LUSTRA OF EZRA POUND

[Image unavailable: From photo portrait by Alvin Langdon Coburn. EZRA POUND.]

EZRA POUND.

L U S T R A

OF
EZRA POUND

Definition—“Lustrum: an offering for the sins of the whole
people, made by the censors at the expiration of their
five years of office.”
Elementary Latin Dictionary of Charlton T. Lewis.

LONDON
ELKIN MATHEWS, CORK STREET
M CM XVI

Certain of these poems have appeared in Poetry, Blast, Poetry
and Drama, Smart Set, and Others, to the editors of which
magazines the author wishes to make due acknowledgment.

E. P.

V. L.

Cui dono lepidum novum libellum.

	PAGE
Tenzone	9
The Condolence	10
The Garret	11
The Garden	12
Ortus	13
Salutation	14
The Spring	15
Albâtre	16
Causa	16
A Pact	17
Surgit Fama	18
Preference	19
Dance Figure	20
April	22
Gentildonna	22
The Rest	23
Les Millwin	24
Further Instructions	25
A Song of the Degrees	26
Ite	27
Dum Capitolium Scandet	27
καλὀν	27
The Study in Aesthetics	28
The Bellaires	29
Salvationists	32
Arides	33
The Bath Tub	33
Amitiés	34
To Dives	35
Ladies	36
Coda	37
Ancora	38
“Dompna pois de me no’us cal”	39
The Coming of War: Actaeon	42
After Ch’u Yuan	43
Liu Ch’e	43
Fan-piece, for her Imperial Lord	44
Ts’ai Chi’h	44
In a Station of the Metro	45
Alba	45
Heather	45
The Faun	46
Pervigilium	46
The Encounter	47
Tempora	47
Black Slippers: Bellotti	48
Society	48
Image from D’Orleans	49
Papyrus	49
“Ione, Dead the Long Year”	50
Shop Girl	50
To Formianus’ Young Lady Friend	51
Tame Cat	52
L’Art, 1910	52
Simulacra	53
Women before a Shop	53
Epilogue	54
The Social Order	55
The Tea Shop	56
Epitaphs	57
Our Contemporaries	57
Ancient Wisdom, Rather Cosmic	58
The Three Poets	58
The Gipsy	59
The Game of Chess	60
Provincia Deserta	61

Cathay

Song of the Bowmen of Shu	67
The Beautiful Toilet	69
The River Song	70
The River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter	73
The Jewel Stairs’ Grievance	75
Poem by the Bridge at Ten-Shin	76
Lament of the Frontier Guard	78
Exile’s Letter	80
Four Poems of Departure
Separation on the River Kiang	85
Taking Leave of a Friend	85
Leave-taking near Shoku	86
The City of Choan	87
South Folk in Cold Country	88
Sennin Poem by Kakuhaku	89
A Ballad of the Mulberry Road	90
Old Idea of Choan by Rosoriu	91
To-Em-Mei’s “The Unmoving Cloud”	93
Near Perigord	95
Villanelle: The Psychological Hour	104
Dans un Omnibus de Londres	107
To a Friend Writing on Cabaret Dancers	109
Homage to Quintus Septimius Florentis Christianus	113
Fish and the Shadow	115

LUSTRA OF EZRA POUND

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.

The Condolence

A mis soledades voy,
De mis soledades vengo,
Porque por andar conmigo
Mi bastan mis pensamientos.
Lope de Vega.

O my fellow sufferers, songs of my youth,
A lot of asses praise you because you are “virile,”
We, you, I! We are “Red Bloods”!
Imagine it, my fellow sufferers—
Our maleness lifts us out of the ruck,
Who’d have foreseen it?

O my fellow sufferers, we went out under the trees,
We were in especial bored with male stupidity.
We went forth gathering delicate thoughts,
Our “fantastikon” delighted to serve us.
We were not exasperated with women,
for the female is ductile.

And now you hear what is said to us:
We are compared to that sort of person
Who wanders about announcing his sex
As if he had just discovered it.
Let us leave this matter, my songs,
and return to that which concerns us.

The Garret

Come let us pity those who are better off than we are.
Come, my friend, and remember
that the rich have butlers and no friends,
And we have friends and no butlers.
Come let us pity the married and the unmarried.

Dawn enters with little feet
like a gilded Pavlova,
And I am near my desire.
Nor has life in it aught better
Than this hour of clear coolness,
the hour of waking together.

The Garden

En robe de parade.
Samain.

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

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

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

Ortus

How have I laboured?
How have I not laboured
To bring her soul to birth,
To give these elements a name and a centre!

She is beautiful as the sunlight, and as fluid.
She has no name, and no place.
How have I laboured to bring her soul into separation;
To give her a name and her being!

Surely you are bound and entwined,
You are mingled with the elements unborn;
I have loved a stream and a shadow.

I beseech you enter your life.
I beseech you learn to say “I”
When I question you:
For you are no part, but a whole;
No portion, but a being.

Salutation

O generation of the thoroughly smug
and thoroughly uncomfortable,
I have seen fishermen picnicking in the sun,
I have seen them with untidy families,
I have seen their smiles full of teeth
and heard ungainly laughter.

And I am happier than you are,
And they were happier than I am;
And the fish swim in the lake
and do not even own clothing.

The Spring

Cydonian spring with her attendant train,
Maelids and water-girls,
Stepping beneath a boisterous wind from Thrace,
Throughout this sylvan place
Spreads the bright tips,
And every vine-stock is
Clad in new brilliancies.
And wild desire
Falls like black lightning.
O bewildered heart,
Though every branch have back what last year lost,
She, who moved here amid the cyclamen,
Moves only now a clinging tenuous ghost.

Albâtre

This lady in the white bath-robe which she calls a peignoir
Is, for the time being, the mistress of my friend,
And the delicate white feet of her little white dog
Are not more delicate than she is,
Nor would Gautier himself have despised their contrasts in whiteness
As she sits in the great chair
Between the two indolent candles.

Causa

I join these words for four people,
Some others may overhear them,
O world, I am sorry for you,
You do not know these four people.

A Pact

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

Surgit Fama

There is a truce among the gods,
Korè is seen in the North
Skirting the blue-gray sea
In gilded and russet mantle.

The corn has again its mother and she, Leuconoë,
That failed never women,
Fails not the earth now.

The tricksome Hermes is here;
He moves behind me
Eager to catch my words,
Eager to spread them with rumour;
To set upon them his change
Crafty and subtle;
To alter them to his purpose;
But do thou speak true, even to the letter:

“Once more in Delos, once more is the altar a-quiver.
Once more is the chant heard.
Once more are the never abandoned gardens
Full of gossip and old tales.”

Preference

It is true that you say the gods are more use to you than fairies,
But for all that I have seen you
on a high, white, noble horse,
Like some strange queen in a story.

It is odd that you should be covered with long robes
and trailing tendrils and flowers;
It is odd that you should be changing your face
and resembling some other woman to plague me;
It is odd that you should be hiding yourself
In the cloud of beautiful women who do not concern me.

And I, who follow every seed-leaf upon the wind?
You will say that I deserve this.

Dance Figure

For the Marriage in Cana of Galilee

Dark eyed,
O woman of my dreams,
Ivory sandaled,
There is none like thee among the dancers,
None with swift feet.

I have not found thee in the tents,
In the broken darkness.
I have not found thee at the well-head
Among the women with pitchers.

Thine arms are as a young sapling under the bark;
Thy face as a river with lights.

White as an almond are thy shoulders;
As new almonds stripped from the husk.

They guard thee not with eunuchs;
Not with bars of copper.

Gilt turquoise and silver are in the place of thy rest.
A brown robe, with threads of gold woven in patterns,
hast thou gathered about thee,
O Nathat-Ikanaie, “Tree-at-the-river.”

As a rillet among the sedge are thy hands upon me;
Thy fingers a frosted stream.

Thy maidens are white like pebbles;
Their music about thee!

There is none like thee among the dancers;
None with swift feet.

April

Nympharum membra disjecta.

Three spirits came to me
And drew me apart
To where the olive boughs
Lay stripped upon the ground:
Pale carnage beneath bright mist.

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Lustra of Ezra Pound

L U S T R A

CONTENTS

LUSTRA OF EZRA POUND

Tenzone

The Condolence

The Garret

The Garden

Ortus

Salutation

The Spring

Albâtre

Causa

A Pact

Surgit Fama

Preference

Dance Figure

For the Marriage in Cana of Galilee

April

Gentildonna