Ezra Pound, from Hilda's Book (#poetry)

Child of the grass

The years pass Above us

Shadows of air All these shall Love us

Winds for our fellows

The browns and the yellows

    Of autumn our colors

Now at our life's morn. Be we well sworn

Never to grow older

Our spirits be bolder At meeting

Than e'er before All the old lore

Of the forests & woodways

Shall aid us: Keep we the bond & seal

Ne'er shall we feel

    Aught of sorrow

 

    Let light flow about thee

    As     a cloak of air

 

-Ezra Pound 

 

This is the first poem in Ezra Pound's Hilda's Book, a hand-assembled book of poems on vellum that Pound gave to his girlfriend, the poet Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) in 1907. Pound was 22 and H.D. was 21. This is the first poem in the book (and the first poem in the Library of America volume of Ezra Pound shown above). But, except for a few poems that were recycled into Pound's first published volume A Lume Spento, none of the poems in Hilda's Book were known until after H.D. died in 1961. The two of them talked of getting married, but never did. (Her parents were opposed.)

This appears now because I'm reading Guy Davenport's collection of essays The Geography of The Imagination of 1981, but reprinted earlier this year with a new introduction. Superb. In one of his several essays on Pound, he quotes this poem, remarking how much the early Pound was influenced by Yeats. (Now that I've had it pointed out to me, I have to agree...I tend to think of the best of Pound being all about Browning, but maybe not always.)

Of course, Pound. In an era when politics are all, Pound's are about as objectionable as they come. At the end of a passage describing Pound's rabid anti-Semitism, Davenport writes, "Southerners take a certain amount of unhinged reality for granted," which is not, of course, justification. (Davenport was from Kentucky.) It's possible I'll have more to say about the Davenport.

 

But anyway, the young Pound could write love poems with the best of them: 'Be we well sworn/Never to grow older...Let light flow about thee/As   a cloak of air".

 

I'm in the Internet-free Zone as this appears.