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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=391210" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>Hugh Selwyn Mauberly (Part I)</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0">"Vocat aestus in umbram" <br>Nemesianus Es. IV. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">E. P. Ode pour l'élection de son sépulchre </div><div style="margin:10px 0">For three years, out of key with his time,<br>He strove to resuscitate the dead art<br>Of poetry; to maintain "the sublime"<br>In the old sense. Wrong from the start --</div><div style="margin:10px 0">No, hardly, but, seeing he had been born<br>In a half savage country, out of date;<br>Bent resolutely on wringing lilies from the acorn;<br>Capaneus; trout for factitious bait:</div><div style="margin:10px 0">"Idmen gar toi panth, os eni Troie<br>Caught in the unstopped ear;<br>Giving the rocks small lee-way<br>The chopped seas held him, therefore, that year.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">His true Penelope was Flaubert,<br>He fished by obstinate isles;<br>Observed the elegance of Circe's hair<br>Rather than the mottoes on sun-dials.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Unaffected by "the march of events",<br>He passed from men's memory in l'an trentiesme<br>De son eage; the case presents<br>No adjunct to the Muses' diadem.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">II.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">The age demanded an image<br>Of its accelerated grimace,<br>Something for the modern stage,<br>Not, at any rate, an Attic grace;</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Not, not certainly, the obscure reveries<br>Of the inward gaze;<br>Better mendacities<br>Than the classics in paraphrase!</div><div style="margin:10px 0">The "age demanded" chiefly a mould in plaster,<br>Made with no loss of time,<br>A prose kinema, not, not assuredly, alabaster<br>Or the "sculpture" of rhyme.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">III. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">The tea-rose, tea-gown, etc.<br>Supplants the mousseline of Cos,<br>The pianola "replaces"<br>Sappho's barbitos.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Christ follows Dionysus,<br>Phallic and ambrosial<br>Made way for macerations;<br>Caliban casts out Ariel.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">All things are a flowing,<br>Sage Heracleitus says;<br>But a tawdry cheapness<br>Shall reign throughout our days.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Even the Christian beauty<br>Defects -- after Samothrace;<br>We see to kalon<br>Decreed in the market place.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Faun's flesh is not to us,<br>Nor the saint's vision.<br>We have the press for wafer;<br>Franchise for circumcision.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">All men, in law, are equals.<br>Free of Peisistratus,<br>We choose a knave or an eunuch<br>To rule over us.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">A bright Apollo,</div><div style="margin:10px 0">tin andra, tin eroa, tina theon,<br>What god, man, or hero<br>Shall I place a tin wreath upon?</div><div style="margin:10px 0">IV. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">These fought, in any case,<br>and some believing, pro domo, in any case ..</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Some quick to arm,<br>some for adventure,<br>some from fear of weakness,<br>some from fear of censure,<br>some for love of slaughter, in imagination,<br>learning later ...</div><div style="margin:10px 0">some in fear, learning love of slaughter;<br>Died some pro patria, non dulce non et decor" ..</div><div style="margin:10px 0">walked eye-deep in hell<br>believing in old men's lies, then unbelieving<br>came home, home to a lie,<br>home to many deceits,<br>home to old lies and new infamy;</div><div style="margin:10px 0">usury age-old and age-thick<br>and liars in public places.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Daring as never before, wastage as never before.<br>Young blood and high blood,<br>Fair cheeks, and fine bodies;</div><div style="margin:10px 0">fortitude as never before </div><div style="margin:10px 0">frankness as never before,<br>disillusions as never told in the old days,<br>hysterias, trench confessions,<br>laughter out of dead bellies.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br>V. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">There died a myriad,<br>And of the best, among them,<br>For an old bitch gone in the teeth,<br>For a botched civilization.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Charm, smiling at the good mouth,<br>Quick eyes gone under earth's lid,</div><div style="margin:10px 0">For two gross of broken statues,<br>For a few thousand battered books.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Yeux Glauques</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Gladstone was still respected,<br>When John Ruskin produced<br>"Kings Treasuries"; Swinburne<br>And Rossetti still abused.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Fœtid Buchanan lifted up his voice<br>When that faun's head of hers<br>Became a pastime for<br>Painters and adulterers.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">The Burne-Jones cartons<br>Have preserved her eyes;<br>Still, at the Tate, they teach<br>Cophetua to rhapsodize;</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Thin like brook-water,<br>With a vacant gaze.<br>The English Rubaiyat was still-born<br>In those days.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">The thin, clear gaze, the same<br>Still darts out faun-like from the half-ruin'd face,<br>Questing and passive ....<br>"Ah, poor Jenny's case" ...</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Bewildered that a world<br>Shows no surprise<br>At her last maquero's <br>Adulteries.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">"Siena Mi Fe', Disfecemi Maremma" </div><div style="margin:10px 0">Among the pickled fœtuses and bottled bones,<br>Engaged in perfecting the catalogue,<br>I found the last scion of the<br>Senatorial families of Strasbourg, Monsieur Verog.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">For two hours he talked of Gallifet;<br>Of Dowson; of the Rhymers' Club;<br>Told me how Johnson (Lionel) died<br>By falling from a high stool in a pub ...</div><div style="margin:10px 0">But showed no trace of alcohol<br>At the autopsy, privately performed --<br>Tissue preserved -- the pure mind<br>Arose toward Newman as the whiskey warmed.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Dowson found harlots cheaper than hotels;<br>Headlam for uplift; Image impartially imbued<br>With raptures for Bacchus, Terpsichore and the Church.<br>So spoke the author of "The Dorian Mood",</div><div style="margin:10px 0">M. Verog, out of step with the decade,<br>Detached from his contemporaries,<br>Neglected by the young,<br>Because of these reveries.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Brennbaum. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">The sky-like limpid eyes,<br>The circular infant's face,<br>The stiffness from spats to collar<br>Never relaxing into grace;</div><div style="margin:10px 0">The heavy memories of Horeb, Sinai and the forty years,<br>Showed only when the daylight fell<br>Level across the face<br>Of Brennbaum "The Impeccable".</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Mr. Nixon </div><div style="margin:10px 0">In the cream gilded cabin of his steam yacht<br>Mr. Nixon advised me kindly, to advance with fewer<br>Dangers of delay. "Consider<br>Carefully the reviewer.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">"I was as poor as you are;<br>"When I began I got, of course,<br>"Advance on royalties, fifty at first", said Mr. Nixon,<br>"Follow me, and take a column,<br>"Even if you have to work free.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">"Butter reviewers. From fifty to three hundred<br>"I rose in eighteen months;<br>"The hardest nut I had to crack<br>"Was Dr. Dundas.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">"I never mentioned a man but with the view<br>"Of selling my own works.<br>"The tip's a good one, as for literature<br>"It gives no man a sinecure."</div><div style="margin:10px 0">And no one knows, at sight a masterpiece.<br>And give up verse, my boy,<br>There's nothing in it."</div><div style="margin:10px 0">* * * </div><div style="margin:10px 0">Likewise a friend of Bloughram's once advised me:<br>Don't kick against the pricks,<br>Accept opinion. The "Nineties" tried your game<br>And died, there's nothing in it.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">X. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">Beneath the sagging roof<br>The stylist has taken shelter,<br>Unpaid, uncelebrated,<br>At last from the world's welter</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Nature receives him,<br>With a placid and uneducated mistress<br>He exercises his talents<br>And the soil meets his distress.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">The haven from sophistications and contentions<br>Leaks through its thatch;<br>He offers succulent cooking;<br>The door has a creaking latch.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">XI. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">"Conservatrix of Milésien"<br>Habits of mind and feeling,<br>Possibly. But in Ealing<br>With the most bank-clerkly of Englishmen?</div><div style="margin:10px 0">No, "Milésian" is an exaggeration.<br>No instinct has survived in her<br>Older than those her grandmother<br>Told her would fit her station.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">XII. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">"Daphne with her thighs in bark<br>Stretches toward me her leafy hands", --<br>Subjectively. In the stuffed-satin drawing-room<br>I await The Lady Valentine's commands,</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Knowing my coat has never been<br>Of precisely the fashion<br>To stimulate, in her,<br>A durable passion;</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Doubtful, somewhat, of the value<br>Of well-gowned approbation<br>Of literary effort,<br>But never of The Lady Valentine's vocation:</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Poetry, her border of ideas,<br>The edge, uncertain, but a means of blending<br>With other strata<br>Where the lower and higher have ending;</div><div style="margin:10px 0">A hook to catch the Lady Jane's attention,<br>A modulation toward the theatre,<br>Also, in the case of revolution,<br>A possible friend and comforter.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">* * * </div><div style="margin:10px 0">Conduct, on the other hand, the soul<br>"Which the highest cultures have nourished"<br>To Fleet St. where<br>Dr. Johnson flourished;</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Beside this thoroughfare<br>The sale of half-hose has<br>Long since superseded the cultivation<br>Of Pierian roses.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br /></a><br />poem by <a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/by.php?a=Ezra+Pound">Ezra Pound</a><div class=q> <img src="https://www.citatepedia.ro/g/32share.png" style="float:left" alt="Share"> <script type="text/javascript" src="//s7.addthis.com/js/300/addthis_widget.js#pubid=citatepedia" async="async"></script><div style="display:inline-block" class="addthis_sharing_toolbox" data-url="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=391210" data-title="Hugh Selwyn Mauberly (Part I) de Ezra Pound" data-description=""Vocat aestus in umbram" Nemesianus Es. IV. E. P. Ode pour l'élection de son sépulchre For three years, out of key with his time, He strove to resuscitate the dead art Of poetry; to maintain "the sublime" In the old sens..."></div> </div> </div>
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