Top 100 or so Poems -- "Three Cantos: I" by Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound is one of the most remarkable characters in poetry - a legend, a true icon. Brilliant, genius, outspoken, political and radical - he spanned the entire 20th century as a central figure in 2 main areas - radical protest and the creation of the Modernist movement in Poetry, having edited, promoted, consulted, insulted, befriended and alienated such poetic giants as T.S. Eliot, E. E. Cummings, Yeats, HD, Gertrude Stein, Stravinsky, the Surrealists, William Carlos Williams, James Joyce, and so on.

His own poetry was brilliant if not radically inconsistent with his demands upon the greats. His poetry exhibited the required characteristics of Modernist poetry including frugality with words, using words which convey the complex feelings behind the work in a very simple way...but often his poetry was peppered with his complex notions about War (the first peace activist), politics (an outspoken advocate of Benito Mussolini, which landed him in prison), economics (he was truly the first "Occupier" - study his views on business and compare them to what is going on TODAY).

His most ambitious work in poetry centered around his epic "Cantos" project - a book length poem.  The Cantos is a long poem consisting of nearly 120 sections, written between 1915 and 1962, although much of the early work was abandoned and the early cantos, as finally published (the first of which is included below) date from 1922 onwards. It is widely considered to be a very difficult read.

It should be noted though, that  "The Cantos" is considered to be one of the most significant works of modernist poetry in the 20th century.  So, difficult or not, I suggest simply reading a few sections at a time...don't think about the "big picture" (there really isn't any) and concentrate on obtaining the "big feel" only.  To help you get started, here is the original outline for "The Cantos" concept in a letter Pound wrote to his father in the 1920's where he stated that his plan was:

A. A. Live man goes down into world of dead.

C. B. 'The repeat in history.'

B. C. The 'magic moment' or moment of metamorphosis, bust through from quotidian into 'divine or permanent world.' Gods, etc.

 I don't really get the double alphabetized outline "A, B, C" reference, but remember he was a lunatic.  So, here is the first:

Three Cantos: I

By Ezra Pound

HANG it all, there can be but one Sordello!
But say I want to, say I take your whole bag of tricks,
Let in your quirks and tweeks, and say the thing’s an art-form,
Your Sordello, and that the modern world
Needs such a rag-bag to stuff all its thought in;	5
Say that I dump my catch, shiny and silvery
As fresh sardines flapping and slipping on the marginal cobbles?
(I stand before the booth, the speech; but the truth
Is inside this discourse—this booth is full of the marrow of wisdom.)
Give up th’ intaglio method.                     Tower by tower	10
Red-brown the rounded bases, and the plan
Follows the builder’s whim. Beaucaire’s slim gray
Leaps from the stubby base of Altaforte—
Mohammed’s windows, for the Alcazar
Has such a garden, split by a tame small stream.	15
The moat is ten yards wide, the inner court-yard
Half a-swim with mire.
Trunk hose?           There are not. The rough men swarm out
In robes that are half Roman, half like the Knave of Hearts;
And I discern your story:                 Peire Cardinal	20
Was half forerunner of Dante. Arnaut’s that trick
Of the unfinished address,
And half your dates are out, you mix your eras;
For that great font Sordello sat beside—
’Tis an immortal passage, but the font?—	25
Is some two centuries outside the picture.
Does it matter?           Not in the least. Ghosts move about me
Patched with histories. You had your business:
To set out so much thought, so much emotion;
To paint, more real than any dead Sordello,	30
The half or third of your intensest life
And call that third Sordello;
And you’ll say, “No, not your life,
He never showed himself.”
Is’t worth the evasion, what were the use	35
Of setting figures up and breathing life upon them,
Were ’t not our life, your life, my life, extended?
I walk Verona. (I am here in England.)
I see Can Grande. (Can see whom you will.)
You had one whole man?	40
And I have many fragments, less worth? Less worth?
Ah, had you quite my age, quite such a beastly and cantankerous age?
You had some basis, had some set belief.
Am I let preach? Has it a place in music?
I walk the airy street,	45
See the small cobbles flare with the poppy spoil.
’Tis your “great day,” the Corpus Domini,
And all my chosen and peninsular village
Has made one glorious blaze of all its lanes—
Oh, before I was up—with poppy flowers.	50
Mid-June: some old god eats the smoke, ’tis not the saints;
And up and out to the half-ruined chapel—
Not the old place at the height of the rocks,
But that splay, barn-like church the Renaissance
Had never quite got into trim again.	55
As well begin here. Began our Catullus:
“Home to sweet rest, and to the waves’ deep laughter,”
The laugh they wake amid the border rushes.
This is our home, the trees are full of laughter,
And the storms laugh loud, breaking the riven waves	60
On “north-most rocks”; and here the sunlight
Glints on the shaken waters, and the rain
Comes forth with delicate tread, walking from Isola Garda—
Lo soleils plovil,
As Arnaut had it in th’ inextricable song.	65
The very sun rains and a spatter of fire
Darts from the “Lydian” ripples; “locus undae,” as Catullus, “Lydiae,”
And the place is full of spirits.
Not lemures, not dark and shadowy ghosts,
But the ancient living, wood-white,	70
Smooth as the inner bark, and firm of aspect,
And all agleam with colors—no, not agleam,
But colored like the lake and like the olive leaves,
Glaukopos, clothed like the poppies, wearing golden greaves,
Light on the air.	75
Are they Etruscan gods?
The air is solid sunlight, apricus,
Sun-fed we dwell there (we in England now);
It’s your way of talk, we can be where we will be,
Sirmio serves my will better than your Asolo	80
Which I have never seen.                 Your “palace step”?
My stone seat was the Dogana’s curb,
And there were not “those girls,” there was one flare, one face.
’Twas all I ever saw, but it was real….
And I can no more say what shape it was …	85
But she was young, too young.                       True, it was Venice,
And at Florian’s and under the north arcade
I have seen other faces, and had my rolls for breakfast, for that matter;
So, for what it’s worth, I have the background.
And you had a background,	90
Watched “the soul,” Sordello’s soul,
And saw it lap up life, and swell and burst—
“Into the empyrean?”
So you worked out new form, the meditative,
Semi-dramatic, semi-epic story,	95
And we will say: What’s left for me to do?
Whom shall I conjure up; who’s my Sordello,
My pre-Daun Chaucer, pre-Boccacio,
As you have done pre-Dante?
Whom shall I hang my shimmering garment on;	100
Who wear my feathery mantle, hagoromo;
Whom set to dazzle the serious future ages?
Not Arnaut, not De Born, not Uc St. Circ who has writ out the stories.
Or shall I do your trick, the showman’s booth, Bob Browning,
Turned at my will into the Agora,	105
Or into the old theatre at Arles,
And set the lot, my visions, to confounding
The wits that have survived your damn’d Sordello?
(Or sulk and leave the word to novelists?)
What a hodge-podge you have made there!—	110
Zanze and swanzig, of all opprobrious rhymes!
And you turn off whenever it suits your fancy,
Now at Verona, now with the early Christians,
Or now a-gabbling of the “Tyrrhene whelk.”
“The lyre should animate but not mislead the pen”—	115
That’s Wordsworth, Mr. Browning. (What a phrase!—
That lyre, that pen, that bleating sheep, Will Wordsworth!)
That should have taught you avoid speech figurative
And set out your matter
As I do, in straight simple phrases:	120
Gods float in the azure air,
Bright gods, and Tuscan, back before dew was shed,
It is a world like Puvis’?                     Never so pale, my friend,
’Tis the first light—not half light—Panisks
And oak-girls and the Maenads	125
Have all the wood. Our olive Sirmio
Lies in its burnished mirror, and the Mounts Balde and Riva
Are alive with song, and all the leaves are full of voices.
“Non è fuggito.”                 “It is not gone.” Metastasio
Is right—we have that world about us,	130
And the clouds bow above the lake, and there are folk upon them
Going their windy ways, moving by Riva,
By the western shore, far as Lonato,
And the water is full of silvery almond-white swimmers,
The silvery water glazes the up-turned nipple.	135
How shall we start hence, how begin the progress?
Pace naif Ficinus, say when Hotep-Hotep
Was a king in Egypt—
When Atlas sat down with his astrolabe,
He, brother to Prometheus, physicist—	140
Say it was Moses’ birth-year?
Exult with Shang in squatness? The sea-monster
Bulges the squarish bronzes.
(Confucius later taught the world good manners,
Started with himself, built out perfection.)	145
With Egypt!
Daub out in blue of scarabs, and with that greeny turquoise?
Or with China, O Virgilio mio, and gray gradual steps
Lead up beneath flat sprays of heavy cedars,
Temple of teak wood, and the gilt-brown arches	150
Triple in tier, banners woven by wall,
Fine screens depicted, sea waves curled high,
Small boats with gods upon them,
Bright flame above the river! Kwannon
Footing a boat that’s but one lotus petal,	155
With some proud four-spread genius
Leading along, one hand upraised for gladness,
Saying, “Tis she, his friend, the mighty goddess! Paean!
Sing hymns ye reeds,             and all ye roots and herons and swans be glad,
Ye gardens of the nymphs put forth your flowers.”	160
What have I of this life,
Or even of Guido?
Sweet lie!—Was I there truly?
Did I knew Or San Michele?
Let’s believe it.	165
Believe the tomb he leapt was Julia Laeta’s?
Friend, I do not even—when he led that street charge—
I do not even know which sword he’d with him.
Sweet lie, “I lived!” Sweet lie, “I lived beside him.”
And now it’s all but truth and memory,	170
Dimmed only by the attritions of long time.
“But we forget not.”                     No, take it all for lies.
I have but smelt this life, a whiff of it—
The box of scented wood
Recalls cathedrals. And shall I claim;	175
Confuse my own phantastikon,
Or say the filmy shell that circumscribes me
Contains the actual sun;                       confuse the thing I see
With actual gods behind me?                           Are they gods behind me?
How many worlds we have! If Botticelli	180
Brings her ashore on that great cockle-shell—
His Venus (Simonetta?),
And Spring and Aufidus fill all the air
With their clear-outlined blossoms?
World enough. Behold, I say, she comes	185
“Apparelled like the spring, Graces her subjects,”
(That’s from Pericles).
Oh, we have worlds enough, and brave décors,
And from these like we guess a soul for man
And build him full of aery populations.	190
Mantegna a sterner line, and the new world about us:
Barred lights, great flares, new form, Picasso or Lewis.
If for a year man write to paint, and not to music—
O Casella! (To be continued)