Posts Tagged Ezra Pound

After my last post, Emerson’s “The Snow-Storm,” my friend Mark Moffett, ever the contrarian, sent me this note and poem.

Enjoy! I did.

Well I’m not so much a poetry reader and with all respect to Emerson, here’s the poem that comes to my mind during heavier snow storms – ague hath my ham indeed:

Mt. Baldy, Big Belt Mountains, Montana

Words, and the ideas and moods that words represent, are the tools of the writer… especially for the poet. Poetry, after all, is the art of using compressed language to express the inexpressible.

A poet then needs to be mindful of the full gamut of meanings and connotations of each word he or she chooses –of each and every word that chooses the poem– because to varying degrees all of the many denotations and connotations of a word will be carried  eventually by some reader to a poem.

Today at MontanaWriter we begin another new feature: Thesaurus Thursday. Each Thursday we will highlight a word or concept:

• word origin
• dictionary definition
• connotations
• and literary/poetical usage

This week on Thesaurus Thursday we will be examining the most Montanan of words: mountain.

Comments
A few words about the word mountain. Mt. Baldy in the Big Belt Mountains viewed from the Missouri River valley remains always my archetypal mountain. Many places in the west have views of peaks, but of places I have visited only a few places have that one predominant “mountain” that stands over all and gives definition to everything: Mt. Rainier, Mt. Hood, the Grand Tetons and Mt. Baldy. The “Tetons” like “Baldy” are actually more than one named peak but collectively are referred to as one.

Baldy remains for the most part unknown to any who have not spent time in Broadwater County. But if you have lived in the valley there, and have known the experience of one mountain always being there, always looking over you, always being a point of reference from any place you are, you begin to know the power of mountains as nature, as definer, and as symbol. Of course, gods live on mountains. Where else could gods and humans meet.

Word Origin

According to Dictionary.com the origin of the English word mountain (and the State of Montana) is:

1175–1225; Middle English mountaine  < Old French montaigne  <Vulgar Latin *montānea,
noun use of feminine of *montāneus, equivalent to Latin montān ( us ) mountainous
( mont-,  stem ofmōns  mountain + -ānus -an) + -eus  adj. suffix

Definition

The definitions for “mountain” are:

noun  1. a natural elevation of the earth’s surface rising more or less abruptly to a summit,
and attaining an altitude greater thanthat of a hill, usually greater than 2000 feet (610 meters).
2. a large mass of something resembling this, as in shape or size.
3. a huge amount: “a mountain of incoming mail.”

adjective 4. of or pertaining to mountains: mountain air. 5. living, growing, or located
in the mountains: mountain people. 6. resembling or suggesting a mountain, as in size.

Associations & Connotations

Religious and Holy Connotations

• Mount Sinai
• Mount Zion
  
• Mount of Olives
• Mount Olympus
• Mount Fuji
• Kilimanjaro
• Mount Ararat

Literary Connotations

• “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” by Ernest Hemingway
• Greek Myths and Mount Olympus
• Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton
• Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
• Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier
• The Big Rock Candy Mountain by Wallace Stegner
• Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin
• Mountain Interval by Robert Frost

Some bible verses with “mountain”

“It shall come to pass in the latter days that the mountain of the house of the LORD shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be raised above the hills; and all the nations shall flow to it.” (Isaiah 2:2)

“They will neither harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain, for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea.” (Isaiah 11:9)

“Get you up to a high mountain, O Zion, herald of good tidings; lift up your voice with strength, O Jerusalem, herald of good tidings, lift it up, fear not; say to the cities of Judah, “Behold your God!” (Isaiah 40:9)

Some Poetical Lines with “mountain”

Faeries, come take me out of this dull world,
For I would ride with you upon the wind,
Run on the top of the dishevelled tide,
And dance upon the mountains like a flame.
~ ( cf. The Land of Heart’s Desire, by W.B. Yeats)

 

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

 

 O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall

Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap

May who ne’er hung there. Nor does long our small

Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep,

Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all

Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.
~ (cf. “No Worse, There is None,” by Gerard Manley Hopkins)

 

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

 

The wilderness has a mysterious tongue
Which teaches awful doubt, or faith so mild,
So solemn, so serene, that man may be
But for such faith with nature reconciled;
Thou hast a voice, great Mountain, to repeal
Large codes of fraud and woe; not understood
By all, but which the wise, and great, and good
Interpret, or make felt, or deeply feel.
~ (cf. “Mont Blanc”, by P.B. Shelley)

 

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

 

Five years have past; five summers, with the length

Of five long winters! and again I hear

These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs

With a soft inland murmur.—Once again

Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,

That on a wild secluded scene impress

Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect

The landscape with the quiet of the sky.

  ~(cf. “Tintern Abbey,” by William Wordsworth)

 

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

 

And before hell mouth; dry plain

              and two mountains;

On the one mountain, a running form,

              and another

In the turn of the hill; in hard steel

The road like a slow screw’s thread,

The angle almost imperceptible,

               so that the circuit seemed hardly to rise;

And the running form, naked, Blake…
~ (cf. “Canto XVI,” by Ezra Pound)

 

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

 

 The mountain held the town as in a shadow
I saw so much before I slept there once:
I noticed that I missed stars in the west,
Where its black body cut into the sky.
Near me it seemed: I felt it like a wall
Behind which I was sheltered from a wind.
~ (cf. “The Mountain” by Robert Frost)

 

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

 

We stayed the night in the pathless gorge of Ventana Creek, up the east fork.

The rock walls and the mountain ridges hung forest on forest above our heads, maple and redwood,

Laurel, oak, madrone, up to the high and slender Santa Lucian firs that stare up the cataracts

Of slide-rock to the star-color precipices.
~(cf. “Oh Lovely Rock,” by Robinson Jeffers)

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

 

Round the cape of a sudden came the sea, 
And the sun looked over the mountain’s rim: 
And straight was a path of gold for him, 
And the need of a world of men for me. 
~ (cf. “Parting in the Morning” by Robert Browning)

 

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

 

You have built a mountain of something,

Thoughtfully pouring all your energy into this single monument,   

Whose wind is desire starching a petal,

Whose disappointment broke into a rainbow of tears.
~ (cf. “These Lacustrine Cities,” by John Ashberry) 

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For awhile postings at MontanaWriter will be sparse by necessity, and I will be re-posting –with new content and edits– some older posts that were written and posted before readership here really began to grow. Soon, “and very soon,” there will be enough time again… for new directions and trajectories. But for now, patience is the order of the day.

Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound is famous for many things: the man who discovered T.S. Eliot; an influence on and supporter of the generation of writers known as “The Lost Generation;” an influential literary critic; a traitor to his country in World War II. Above all, though, Pound was a poet.

As a poet he was a lyricist, greatly influenced by a love of China and the many works and writers that he translated and introduced to a Western audience. The poem “A Ballad of the Mullberry Road” shows this Eastern influence quite well.

Pound is another poet whose reputation has diminished with time. I do not know why. Leafing through a volume of his poetry, I quickly lose count of the poems I would like to feature here… the many lines I have loved since I first read them decades ago….

Enjoy!

A Ballad of the Mullberry Road

The sun rises in south east corner of things
To look on the tall house of the Shin
For they have a daughter named Rafu,
(pretty girl)
She made the name for herself: ‘Gauze Veil,’
For she feeds mulberries to silkworms.
She gets them by the south wall of the town.
With green strings she makes the warp of her basket,
She makes the shoulder-straps of her basket
from the boughs of Katsura,
And she piles her hair up on the left side of her headpiece.

Her earrings are made of pearl,
Her underskirt is of green pattern-silk,
Her overskirt is the same silk dyed in purple,
And when men going by look on Rafu
They set down their burdens,
They stand and twirl their mustaches.

Listening with a pencil and my ear, these are the lines I marked:

And when men going by look on Rafu
They set down their burdens,
They stand and twirl their mustaches.

The theme of the power of feminine beauty is as old as Homer and Helen… as old as Adam and Eve. It is the theme of my favorite Ezra Pound poem as well, “Tame Cat.”

Tame Cat
“It rests me to be among beautiful women.
Why should one always lie about such matters?
I repeat:
It rests me to converse with beautiful women
Even though we talk nothing but nonsense,

The purring of the invisible antennæ
Is both stimulating and delightful.”

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During the month of May, MontanaWriter is featuring poems about flowers… and a few photos I have taken over the years of flowers and plants. For more poems about flowers, click here.

In the North Country, tulips are among the first flowers of spring. In the brown and green days of early spring, they represent some of the first real color of the year… making their essential beauty even more luminous. They are harbingers of better days to come.

Amy Lowell was, of course, an Imagist.  The term Imagist was originally coined by Ezra Pound to describe the kind of poetry that Richard Aldington, his more famous wife, poet H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), and Amy Lowell among others were writing. The kind of poetry Pound was exploring himself.

I have posted the Imagist creed at MontanaWriter a number of times, including here.  Lowell and her fellow Imagists were looking for language and images in poetry that were more direct and precise than that of the Victorians (or Romantics), as well a poetic style that was more… un-sentimental.

On a May morning, an Amy Lowell poem seems like just the thing.

Enjoy!

A Tulip Garden
Guarded within the old red wall’s embrace,
Marshalled like soldiers in gay company,
The tulips stand arrayed. Here infantry
Wheels out into the sunlight. What bold grace
Sets off their tunics, white with crimson lace!
Here are platoons of gold-frocked cavalry,
With scarlet sabres tossing in the eye
Of purple batteries, every gun in place.
Forward they come, with flaunting colours spread,
With torches burning, stepping out in time
To some quick, unheard march. Our ears are dead,
We cannot catch the tune. In pantomime
Parades that army. With our utmost powers
We hear the wind stream through a bed of flowers.

Listening with a pencil and my ear, these are the lines I marked:

                                           Our ears are dead,
We cannot catch the tune. In pantomime
Parades that army. With our utmost powers
We hear the wind stream through a bed of flowers.

 

There is much to love in this poem: the extended metaphor, the loose rhyme, the sense of alienation from nature. I have noticed over the years that Lowell is the kind of poet that even people who do not particularly like or read poetry that much enjoy reading. She is at once “good to great”, “accessible”, and “interesting”.  That trifecta may be the most difficult to achieve in poetry. Most of the poets I love best fail miserably in the area of “accessibility.” Yet Lowell achieves it  regularly.

 

(copyright © m.a.h. hinton)

 

 

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This month, MontanaWriter is featuring poems about the month of March. For more March poems, click here.

Unseasonably warm weather has come to the North Country, making winter seem a distant memory. It never ceases to surprise how quickly we can move from one season to the next. Overnight a mini-ice age ends and months of darkness turn into long afternoons of light.

The March evening that Amy Lowell is thinking about in this poem is a wetter one than we have had so far here. It is the kind of March evening we are used to… wet and cold and rainy. It is the kind of March evening we need to bring moisture levels up to where they belong.

Lowell and the Imagists wanted to strip poetry of non-essential ornamentation. The poetry they envisioned was one of:  ”direct language, non-traditional form, [with] the concentration on an image… a thing itself.”

What Lowell and Richard Aldington (and Ezra Pound for awhile) were trying to do as Imagists was to create a different kind of poetry than the one they had inherited.  In the preface to the famous 1915 edition of Some Imagist Poets, they spelled out their vision of poetry in a credo.  I have posted the credo at MontanaWriter before. I am  posting it here again with Lowell’s wonderful poem “March Evening.”

Enjoy!

1. To use the language of common speech, but to employ always the exact word, not the nearly-exact, nor the merely decorative word.
2. To create new rhythms — as the expression of new moods — and not to copy old rhythms, which merely echo old moods. We do not insist on ‘free-verse’ as the only method of writing poetry. We fight for it as for a principle of liberty. We believe that the individuality of a poet may often be better expressed in free-verse than in conventional forms. In poetry, a new cadence means a new idea.
3. To allow absolute freedom in the choice of subject. It is not good art to write badly about aeroplanes and automobiles; nor is it necessarily bad art to write well about the past. We believe passionately in the artistic value of modern life, but we wish to point out that there is nothing so uninspiring nor so old-fashioned as an aeroplane of the year 1911.
4. To present an image (hence the name: “Imagist”). We are not a school of painters, but we believe that poetry should render particulars exactly and not deal in vague generalities, however magnificent and sonorous. It s for this reason that we oppose the cosmic poet, who seems to us to shirk the real difficulties of art.
5. To produce poetry that is hard and clear, never blurred nor indefinite.
6. Finally, most of us believe that concentration is of the very essence of poetry.

March Evening
Blue through the window burns the twilight;
Heavy, through trees, blows the warm south wind.
Glistening, against the chill, gray sky light,
Wet, black branches are barred and entwined.
Sodden and spongy, the scarce-green grass plot
Dents into pools where a foot has been.
Puddles lie spilt in the road a mass, not
Of water, but steel, with its cold, hard sheen.
Faint fades the fire on the hearth, its embers
Scattering wide at a stronger gust.
Above, the old weathercock groans, but remembers
Creaking, to turn, in its centuried rust.
Dying, forlorn, in dreary sorrow,
Wrapping the mists round her withering form,
Day sinks down; and in darkness to-morrow
Travails to birth in the womb of the storm

Listening with a pencil and my ear, these are the lines I marked:

Wet, black branches are barred and entwined.
Sodden and spongy, the scarce-green grass plot
Dents into pools where a foot has been.

I love these lines. They are the embodiment of Imagist poetry. She writes beautifully about something without any apparent beauty at all.

I have never been fully comfortable with the cliche that a good poem should help you to “see things in a new way.” But in the case of Imagist poetry, that is exactly the point: seeing things themselves. In this poem, Lowell does this as well as it can be done.

_____

Ghost Room (copyright © m.a.h. hinton)

For the past couple of months, I have felt like a wandering Aramean. A complicated series of furniture misadventures with more plot twists than a Robert Ludlum novel had meant that for awhile our living room –the place where I do most of my reading and writing– had been transformed into a sofa storage and staging area. I was displaced and lost.

A perfect place to read

At different times in my life it has been different places. I have read Auden in a tent by flashlight late at night on the Continental Divide Trail in the Anaconda-Pintler Wilderness in Montana and Hugh MacDiarmad on a battered Lazyboy in a dingy St. Paul studio apartment overrun with box-elder bugs. I read Ezra Pound at an Irish bar in Chicago and Ford Madox Ford on long city-bus rides going to and from a downtown editing job I never really liked. I read Paradise Lost in a hospital waiting room and Ted Kooser in a cabin on Lake Superior. On beaches in Florida I read Travis McGee and in a dimly lit apartment of borrowed furniture in Saginaw, Michigan, I read Kafka and Yeats.

For the past few years, I have done most of my reading… and writing… in the living room of our Bloomington home overlooking our less-than perfect front yard and our quite-perfect suburban street. Since I never close the shades on the big window that faces the sidewalk and street and routinely read late into the evening, I have heard that the neighbors are well aware of how I spend my evenings. Whether they approve or not… I cannot say.

With my Kindle app on my iPod, I now find I can read almost anywhere… and frequently do. Sitting in the car waiting for a daughter, sitting in some waiting room or at a desk waiting for a computer I am working on to reimage or update…. And yet in the end, I spent the past few months feeling homeless because my living room, lined with books, was in disarray… and in a house with many rooms I had no place to go.

I am in the northeast corner of my living room again which is in southwest corner of our house. The room is a long rectangle. In front of me, in the southeast corner, is one tall bookcase with westerns and chess books and books about Montana, and next to that another small four-sided bookcase that spins filled with Modern Library classics. In center of the wall is a big picture window looking south over a yard that needs to be raked again. On the western wall, is one bookcase, a piano, and two more bookcases with glass doors on top to protect older books.

On the coffee table in front of the couch I am sitting on is a chess board and a few piles of books in various states of being read, and more books on the coffee table’s lower shelf. I look around the room, at spines of books I have read and plan to read. On books of history, and theology, and poetry, and mysteries, and science fiction, and fantasy, and French Literature, and Russian Literature, and books that have changed my life, and books that may change my life in the future… and I am as content as I am hard-wired to be. I have my home back. I have a good place to read.

____

“We should not make light of the troubles of children. They are worse than ours, because we can see the end of our trouble and they can never see any end.” ~ William Middleton

“… never talk as grown-up people do of the happiness of childhood.” ~ W. B. Yeats

There are some poems that you find yourself returning to again and again. “Childhood” by Richard Aldington is one of those poems for me. Certain memories and images, certain events, even certain lines and images from other poets and poems will suddenly bring this one to my mind. That is the way of great poetry. And this is certainly great in every sense of the word.

I first remember reading this poem as part of an anthology when I was about 15 or 16 years old. It may have been in a copy of Some Imagist Poets (which is now available for free many places, including here) or it may have been another anthology all together. What I do remember is that the volume was blue and old and it was in the library that was in the basement of the Broadwater County Courthouse. And I remember reading this poem and loving it.

As a poet, Aldington is classified as an “Imagist.” The term Imagist was originally coined by Ezra Pound to describe the kind of poetry both Aldington and his more famous wife, poet H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), were writing. The kind of poetry Pound himself was exploring. The credo of those who viewed them selves as  Imagists is spelled out nicely in Some Imagist Poets:

1. To use the language of common speech, but to employ always the exact word, not the nearly-exact, nor the merely decorative word.
2. To create new rhythms — as the expression of new moods — and not to copy old rhythms, which merely echo old moods. We do not insist on ‘free-verse’ as the only method of writing poetry. We fight for it as for a principle of liberty. We believe that the individuality of a poet may often be better expressed in free-verse than in conventional forms. In poetry, a new cadence means a new idea.
3. To allow absolute freedom in the choice of subject. It is not good art to write badly about aeroplanes and automobiles; nor is it necessarily bad art to write well about the past. We believe passionately in the artistic value of modern life, but we wish to point out that there is nothing so uninspiring nor so old-fashioned as an aeroplane of the year 1911.
4. To present an image (hence the name: “Imagist”). We are not a school of painters, but we believe that poetry should render particulars exactly and not deal in vague generalities, however magnificent and sonorous. It s for this reason that we oppose the cosmic poet, who seems to us to shirk the real difficulties of art.
5. To produce poetry that is hard and clear, never blurred nor indefinite.
6. Finally, most of us believe that concentration is of the very essence of poetry.

In “Childhood,” Aldington achieves what he sets out to do. There is certainly nothing “blurred” or “indefinite” about it. It is exactly what an Imagist poem is suppose to be. It is exactly what a poem is suppose to be.

Enjoy!

Childhood

This is the first book review in the series “Poets on Poetry.”

The best way to learn about poetry is to read poetry… and to read poets talking about it. With that in mind, over the next few weeks, MontanaWriter will be highlighting a number of books that feature poets talking about poetry, beginning with Poetry and Ambition: Essays 1982-88 by Donald Hall.

The greatest challenge in reviewing a collection of essays written for different occasions, audiences, and publications is trying to say a few things in general about a number of potentially mutually exclusive particulars. Do you highlight each individual essay? Do you group them thematically and talk about them that way? Or do you go a different route altogether? Regular readers of MontanaWriter will no doubt be less than surprised to find that I am choosing the last option.

I first read, Poetry and Ambition (according to my note on the inside front cover) in the summer of 1996. In the summer of 1996, I was an at-home dad with a one and a three-year-old. During the days I would have been doing the parenting thing and during naps editing and writing bible studies and training materials. In the evenings then I had a part-time telemarketing job I went to a few nights of the week.

I would have been reading these essays then… during breaks at work, and in my  cubicle waiting for calls to come in. Donald Hall was helping me to keep my sanity. Poetry has always been that for me.

Picking the volume off the shelf, I look now at lines I underlined and highlighted 15 years ago:

“I see no reason to spend you life writing poems unless your goal is to write great poems.” (cf. the title essay, “Poetry and Ambition”)

“…you have to realize, the countryside is full of people who who do what they want to do. The suburbs are full of people doing what they hate to do, because they need to in order to maintain their debts.” (cf. part of Hall’s response to question in “An Interview with Donald Hamilton”)

“No excellent poem is immediately receivable, even in silent reading.” (cf. essay “Public Performance/Private Art”)

“Sometimes when people praise the sound of verse, they are dismissed as anti-intellectual.” (cf. essay “Naming the Skin.”)

“The writer of genius is the writer who fails most at what he or she tries hardest to accomplish.” (cf. essay “Theory X Theory”)

“…what a wonderful autobiography [Phillip] Larkin could write, about a life in which nothing has happened: always the most interesting biography.” (cf. essay “Deprivation’s Laureate”)

“‘Poetry is the supreme result of the entire language,’ says Joseph Brodsky. Poetry is what language is for, what language exists to move toward.” (cf. essay “The way to Say Pleasure”)

There are 19 essays in Poetry and Ambition.  Read together they flush out Hall’s substantial understanding of the creative process, poetry and poetic language, the role of poetry in society, and the contributions of individual poets. Included are essays on William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, and Philip Larkin and on modern Irish poetry. The excellent title essay is inspiring. The essay “Public Performance/Private Art” is a wonderful treatise on the business-end of writing and performing poetry.

My favorite essay, though, is the one entitled “About ‘Names of Horses.’” In it he provides background to his poem called “Names of Horses.” But more than that, he provides background into the creative process and an entre into reading and appreciating one particular poem. A poem that is now one of my favorite Hall poem’s.

I could easily add many dozen more lines to those I highlighted above… or a dozen notes I made in margins and in the back of the book on blank pages. Hall is that good a writer and this is that good a book.

_____

Today we welcome a new guest blogger, Alexis Bonari, who reviews “Canto LXXXI” by Ezra Pound.

Poetry Review: “Canto LXXXI” by Ezra Pound

In the autumn of 2007, I traveled to the foothills of the Italian Alps to study under Mary and Siegfried de Rachewiltz, the daughter and grandson (respectively) of Ezra Pound.  Nearly every day for three months, we twelve college students gathered around a table for hours at a time, taking turns reading Pound’s The Cantos, his unfinished volume of poetry.  We enjoyed it most when Mary read it to us.  She was 82, so her voice had lost some of its song, but it still carried the pronounced lilt with which her father had recited his work.

I’ll admit: I enjoy reading about Ezra more than I do reading his poetry.  Pound was one of the fathers of modern poetry alongside W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot; he is said to have discovered James Joyce.  His views on economic matters were less than popular and led to whispers—well, full-fledged courtroom accusations, really—of anti-Semitism in America.  Pound left his native United States for Italy, where he retreated to Brunnenburg Castle with Mary and eventually Rapallo and Venice with his mistress, Olga Rudge (Mary’s mother).  Near death, Pound is said to have admonished himself for his “worst mistake…the stupid suburban anti-Semitic prejudice.”

Whatever his political leanings, Pound was a master of the written word—in more than nine languages, some of them dead.  As a poet, he’s self-indulgent and loquacious, daring any sometime-enthusiast to crack his next code.  Admittedly, none of us—even the creative writing majors—knew what he was going on about more than half the time.

All that means, however, is that there is much for us to learn.  Try this excerpt of Canto LXXXI (81), one of his more straightforward works.

Excerpt from Canto LXXXI

Ed ascoltando il leggier mormorio

there came new subtlety of eyes into my tent,whether of spirit or hypostasis,

but what the blindfold hides

or at carneval

nor any pair showed anger

Saw but the eyes and stance between the eyes,

colour, diastasis,

careless or unaware it had not the

whole tent’s room

nor was place for the full

interpass, penetrate

casting but shade beyond the other lights

sky’s clear

night’s sea

green of the mountain pool

shone from the unmasked eyes in half-mask’s space.

What thou lovest well remains,

the rest is dross

What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee

What thou lov’st well is thy true heritage

Whose world, or mine or theirs

or is it of none?

First came the seen, then thus the palpable

Elysium, though it were in the halls of hell,

What thou lovest well is thy true heritage

What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee

The ant’s a centaur in his dragon world.

Pull down thy vanity, it is not man

Made courage, or made order, or made grace,

Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down.

Learn of the green world what can be thy place

In scaled invention or true artistry,

Pull down thy vanity,

Paquin pull down!

The green casque has outdone your elegance.

“Master thyself, then others shall thee beare”

Pull down thy vanity

Thou art a beaten dog beneath the hail,

A swollen magpie in a fitful sun,

Half black half white

Nor knowst’ou wing from tail

Pull down thy vanity

How mean thy hates

Fostered in falsity,

Pull down thy vanity,

Rathe to destroy, niggard in charity,

Pull down thy vanity,

I say pull down.

But to have done instead of not doing

This is not vanity

To have, with decency, knocked

That a Blunt should open

To have gathered from the air a live tradition

or from a fine old eye the unconquered flame

this is not vanity.

Here error is all in the not done,

all in the diffidence that faltered . . .

(Notes provided by University of North Carolina at Greensboro)

Bio: Alexis Bonari is a freelance writer and amateur musician. Lately she’s been researching scholarships for women and guest posting on higher education. To keep her sanity she enjoys practicing martial arts and playing PlayStation 3.

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Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound is famous for many things: the man who discovered T.S. Eliot; an influence on and supporter of the generation of writers known as “The Lost Generation;” an influential literary critic; a traitor to his country in World War II. Above all, though, Pound was a poet.

As a poet he was a lyricist, greatly influenced by a love of China and the many works and writers that he translated and introduced to a Western audience. The poem “A Ballad of the Mullberry Road” shows this Eastern influence quite well.

Pound is another poet whose reputation has diminished with time. I do not know why. Leafing through a volume of his poetry, I quickly lose count of the poems I would like to feature here… the many lines I have loved since I first read them decades ago….

Enjoy!

A Ballad of the Mullberry Road

The sun rises in south east corner of things
To look on the tall house of the Shin
For they have a daughter named Rafu,
(pretty girl)
She made the name for herself: ‘Gauze Veil,’
For she feeds mulberries to silkworms.
She gets them by the south wall of the town.
With green strings she makes the warp of her basket,
She makes the shoulder-straps of her basket
from the boughs of Katsura,
And she piles her hair up on the left side of her headpiece.

Her earrings are made of pearl,
Her underskirt is of green pattern-silk,
Her overskirt is the same silk dyed in purple,
And when men going by look on Rafu
They set down their burdens,
They stand and twirl their moustaches.

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