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.

 

 

 

 

The Fragments of Archilochos (Browsing my shelves)

I'm sure I've seen interest in my blogging world in the new collection of letters between Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner; I'm not sure I'm quite prepared to read them myself--the two volume set is over 2000 pages and Amazon tells me it weighs seven and a half pounds. I'd probably end up with tendinitis just holding the book. But I've been reading reviews (and thinking about reading the whole thing) and one of said reviews is the always excellent Jeet Heer's at the New Republic. And that made me realize I actually had a work he mentioned: The Fragments of Archilochos, translated by Guy Davenport with a foreword by Hugh Kenner. A good enough reason to pull it off the shelf.

Archilochos is an Archaic Greek poet; his dates are pretty vague, but somewhere in the early to middle 7th century BC. He was a member of an aristocratic family and a soldier. What we have of his poetry is in no better shape than what we have of Sappho; there are two complete poems--maybe--and a number of fragments that either come from quotations in later authors or were pulled from the wrappings of less-well-off mummified Egyptians. Davenport translates all the fragments he had at the time, from the Budé edition of 1958.

I'd forgotten how charming this volume is. Here's his version of what's probably Archilochos' best known poem:

Some Saian mountaineer
Struts today with my shield.
I threw it down by a bush and ran
When the fighting got hot.
Life seemed somehow more precious.
It was a beautiful shield.
I know where I can buy another
Exactly like it, just as round.

Archilochos is also famous for the contrast between the hedgehog and the fox, used by Isaiah Berlin as a title and epigraph to his essay on the nature of writers, particularly Tolstoy. Here's Davenport:

Fox knows many,
Hegehog one
Solid trick.

Another fun one:

What breaks me,
Young friend,
Is tasteless desire,
Dead iambics,
Boring dinners.

and:

And I know how to lead off
The sprightly dance
Of the lord Dionysus,
     the dithyramb.
I do it thunderstruck
With wine.

Davenport doesn't hide the fact that these are fragments, but he does clean up a bit.

The other charming thing about the volume is the illustrations done in a modernization of Greek black-figure drawing. My edition doesn't name the artist, but I saw in the review Davenport was also an illustrator, and I suspect they must be his. (Does anybody know for sure?)

Those dresses strike me as more proto-Mod than Archaic, but still...

The girls are clothed but the boy naked. Oh, Mr. Davenport!

Anyway, a fun volume I'd half forgotten I owned.