Part 4

It is, and is not, I am sane enough, Since you have come this place has hovered round me, This fabrication built of autumn roses, Then there's a goldish colour, different.

And one gropes in these things as delicate Algae reach up and out beneath Pale slow green surgings of the under-wave, 'Mid these things older than the names they have, These things that are familiars of the god.

PLUNGE

I would bathe myself in strangeness: These comforts heaped upon me, smother me! I burn, I scald so for the new, New friends, new faces, Places! Oh to be out of this, This that is all I wanted --save the new. And you, Love, you the much, the more desired! Do I not loathe all walls, streets, stones, All mire, mist, all fog, All ways of traffic? You, I would have flow over me like water, Oh, but far out of this! Grass, and low fields, and hills, And sun, Oh, sun enough! Out and alone, among some Alien people!

A VIRGINAL

No, no! Go from me. I have left her lately, I will not spoil my sheath with lesser brightness, For my surrounding air has a new lightness; Slight are her arms, yet they have bound me straitly And left me cloaked as with a gauze of æther; As with sweet leaves; as with a subtle clearness. Oh, I have picked up magic in her nearness To sheathe me half in half the things that sheathe her.

No, no! Go from me. I have still the flavour, Soft as spring wind that's come from birchen bowers. Green come the shoots, aye April in the branches, As winter's wound with her sleight hand she staunches, Hath of the tress a likeness of the savour: As white their bark, so white this lady's hours.

PAN IS DEAD

Pan is dead. Great Pan is dead. Ah! bow your heads, ye maidens all, And weave ye him his coronal.

There is no summer in the leaves, And withered are the sedges; How shall we weave a coronal, Or gather floral pledges?

That I may not say, Ladies. Death was ever a churl. That I may not say, Ladies. How should he show a reason, That he has taken our Lord away Upon such hollow season?

THE PICTURE[1]

The eyes of this dead lady speak to me, For here was love, was not to be drowned out, And here desire, not to be kissed away.

The eyes of this dead lady speak to me.

[1] "Venus Reclining," by Jacopo del Sellaio (1442-93).

OF JACOPO DEL SELLAIO

This man knew out the secret ways of love, No man could paint such things who did not know.

And now she's gone, who was his Cyprian, And you are here, who are "The Isles" to me.

And here's the thing that lasts the whole thing out: The eyes of this dead lady speak to me.

THE RETURN

See, they return; ah, see the tentative Movements, and the slow feet, The trouble in the pace and the uncertain Wavering!

See, they return, one, and by one, With fear, as half-awakened; As if the snow should hesitate And murmur in the wind, and half turn back; These were the "Wing'd-with-Awe," Inviolable.

Gods of the wingèd shoe! With them the silver hounds, sniffing the trace of air!

Haie! Haie! These were the swift to harry; These the keen-scented; These were the souls of blood.

Slow on the leash, pallid the leash-men.

EFFECTS OF MUSIC UPON A COMPANY OF PEOPLE

I

DEUX MOVEMENTS

1. Temple qui fut. 2. Poissons d'or.

1

A soul curls back, Their souls like petals, Thin, long, spiral, Like those of a chrysanthemum curl Smoke-like up and back from the Vavicel, the calyx, Pale green, pale gold, transparent, Green of plasma, rose-white, Spirate like smoke, Curled, Vibrating, Slowly, waving slowly. O Flower animate! O calyx! O crowd of foolish people!

2

The petals! On the tip of each the figure Delicate. See, they dance, step to step. Flora to festival, Twine, bend, bow, Frolic involve ye. Woven the step, Woven the tread, the moving. Ribands they move, Wave, bow to the centre. Pause, rise, deepen in colour, And fold in drowsily.

II

FROM A THING BY SCHUMANN

Breast high, floating and welling Their soul, moving beneath the satin, Plied the gold threads, Pushed at the gauze above it. The notes beat upon this, Beat and indented it; Rain dropped and came and fell upon this, Hail and snow, My sight gone in the flurry!

And then across the white silken, Bellied up, as a sail bellies to the wind, Over the fluid tenuous, diaphanous, Over this curled a wave, greenish, Mounted and overwhelmed it. This membrane floating above, And bellied out by the up-pressing soul.

Then came a mer-host, And after them legion of Romans, The usual, dull, theatrical!

THE COMPLETE POETICAL WORKS OF T.E. HULME

PREFATORY NOTE

In publishing his _Complete Poetical Works_ at thirty,[1] Mr Hulme has set an enviable example to many of his contemporaries who have had less to say.

They are reprinted here for good fellowship; for good custom, a custom out of Tuscany and of Provence; and thirdly, for convenience, seeing their smallness of bulk; and for good memory, seeing that they recall certain evenings and meetings of two years gone, dull enough at the time, but rather pleasant to look back upon.

As for the "School of Images," which may or may not have existed, its principles were not so interesting as those of the "inherent dynamists" or of _Les Unanimistes_, yet they were probably sounder than those of a certain French school which attempted to dispense with verbs altogether; or of the Impressionists who brought forth:

"Pink pigs blossoming upon the hillside";

or of the Post-Impressionists who beseech their ladies to let down slate-blue hair over their raspberry-coloured flanks.

_Ardoise_ rimed richly--ah, richly and rarely rimed!--with _framboise_.

As for the future, _Les Imagistes_, the descendants of the forgotten school of 1909, have that in their keeping.

I refrain from publishing my proposed _Historical Memoir_ of their forerunners, because Mr Hulme has threatened to print the original propaganda.

E.P.

[1] Mr Pound has grossly exaggerated my age.--T.E.H.

AUTUMN

A touch of cold in the Autumn night-- I walked abroad, And saw the ruddy moon lean over a hedge Like a red-faced farmer. I did not stop to speak, but nodded, And round about were the wistful stars With white faces like town children.

MANA ABODA

Beauty is the marking-time, the stationary vibration, the feigned ecstasy of an arrested impulse unable to reach its natural end.

Mana Aboda, whose bent form The sky in archèd circle is, Seems ever for an unknown grief to mourn. Yet on a day I heard her cry: "I weary of the roses and the singing poets-- Josephs all, not tall enough to try."

ABOVE THE DOCK

Above the quiet dock in mid night, Tangled in the tall mast's corded height, Hangs the moon. What seemed so far away Is but a child's balloon, forgotten after play.

THE EMBANKMENT

(The fantasia of a fallen gentleman on a cold, bitter night.)

Once, in finesse of fiddles found I ecstasy, In the flash of gold heels on the hard pavement. Now see I That warmth's the very stuff of poesy. Oh, God, make small The old star-eaten blanket of the sky, That I may fold it round me and in comfort lie.

CONVERSION

Lighthearted I walked into the valley wood In the time of hyacinths, Till beauty like a scented cloth Cast over, stifled me. I was bound Motionless and faint of breath By loveliness that is her own eunuch.

Now pass I to the final river Ignominiously, in a sack, without sound, As any peeping Turk to the Bosphorus.

FINIS

End of Project Gutenberg's Canzoni & Ripostes, by Ezra Pound and T.E. Hulme