Chapter I: Front Matter

LUSTRA OF EZRA POUND

_From photo portrait by Alvin Langdon Coburn._

EZRA POUND.]

LUSTRA

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._

CONTENTS

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

RIGHT
_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.

Gentildonna

She passed and left no quiver in the veins, who now
Moving among the trees, and clinging
in the air she severed,
Fanning the grass she walked on then, endures:

Grey olive leaves beneath a rain-cold sky.

The Rest

O helpless few in my country,
O remnant enslaved!

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

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

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

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

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

Les Millwin

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 undisciplined host of art students--
The rigorous deputation from “Slade”--
Was before them.
With arms exalted, with fore-arms
Crossed in great futuristic X’s, the art students
Exulted, they beheld the splendours of _Cleopatra_.

And the little Millwins beheld these things;
With their large and anæmic eyes they looked out upon this configuration.

Let us therefore mention the fact,
For it seems to us worthy of record.

Further Instructions

Come, my songs, let us express our baser passions,
Let us express our envy of the man with a steady job
and no worry about the future.
You are very idle, my songs.
I fear you will come to a bad end.
You stand about in the streets,
You loiter at the corners and bus-stops
You do next to nothing at all.

You do not even express our inner nobilities,
You will come to a very bad end.

And I?
I have gone half cracked,
I have talked to you so much that
I almost see you about me,
Insolent little beasts, shameless, devoid of clothing!

But you, newest song of the lot,
You are not old enough to have done much mischief,
I will get you a green coat out of China
With dragons worked upon it,
I will get you the scarlet silk trousers
From the statue of the infant Christ at Santa Maria Novella,
Lest they say we are lacking in taste,
Or that there is no caste in this family.

A Song of the Degrees

I

Rest me with Chinese colours,
For I think the glass is evil.

II

The wind moves above the wheat--
With a silver crashing,
A thin war of metal.

I have known the golden disc,
I have seen it melting above me.
I have known the stone-bright place,
The hall of clear colours.