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Title: (Mauberley)
Author: Ezra Pound [
More Titles by Pound]
I.
TURNED from the "eau-forte
Par Jaquemart"
To the strait head
Of Mcssalina:
"His true Penelope
Was Flaubert",
And his tool
The engraver's
Firmness,
Not the full smile,
His art, but an art
In profile;
Colourless
Pier Francesca,
Pisanello lacking the skill
To forge Achaia.
II.
"Qu'est ce qu'ils savent de l'amour, et
gu'est ce qu'ils peuvent comprendre?
S'ils ne comprennent pas la poèsie,
s'ils ne sentent pas la musique, qu'est ce
qu'ils peuvent comprendre de cette pas-
sion en comparaison avec laquelle la rose
est grossière et le parfum des violettes un
tonnerre?"
CAID ALI
FOR three years, diabolus in the scale,
He drank ambrosia,
All passes, ANANGKE prevails,
Came end, at last, to that Arcadia.
He had moved amid her phantasmagoria,
Amid her galaxies,
NUKTIS AGALMA
Drifted....drifted precipitate,
Asking time to be rid of....
Of his bewilderment; to designate
His new found orchid....
To be certain....certain...
(Amid aerial flowers)..time for arrangements--
Drifted on
To the final estrangement;
Unable in the supervening blankness
To sift TO AGATHON from the chaff
Until he found his seive...
Ultimately, his seismograph:
--Given, that is, his urge
To convey the relation
Of eye-lid and cheek-bone
By verbal manifestation;
To present the series
Of curious heads in medallion--
He had passed, inconscient, full gaze,
The wide-banded irises
And botticellian sprays implied
In their diastasis;
Which anæsthesis, noted a year late,
And weighed, revealed his great affect,
(Orchid), mandate
Of Eros, a retrospect.
. . .
Mouths biting empty air,
The still stone dogs,
Caught in metamorphosis were,
Left him as epilogues.
[The end]
Ezra Pound's poem: (Mauberley)
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