stillness,
then what does it mean to say she is 'beneath them'? Does it mean that she is
dead and buried under the leaves in the courtyard ? Or does it mean that she
feels beneath them, that her power to make the heart rejoice, or her dignity
somehow, is beneath theirs. There are other possibilities too. The readers
hope that the final line might clarify some of these puzzling questions and
lead to a conclusion at least. But Pound gives a colon and then a pause. John
T. Gage calls it the 'characteristic colon' of Pound. It is a signal that what
follows is to be equated with what has gone before. What follows in a
comparision by juxtaposition of the possible concepts. But it does not resolve
the ambiguity.
If she is dead, then the comparision serves to tell us how the speaker
feels. He compares her to the leaf to inform us of the poignancy of his grief,
'perhaps' : the threshold representing the frame of his consciousness, the
tangibility of her recent memory and the intangibility of her recent loss'.98 If,
however, the other meaning of beneath is recalled, the comparision functions
to inform us about how she feels. So the essential ambiguity of the fifth line,
therefore, renders the whole imagistic comparision equivocal, in that it might
be said to be an 'equation' for the emotions of either the speaker of the poem
or its subject.
" John T. Gage, In the Arresting Eye: Die Rhetoric of hmgism, p.68.
193
Besides these possibilities of emotional equations the discontinuity of
the last line is also worth considering. The dominant effect of the first stanza
is that of dryness ('scurry'), a lack of energy ('drift') and absence. But the
last line is a contrast:
A wet leaf that clings to the threshold.
Here the significance, contrary to that of the first stanza, is a notion of
presence, wetness and energy ('Clings'). The point is that these contrasting
'tones' are both signified by the same 'object'. Martin A. Kayman says,
‘everythingin the last line belongs metonymically in the scene as presented
in the first stanza; yet its state and function have been changed. We can view
the poem as a whole metaphor'.99 The first image of lifelessness, which is
represented by the association of dry leaves gives a picture of a typical
autumn day signifying the end of activities and fall (death). But in a larger
sense it also gives the idea of an another phase. A beginning, a reawakening
of the spirit is inevitable. The second image, with the metaphorical term 'wet
leaf' and so on is brought into an organic relation by a problematically silent
emotional adjunct. The relation can not be strictly continunous. And in its
literal sense it can not be interpreted in metonymic terms, unless we insert
an intervening story. Here it will be interesting and productive to compare
Martin A. Kayman. llw Modemistn o f Ezra Pound, p.45.
194
the poem with another English version of the same Chinese Original, the
version on which Pound apparently worked, that of Herbert Giles.
The sound of rustling silk is stilled,With dust the marble courtyard tilled ;No footfalls echo on the floor.Fallen leaves in heaps block up the door...For she, my pride, my lovely one is lost, m And I am left, in hopeless anguish tossed.
John T. Gage says that by substituting the concrete 'image' for the abstract
name of the emotion, Pound has created an ambiguity which is not found in
Gile's version. However, when Hugh Witemeyer said that Pound avoided
the metrical monotony of Giles couplets with his unrhymed vers libre and
gave a more powerful equation for sorrow than Gile's rhetorical inversion.
'In hopeless anguish tossed'.101 John T. Gage is of he opinion that Pound's
poem cannot be as simple as that. Although Pound might have worked from
Giles' version, the poem is not a direct translation. We must not fail to notice
that Pound does not necessarily equate the clinging leaf with the speaker:
Because in Pound's version, it is not 'I', who is left. Pound version, of course,
allows the possibility that the image renders the speaker's anguish, but it
renders this emotion with less certainty as we cannot rule out other
possibilities. John T. Gage says, "He may have found the phrase 'hopeless
John T. Gage, In The Arresting Eye :lh e Rhetoric of Imagism, (Baton Rouge : Louisiana Stale University Press 1981) p.69. > r , . . .
111 John T. Gage, In 'Pie Arresting Eye .Die Rhetoric of Imagism, p.69.
195
anguish' vague, but his own version replaces this vagueness with an
uncertainty".1"2
But many critics have agreed that it is only by reference to Giles' poem
that we can resolve with any certainty what and whose emotion is being
presented. If Pound wanted to correct Giles' failure to communicate the
precise emotion of the speaker we must conclude that it fails to do so, as John
T. Gage observed. But Pound's purpose is different. He has made an attempt
to shift the emotion away from the speaker, or the subject, and fix it
somehow in the scene. Having left alone so, we might well conclude that the
poem is more 'powerful'.
The readers have to understand the relationship of the girl, who is 'the
rejoicer of the heart' and lies 'beneath' the leaves on the dry and dusty earth,
with the speaker of the poem. Thus, because of the change of state, but in as
much as it is the same scene transformed, there is a more radical metonymic
continuity.
Martin A. Kayman, illustrates the point by comparing this poem with
William Carlos Williams' poem, 'The Young Housewife':
"• John T. Gage, In The Arresting Eye :'I'he Rhetoric of Imagism, p.69.
1%
She stands
Shy, uncorsctcd, tucking in Stray ends of hair, and I compare her to a fallen leaf
The noiseless wheels of my car rush with a crackling sound over
103dried leaves as I bow and pass smiling.
Martin A. Kayman writes:
The leaf which appears first as an explicit metaphor is
subsequently demystified when it reappears meto-
nymically. The effect is disjunctive : 'an assertion of
objective realities and difference over subjective
relations. In 'Liu Che', on the other hand, the leaf is first
introduced as a metonymy, and then transformed into a
metaphor — which continues, in a sense as a, 104metonymy.
The energy of Pound's poem is released in our participation in relating
the shift at the level of emotional connotation. The effect is an elegiac
resolution of discontinuity, the dominance of the subjective transformations
over the denotations of the actual. This is achieved without recourse to
didacticism, mysticism, allegory or abstract comment— without conspicuous
subjectivism and without the loss of the concrete values of the signifiers. It is
a question not merely of the presentation of 'natural objects', but of making
‘nt Martin A. Kayman, The Modernism o f Ezra Pound, p.45.
1 u Martin A. Kayman, The Modernism o f Ezra Pound. p.45.
197
the object function at two levels. So, what we seem to have in Pound's
Image and his hierarchy of metaphors is a process in which the metaphorical
or metonymic roles of signifiers are inverted. And we see that the Image has
replaced the descriptive limitations of an objective language, with an
activised transformation. The achievement may not be as interesting
qualitatively as it is technically.
198
IN A STATION OF THE METRO
THE apparition of these faces in the crowd ;Petals on a wet, black bough.
fSelected Poenis, 1926]
This little poem is one of the most famous Imagist poems of Ezra
Pound, and is often considered by the critics as a poem showing the
quintessence of Imagism. Pound himself wrote an account of its composition,
which is quite well known and often quoted by many critics.105 The incident
that inspired Pound to write the poem was just a simple experience of
meeting some beautiful ladies and a child at a Metro Station at La Concorde
on a visit to Paris. Unable to express what he felt at that time he took more
than one year to compose the poem after repeated draftings, revisions and
prunningj With the Japanese haiku in mind, Pound ultimately has composed
the poem, which, according to Hugh Kenner, 'needs every one of its twenty
words, including the six words of its title'. 106 What Pound was trying to
convey to the readers was the organic evolution of the form of the poem,
rather than arbitrary arrangement of words. Whether the history of the poem
is a truth or a myth, the piece has become a famous document of Imagism.
Pound's story of how a 'sudden emotion', which inspired the poem, led first
The story is given in Chapter III ot this Thesis, Ezra Pound and the Imagist Movemen, p.l 18.
' Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (Barkeley : University of California Press, 1971) p. 184.
I9y
to an equation in colour' and later on to a precise 'verbal equivalent, has
much in common with certain contemporary developments in the visual arts.
That is why it became the priviledged text of Imagism. It illustrates the
' 107linguistic character and 'the metonymic articulation of lmagist verse .
Pound's account of his condensation of the original thirty line poem into a
two-line haiku-like poem is significant. This is the sort of image that Pound
had contemplated when he declared that it is better to present one Image in a
lifetime than to produce voluminous works.108 Pound wrote :
The 'one image poem' is a form of super-position, that is
to say, it is one idea set on the top of another. I found it
useful in getting out of the impasse in which I had been
left by my metro emotion.109
The two images given in the poem, 'faces in the crowd' and 'Petals on a
bough' are presented in a simple and direct way, and they have been
amalgamated to form the 'One image poem'. One of the principles of Pound
was that the rhetorical framework around a metaphor should be stripped
away so that comparision, which is at the core of every metaphor, must be
allowed to stand alone. For him, the fusion of the images can not be an
abstraction ; both must be concrete, precise images which, when juxtaposed,
John Steven Childs, Modernist Fomi : Pound's Style in the Early Cantos (London : Associated University Press. 1986) p.37.
* K/ra Pound, ‘A Few Don’Ls’ , Literary Essays, p.4.
t / i .1 Pound. 'Vorticism’. Ezra Pound: A Critical Anthology, ed. J.P. Sullivan, p.5 1
result in sudden illumination. The readers have to reconstruct the whole
process, which Pound deleted at the time of writing in terms of metonymy.
Regarding the poem Pound comments :
I dare say it is meaningless unless one has drifted into a
certain vein of thought. In a poem of this sort one is
trying to record the precise instant when a thing outward
and objective transforms itself, or darts into a thing
inward and subjective'.11U
Donald Davie has pointed out that this transformation (from inward to
outward) is the main difference between Imagism and Symbolism, 'the traffic
being run all the other way from Symbolists?' He writes :
For to Pound it is the outward that transforms itself into
the inward, whereas the devotee of the objective
correlative (Eliot) it is always the inward (the poet's state
of mind, or the state of feeling) that seeks in the outward
world something to correspond to itself.111
The poem, by itself clarifies that the intention in writing it, as the
syntactical dislocation between the two lines permits two comparisions at
once. First, a simple register of the outward, by which the white faces against
the gloom of the underground station are like white petals againts a black
bough , second, a register of the inward state evoked as a response to the
""H /ra Pound, ‘Vorticism', Ezra Pound: A Critical Anthology, ed. J.P. .Sullivan, p.54.
111 Donald Davie, Ezra Pound. (New York : The Viking Press, 1975) p.57.
201
perciever's mind, by which not the faces but the apparition of them stands
out against the gloom of the observer's mind as petals stand out against the
bough. In its original published form Pound used extra spacing between
phrases, as if to underline and emphasize the poem's only partial
resemblance to the world of conventional syntax and traditional poetry .
The apparition of these faces in the crowd.
Petals on a wet, black bough.
But this arrangement seems to be over insistent in the light of Davie's
interpretation as the poem does not need any such mechanical aids. He even
refutes Pound's own comment and said :
it is surely untrue, therefore, that the poem is
meaningless unless one has drifted into a certain vein of
thought'. Its compactness is not superficial, but real and
masterly.112
The title of the poem suggests something that happens in an
underground railway station. And the scene of the underground, quite
contrary to our world above evokes a series of unearthly and
transtemporal references to the serious readers. The opening word of the
poem, The apparition is significant as it is different from normal appearence.
The crowd seen in the underground is not any crowd. The reader remembers
that, Odysseus and Orpheus and Kore saw crowds in Hades. So the conscious
Donald Davie, Ezra Pound, p.57.
202
reader's mind goes roaming till it reaches the 'petals on a wet black bough .
Hugh Kenner says, 'And carrying forward the suggestion of wraiths, the word
'apparition' detaches these faces, and presides over the image that conveys the
quality of their separation.113 If the stream of consciousness of the reader
continues in this direction, the 'petals, will be of the flowers underground,
flowers, out of the sun ; flowers seen as if against a natural gleam.114 While
thinking of the bough's, wetness gleaming on its darkness, the mind may even
reach the place 'where wheels turn and nothing grows' and may be in touch
with a memory of Persephone, as Hugh Kenner suggests or any other
development of the mind's imagination. It is the 'intellectual and emotional
complex in an instant of time' and according to Pound, it is the presentation of
'that sense of sudden liberation ; that change of sudden growth'. It is also 'a
radiant node or cluster and it is the VORTEX, from which and through which,
and into which ideas are constantly rushing'.115
On one level the poem seems to operate through a substitution
relation; 'the apparition of these faces' is like 'petals'. But even on this level,
deletion is apparent in the absense of the marker of the simile, 'like'. Here
John Steven Childs raised a very pertinent question, "Are we meant to
recover this deletion of similitude, a substitution relation, or, rather, are we
111 Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era. (Barkeley : University of California Press, 1971) p. 185.
114 Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era. p. 185
n<;Ezra Pound ‘Vorticism’, Ezra Pound: A Critical Anthology, p.57.
meant to percieve the two lines in a spatial juxtaposition. But the
syntactically parallel construction of the two lines emphasizes the integrity
and not the transposition of each. Pound does not merely intend us to
conceive that 'faces' are like 'petals', but that “through contiguity of 'a thing
outward and objective' and 'a thing inward and subjective the two elements
are spatially juxtaposed.117 'Consciously or not', writes Earl Miner in this
context, "Pound's language here echoe the definition of a sacrament in the
Catechism of the Book of Common Prayer as 'the outward and visible sign of an
inward and spiritual grace".118 Thus the effect of Pound's Imagist theory of
poems, can also be regarded as an extention of the religious symbolism, 'the
modern counterpart of the moment of inspired emotion which had once
produced the lengthier forms of Greek myth and medieval romance'. But unlike
myth and romance, image must be instantaneous and independent of time and
space. Pound's image in this poem consists of a single perception of beauty in the
midst of ugliness.
But it is so much intensified, to form an Image that not everyone can't
agree how such an intense emotional effect is possible in a poem as short as
this one. But one can, by meditating upon it (meditation or reflection, is what
" ‘ John Steven Childs, Modernist Form : Pound's Style in the Early Cantos, p.37.
John Steven Childs, Modernist Form, Pound’s Style in the Early Cantos, p. 37.
William Pratt, ‘Ezra Pound and the Image’, Ezra Pound: The London Years, p.2.5.
204
a short poem demands) we can analyse the poem. Interestingly, William Pratt
deduces an equation for this poem, 'the equation for human emotions
faces Crowd
Petals bough
According to him the faces and petals connote beauty as the crowd and
bough connote ugliness and the emotion evoked is one of unexpected
delight, of human beauty percieved in a sordid city scene. And in this brief
image there is a contrast of light and darkness, which Pound used
extensively in the Cantos, later on. Pound repeated these images so
frequently in different forms that they become equivalents of Heaven and
Hell.
Now, returning to the poem, the reader is presumably expected to
visualize an amalgam of these juxtaposed scences, which is neither petals
nor faces, but a kind of some third image different to both. Hulme called it a
visual chord. Hulme wrote, 'The simultaneous presentation to the mind of two
different images from what one might call a visual chord. They unite to suggest
an Image which is different to both'.119 But the Gestalt psychologists say that the
act of perception of objects in juxtaposition is to be a figure or ground
relationship. Then, as John T. Gage wondered, the synthesis of images into one
Hulme. Further Speculations, Quoted in John T.Gage, In the Arresting Eye (Baton Rouge : Louisiana Slate University Press, 1981) p.61
205
image becom es questionable. The poem , in this respect is com pared to one of the120perceptual processes illustrated by the fam iliar G estalt illusion.
Here the image of the faces or vase can be seen together but it is not possible
to see both the faces and the vase simultaneously. So in a sense it is not a
pictorial fusion of the faces and the vase, but merely an alternating
perception of one or the other, depending on which is percieved in the
foreground. The relation between the parts of the poem appears to be
similarly a ambiguous relation between the figure and the ground, so that
one may choose to consider the faces in terms of the petals, or vice versa.
Although it is evidently a poem about 'faces' the use of colon, at the end of
the first line in place of words 'are like' is what makes this ambiguity
possible. Pound compared this poem to a Japanese Haiku:
The footsteps of the cat upon the snow : (are like) plum-blossoms.
'-"T.H. Hulmc, Further Speculations. Quoted in John T.Gage, In the Arresting Eve. p.61.
206
.ind commented, 'the words 'are like' would not occur in the original, but I
.uld them for clarity" indicating that the comparison was meant to be
understood but that Pound saw some advantage in choosing to imply it by
leaving out the comparative term.121 And the advantage is that it gives the
poem a richness it would not have if it were a simile. Pound believed that in
Japan, where a work of art is not estimated by its acreage and where sixteen
syllables are counted enough for a poem if you arrange and punctuate them
properly'.122 He finally got it in this poem. Earlier, he took three years to find
the words for 'Piccadily' (Printed at the end of Personae of 1909, and not
reprinted): 'Beautiful, tragic faces, Ye that were whole and are so sunken ....
O wistful, fragile faces, few out of so many ... who had forgotton you ?'
And he found himself sentimental in expression.
But the 'Metro' poem, presents, a truely new way of exploring the
possibilities of language in verbalizing experience. Referring to the technique
of parataxis (omission of the connecting words) Hugh Kenner says that, 'This
setting-in-relation is apt to be paratactic'.124 In his opinion, this poeni is not a
sentence, because its structure is typographic and metric. Here words are
used not to deliver the meanings of their common use in isolation and
without context. Without loss of precision, these words are charged with
121 Ezra Pound ‘Vorticism’. .4 Critical Anthology, p.53.
Christine Brooke, ZBC oj Ezra Pound (Barkeley : University of California Press, 1977) p.97.
123 Christine Brooke, ZBC of Ezra Pound, p.97.
114 Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era. p. 186.
207
incepts, that can be translated at different layers of meaning. 'Apparition
extends towards ghosts and goes beyond. It becomes visible revelations. This
word cannot be substituted by a simpler word such as 'sight'. Similary
Petals' cannot be changed to 'blossoms' because it would reduce the energy
generated by the sharp cut of its syllables in the 'Petals'. Kenner Calls it 'a
consonantal vigour', which is again recapitulated in the trisyllabic, 'wet,
black bough'. The words so raised by prosody to attention assert themselves
js words, and make a luminous claim on our attention, from which visual,
tactile and mythic associations radiate.125 As we move through the poem and
read the words one by one, we know a new structure achieves itself.
•' Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era, p .l 87.
20K
FAN-PIECE FOR HER IMPERIAL LORD
OFAN of white silk,Clear as frost on the grass-blade,
You are also laid aside.
[Selected Poems, 1926]
This short poem is also a haiku-like poem included in the Imagist
Anthology, Des Imagiste. It is one of the many poems by Pound in which he
used Chinese images. He adapted this poem from a poem translated by H.A.
Giles, in his A History of Chinese Literature (1901). Pound condensed it from
the original 10-line poem to the present form having only 18 words, and it is
one of the Chinese fragments which Pound produced before reading
Fenollosa and writing Cathay. This epigramatic poem shows the affinity of
Pound with the Oriental classical lyric poets and his love for romantic
varieties. This miniature again relies upon implication for its effect, dropped
into the pool of the reader's mind, the details left to unfold by themselves.126
As in the 'Metro' poem, the title of this poem is also indespensible. The
title informs us that this is a poem inscribed on her fan by a girl who has lost
the favour of the emperor. 'In Chinese', says Micheal Alenxander, 'this forms
part of a large class of occasional epigraph verse, written literally on a
thousand personal things, where fitness and elegance are all that might be
' Michael Alenxander, The Poetic Achievement o f Ezra Pound, pp. 23, 230.
looked for'.127 The starting point of the poem is that the girl and the fan are
compared in their dejection and it is known that eventually both are laid
aside'. The observation itself is figurative and in our attempt to account for
the last line, 'you are also laid aside', makes us to feel the speaker's sorrow,
which is reflected in the abandonment of the fan. The fan is of silk and white
and clear, giving the impression of beauty, softness and cleanliness.
Immediately, we know that the lady is tender and her own characteristics are
those of the fan. But it is not the case of transferred epithet. We can
understand the poem better it we go through the original Giles' poem :
O Fair white silk, fresh from the weaver’s loom,Clear as frost, bright as the winter’s snow —See ! friendship fashions out of thee a fan,Round as the round moon shines in heaven above,At home, abroad, a close companion there,Stirring at every move the grateful gale.And yet I fear, ah me ! that autumn chills Cooling the dying summer’s torrid rage,Will see thee laid neglected on the shelf,
All thoughts of bygone days, like them-bygone.128
The condensation of this poem to an astonishingly limited words, in which
nothing essential has been omitted from the original, can be possible only by
the principles of Imagist economy, and in the hands of a master craftsman,
like Pound.
117 Michael Alenxander, The Poetic Achievement o f Ezra Pound, p.23.
IJI John T. Gage. In the Arresting Eye. p. 172
210
In the condensed version, the emotion is further specified because
there is a 'comment' as well as 'presentation', the last line telling us what no
juxtaposition of descriptions could : that in addition to awe, the speaker
finds significance. It is a comparision in which the imagistic moment of
meditative excitement as in the 'Metro' poem provides an opportunity for the
assertion about an altogether different experience from what is being said.
Almost all of Pound's short Imagist poems are filled with his superb
handling and placement of words so that they 'care charge with meaning'
and are presented as verbal equations for 'intense emotions', which caused
'patterns' in the mind according to Pound. As in the "Metro' poem, William
Pratt gives the equation as follows:
fan (lady) grass-blade 129
hand (lord) frost
In this equation, or metaphor, the white silk fan is the lady, the hand holding
it is her lord, and as the white frost coats the tender grass-blade, so the lord's
love for his lady has cooled, and the fan has been discarded for another, 'The
emotion implied in this image is that of sorrow in the loss of love, a contrast
of warmth and coldness, as the Metro image was a contrast of light and
darkness' says William Pratt.130 Moreover, the extension of the word 'also'
from the fan to the lady is the exact rendering of the precise realization of the
i:'’ Philip Grever, ed. , Ezra Pound: The London Years, p.26.
1 Philip Grever, ed. , Ezra Pound: The London Years, p.27.
syllogism. Any decent translation must convey this resemblance with its
emotional potential. The middle term, 'clear as frost on the grass-blade is an
example of Pound's idea that 'the natural object is always the adequate
symbol'131 and 'symbolism in its profounder sense' will give the patterns, 'a
1 ̂ 2 ppiconfiguration through which a particular stream of ideation will pass'.' The
poem, thus, becomes the figure of an ideogram and a vortex which has been
defined by Pound as the 'radiant node or cluster'. This pattern is also a
'word beyond formulated language'. Pound said, 'Any mind that is worth
calling a mind must have needs beyond the existing catagories of
language'.133 In the present poem the language is used with maximum
economy, but the significance of the phrase, i.e. the clearness of the silk
suggesting the possibility of the blamelessness of the girl extends to the fan.
And the reader feels something of the debauchery of the imperial lord or the
plight of a number of imperial concubines, one of them in her 'skills and fine
array' who now writes on her fan this verse. Pound said in his Guide to
Kulchur, that the 'point of writing' was to cause the reader 'suddenly to see'
or to 'reveal the whole subject from a new angle'. This led him into one of his
definitions of ideogramic methods : 'The ideogramic method consists of
presenting one facet and then another until at some point one gets off the
1.1 Micheal Alenxander, The Poetic Achievement o f Ezra Pound, p.23.
1.2 Jaftery Walker, Bardic Ethos and the American Epic Poem (Baton Rouge : Louisiana Stale University Press, 1978) p.69.
Ezra Pound, ‘A Retrospect’, Literery Essays, p.4.
212
dead and desensitized surface of the reader's mind onto a part that will
register'. This definition clearly implies an intention to break open the
reader's conventional catagories of understanding and to cause a perception.
'It is in essence': says Jaffrey Walker, 'not the subject itself that is to be
revealed, but the new angle from which it may be seen'.134
If we see this poem from one angle, we contemplate the resemblance.
Both frost and grass-blade are, of course, many things besides 'clear', and
here lies the secret. They are fresh, delicate, minute, pristine, lowly, common,
natural, and short lived. These are the possibilities of properties which can be
transferred both to the silk fan and to the imperial concubine. Like the glass,
the silk and the girl (or the lady) are both wild and uncultivated.
The initial point of resemblance, that both fan and the lady are pretty
things to be discarded at will by the emperor or their lord is further charged
with meaning through the association with the frosted glass-blade, the
natural centre of more wide ranging affinities. Through this somewhat
capricious arrangement of fan, lady and grass in triple juxtaposition, Pound
creates a tension, an energy field, which elicits a considerable radiation of
feeling. In this appeal to the reader's sensibility, however, there is richness
but not, strictly speaking, any ambiguity. Micheal Alexander says, 'Not that
114 Jaffery Walker. Bardic Ethos and the American Epic Poem. p. 69
213
the many suggestions latent in such a poem, its auguries of innocence
experience, can be exhausted'.
From a different angle a new aspect of the 'Fan-Piece' might be
explored: that is its lack of self-pity : the lady is addressing her companion in
misfortune. And her verse for her 'Imperial lord' will be a memento of his
inconsistency and the connotation can be extended even to his mortality.
Thus what he said acquires a universal law with dignity in the common fate
of all things rare'.
This romantic epigram or cameo, thus crudely enlarged, is helpful in
identifying Pound's sensibility. It is not for its attunement, to another cultural
mode as a sample ; it is not for its construction not even becuase it is a
beautiful and touching poem, but for its slightness and simplicity into
which are woven the whole lot of meaning and significance of unfulfilled
love. Pound knew like Milton that poetry should be 'simple, sensuous and
passionate'. Pound helped Eliot to popularise the idea that poetry, like the
novel, should offer a more adult response to the aspects of life, beyond the
compass of the purely lyric mode. It is somewhat more vigorous, intelligent,
complete and critical of the society and self. But the poem does not tell the reader
what to feel and how to feel, but it remains a lyric poem, intended to move,
though the degree of its eloquence depends upon the perceptibility and the
Midieai Alexander, Hie Poetic Achievement o f Ezra Pound, p. 23.
214
intelligence of the reader. Pound here definitely demands an intelligent
imagination. Michael Alexander says, 'Blake gazed at the world in a grain of
sand, Pound allows us to catch the transcendent in the trivial'.13,1 But the
importance of having so much in so little a poem, is not seen naturally by all.
What have the ephemeral feeling of a discarded concubine expressed in
emblematic language of a closed courtly society to do with so much
implantation of ideas ? The best answer is provided again by Micheal Alexander:
To the demand for 'relevance' one can reply that the
freshness and precision of Pound's second line show that
the use of natural analogies to express universal human
situations remains a living convention. As for courtliness,
the poem shows that indirect and oblique means can
express deep feeling. Such a transposition of this
characteristic and attractive human gesture into another
human voice, in another time and another language,
enlarges our sympathies137
'Fan-Piece' uses Pound's technique of exploring emotions by the
presentation of objects in relation with each other, using the exact words ;
and the message is conveyed by implication rather than by exclamation.
" ‘’Micheal Alenxander, The Poetic Achievement of Ezra Pound, p.24.
117 Micheal Alenxander, The Poetic Achievement o f Ezra Pound, p.24
215
PAPYRUS
SPRING ...Too long...
Gongula ...
[Collected Shorter Poems, 1926]
This poem is the finest poem as the example of Pound's concentration
of words and images in the whole period of his Imagist experiementation.
The critical history of 'Papyrus' is, in some ways, as interesting as the poem
itself. Indeed, calling this fragment as a poem is likely to raise 'critical
hackles' as observed by John Steven Childs.138 Robert Graves has ridiculed
'Papyrus', as an absurdly short poem. However, Micheal Alexander refuted
it and said that he poem makes sense in the context. He wrote :
It is a squib and a reductio ad absurdum of a method by
self-parody ; but it is also a fragment of a papyrus
containing words of a poem by Sappho, and stands at a
critical point in the line of Greek lyric poems that runs
from 'The Spring' to 'ifi£ppo/, and forms the spine of Lustra.139
Even then, the two main reservations about the little work are that it is a
'satire on H.D.', or that it is yet another example of Pound's playing fast and
1 '" John Steveen Childs. Modernist Form : I'ound's Style in Early Cantos (London : Associated University Press 19Sh)p. 41
IW Micheal Alexander, The Poetic Achievement o f Ezra Pound, p.89.
216
loose with the translation of ancient texts. But whether 'Papyrus' be comic,
and its inclusion among numerous wry vers de societe might support this
characterisation, or whether it be unwarranted as strict translation is
irrelevent to the poem-as-artifact. And Pound does present Papyrus as
artifact ; the tiny fragment represents for him a touchstone of lyrical
condensation. It is a sign of wearing out of a great age of the ninteenth
century poetry. The poem serves as the efficacy of time in purifying the form
in the Imagist manner.
It is a commonplace to say that the translator's work is a complex one.
Invention and disposition, in the sense of traditional rhetoric, have already
been accomplished by the original poet before the translator sets to his task,
but it is wrong to say that translation chiefly involves species of stylistic
resuscitation. Pound's reputation as a translator was not always consistent.
'In fact, some quite successful translations, among them some of Pound's',
says John Steven Childs,'employ at least a redeployment of disposition'.140
Moreover, he is doubful whether invention can in any realistic sense be said
to be solely the independent creation of topoi. If so, in his opinion, all poets
are, therefore, translators. As Aristotle proclaimed in his Rhetoric, the ancient
Greek writers, as a matter of fact, never conceived invention as original
arising from genius, but as the intelligent selection and gifted use of subjects
John Stevens Childs, Modernist Form : Pound's Style in the Early Cantos (London : Associated Universiy Press. 19K6) p.42
at hand. And such a conception, of course, fits Pound's notion of translation
nicely. According to John Stevens Childs, this view is in the line of post
structuralist idea (notably, in Riffatere) that 'all texts are composed on thec | , 141
basis of intertexuality, an earlier text providing hypograms for a later one.
Thus 'Papyrus' may be seen as either the result of the topos (the hypogram)
presented by Sappho's verse, or on the other hand, as the Sapphic verses
themselves, but modified by time and tradition. That was how Pound saw
the poem and translated.
The most prominent feature of the poem is that it goes beyond the
translation of the original Sapphic fragment. It is to emphasize, as later
translators have done, that poetry transmitted to us only in fragments is
irrevocably fragmentary and must not be reduced to a conventional
syntactical ordering which it does not contain. Many of the later translators
were also influenced by Pound in this regard.142 'Papyrus' serves a still more
important role in the poetic currents of the English language underlining in
the most graphic way Pound's insistence on economy of words 'use no
superfluous word ...', and his praise for 'that explicit rendering ... of the
eyewitness'.143Mentioning about this condensation and the apparent
incoherence Burton Raffel wrote :
141 John Stevens Childs. Modernist Form : Pound’s Snle in the Early Cantos, p.42.
14-Burton Raffel. Ezra Pound: The Prime Minister o f Poetry. (Hamden, Conn. : Archon Books, 1984) p.44.
Burs ton Ratfel, Ezra Pound: The Prime Minister o f Poetry, p. 44.
218
The poets of Braith Waite's Anthology of Magazine
Verse, a few of them very good poets, had plainly
none of them so much as thought of lines so utlerly
stripped, so perfectly sparse and furnished. It is
just one of the many technical innovations which
Pound offered to peers and posterity alike; as Dudley Pitts
wrote more than forty years ago, 'No one who cares
anything about poetry, ancient or modern, can afford to•i • 144disregard Mr. Pound's contribution to i t .
Deletion is the salient device of the poem and as a result the poem
seems to be a fragment. It disconcerts many readers. The three dots at the end
of each line give the impression of incompleteness at the first sight ; and a
number of possibilities for subjective interpretation is suggested. 'The two
most obvious readings of the poem accrete along the metaphoric and
metonymic axes', says, John Stevens Childs, "Metaphorically, 'the lines' of
'Papyrus' depend upon the reader's ready substitution of a vast number of
signifieds for each of the highly charged individual signifiers".145 It goes
without saying that the significance and possibilities of 'Spring' within the
universal poetic tradition is vast. On the most basic level, 'Spring' signifies
annual time' and 'a season'. And on a more specific level, it is the time of
renewal'. A more complex level of the meaning gives the possibility of
renewal through love'. As the reader moves to the next line or phrase Too
“ Burston Raffel, Ezra Pound : The Prime Minister o f Poetry, p.44.
John Stevens Childs. Modernist Form : Pound's Style in the Early Cantos, p.42.
219
long further understanding in the line of 'renewal through love' is made
possible. Spring here will become a time appropriate for love. But the adverb
'too' gives an idea of 'excess'. Thus the speaker of the poem comes up
probably with the proposition that 'something is in excess of the time
appropiate for love'. Finally, a dramatic impact is introduced in Gongula ... .
Gongula is one of Sappho's followers. And though the idea existed that
Pound was somehow satarizing H.D.'s experiments in Sapphics by naming
Gongula, he printed the word without explanation. So, naturally, the poem
itself appears as something broken off or away from a larger whole. But it
is also equally true that without 'Gongula', the strong undercurrent and the
dramatic moment that persist powerfully within the movement would
not have been possible. Indeed the poem, in a sense, gives the common theme
of passionate appeal of a lover, who had been waiting for a long time for his
lady, with the last word 'Gongula' which is substituted for 'something' quite
difficult for a general reader. It is not surprising, therefore, that the preceeding
explication seems a laboured way of getting at the simple meaning of a very
simple poem. In fact, the metaphoric process describes the way in which the
reader deciphers the 'Papyrus' as done in the case of ancient Egyptian scrolls.146
And deeper levels of meaning are to be explored by excavating every sense in a
word. So, even without inserting the ellipses or dots after each line, the poem
Pound wrote this poem while the Egyptologists were working hard on the discovery of the famous tomb of Hmperor Tutankhamen.
220
seems to be self-explanatory. But John Steven Childs gives the opinion that these
ellipses, besides suggesting the fragmentary nature of the original, are also the
signifiers by themselves, 'whose signified is attrition' and says that such
attrition points both to the wearing away of cultural dross in the poem itself as
well as to the attrition which might reasonably be experienced in the
poet/lover's expectations'.147 Then, the connotation signified by too long and
the annual time of 'spring' are brought together under the reigning sign of
'attrition' Paradoxically, although it is a poem about the wearing away, the
weariness induced in the lover by longing, is also an eternal emotional complex
in the lover's mind. Perhaps that is why the poem has been reconstructed by
Pound after nearly three millenia of its original composition.
In fact, the subject of the poem is time ; and it has a duel operation in
the poem. On one hand it destroys individuality, and, on the other, it
intensifies the feelings of love, and thereby creates an artistic perfection. That
which remains in 'Papyrus' is the succession of images. And these images
have been purified by an excision of language. In a sense it is the progression
of history itself that brings it to a perfection. Pound's preoccupation with
cultural revivification and the impersonal moulding of human consciousness,
as presented in this poem, can be found throughout his Imagist period and
later even in the Cantos.
14 John Slovens Childs, Modernist Form : Pound's Style in the luirlv Cantos, p.43.