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Provença

Chapter 54: NOTES
By Ezra Pound
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Poetry

About This Book

A compact sequence of lyrics and narrative poems reimagines medieval troubadour and classical voices through a modernist lens. The collection mixes stylized adaptations and persona pieces, ranging from jaunty ballads to mournful elegies, and tests forms such as sestina, sonnet, and canzone. Themes of love, loss, memory, exile, and the craft of song recur amid dense, allusive imagery. Shifts in diction and perspective create a chorus of historical and mythic echoes, prioritizing formal experimentation and vocal variety over linear narrative while inviting attentive, cross-temporal reading.

NOTES

NOTE PRECEDENT TO “LA FRAISNE”

“When the soul is exhausted of fire, then doth the spirit return unto its primal nature and there is upon it a peace great and of the woodland

“magna pax et silvestris.”

Then becometh it kin to the faun and the dryad, a woodland-dweller amid the rocks and streams

“consociis faunis dryadisque inter saxa sylvarum.”
Janus of Basel.[10]

Also has Mr. Yeats in his “Celtic Twilight” treated of such, and I because in such a mood, feeling myself divided between myself corporal and a self aetherial “a dweller by streams and in woodland,” eternal because simple in elements

“Aeternus quia simplex naturae.”

Being freed of the weight of a soul “capable of salvation or damnation,” a grievous striving thing that after much straining was mercifully taken from me; as had one passed saying as one in the Book of the Dead,

“I, lo I, am the assembler of souls,” and had taken it with him, leaving me thus simplex naturae, even so at peace and trans-sentient as a wood pool I made it.

The Legend thus: “Miraut de Garzelas, after the pains he bore a-loving Riels of Calidorn and that to none avail, ran mad in the forest.

“Yea even as Peire Vidal ran as a wolf for her of Penautier though some say that twas folly or as Garulf Bisclavret so ran truly, till the King brought him respite (See ‘Lais’ Marie de France), so was he ever by the Ash Tree.”

Hear ye his speaking: (low, slowly he speaketh it, as one drawn apart, reflecting) (égaré).

MARVOIL

  • The Personae are:
  • Arnaut of Marvoil, a troubadour, date 1170-1200.
  • The Countess (in her own right) of Burlatz, and of Beziers,
  • being the wife of The Vicomte of Beziers.
  • Alfonso IV of Aragon.
  • Tibors of Mont-Ausier. For fuller mention of her see the
  • “razos” on Bertran of Born. She is contemporary with the
  • other persons, but I have no strict warrant for dragging her
  • name into this particular affair.

Footnotes:

[1] Prefatory note at end of the volume.

[2] I. e. in illumed manuscript.

[3] Reincarnate.

[4] Signum Nativitatis.

[5] Certain gibbeted corpses used to be coated with tar as a preservative; thus one scarecrow served as warning for considerable time. See Hugo, “L’Homme qui Rit.”

[6] Sword-rune, “If thy heart fail thee trust not in me.”

[7] Anglo-Saxon, “Earth.”

[8] See note at end of volume.

[9] Fere = Mate, Companion.

[10] Referendum for contrast. “Daemonalitas” of the Rev. Father Sinistrari of Ameno (1600 circ.). “A treatise wherein is shown that there are in existence on earth rational creatures besides man, endowed like him with a body and soul, that are born and die like him, redeemed by our Lord Jesus Christ, and capable of receiving salvation or damnation.” Latin and English text, pub. Liseux, Paris, 1879.