Skip to main content

On Finding a Lost Ezra Pound Poem in a Castle

The Schloss Brunnenburg, where Ezra Pound lived late in his life.

“Hast thou 2 loaves of bread
Sell one + with the dole
Buy straightaway some hyacinths
To feed thy soul.” —Ezra Pound

I found this short poem by Ezra Pound as I was researching a book about Pound’s years in St. Elizabeths Hospital. It appears for the first time in my book The Bughouse and in the Fall issue of The Paris Review. Finding a previously unpublished poem by Ezra Pound sounds both adventurous and grittily archival, but really, this was neither. It was waiting in an obvious place: in the Schloss Brunnenburg in the Tyrol in northern Italy, which is the fairytale castle where Pound lived late in his life and where his daughter still lives today. The poem wasn’t lost; it just hadn’t been found; and perhaps this is because it doesn’t look quite right. It is too tender, too small. It isn’t hugely complicated. Everyone know that Pound was the archetypal impossible modernist, austere and difficult. Yet here was a little poem, written on the back of an envelope, about flowers. It lacks, for better and for worse, the grandeur we expect. 

It’s a trickier poem than it looks, of course. There are two objects, and the poem insists that we trade one for the other, bread for hyacinths. They do not rhyme, for the poem has only one rhyme: dole and soul. Dole is an odd word, for it means both money and grief. We still have this double in the homophones “dollar” and “dolour,” and the slight tangle is explained simply. “Dole” is actually two words with different etymologies: one comes from the Old English, meaning portion or share, while the other comes from Latin, and this means sorrow. Two things become one; or one becomes two. The poem is halfway to an equation, and the exchange is carefully measured: in the figure “2” in the place of the word, in the mathematical symbol.

The great paradox of Ezra Pound is that the message of his politics was so often contradicted by the forms in which he wrote. He spent the Second World War broadcasting fascist propaganda from Italy, and then the following decade as a patient at St Elizabeths Hospital for the insane in Washington, DC. In the broadcasts, he spoke against the mixing of races, and preached anti-semitic hate, and yet the method of his poetry insists that ideas can and must be translated across cultures. He mixes African myth with classical greek epic; ancient Chinese poetry and the American blues. These were messages that got Pound into trouble: his idea that poets should be taken seriously, should be listened to on the topics of economics and politics and the running of the world. In this little poem he offers a simple lesson: that the world of bread must have a place for hyacinths, too.

We shouldn’t take this spiritualism too seriously, however. You don’t give away your loaves but trade one of them carefully, while the other is held back, perhaps for lunch, just as the things of this world are balanced with the next. Reading the poem again, I realise: now he has all the ingredients for a hyacinth sandwich.

Daniel Swift is the author of The Bughouse: the Poetry, Politics, and Madness of Ezra Pound. His first book, Bomber County, was longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize and the Guardian First Book award, and his essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, the New Statesman, and Harper’s.



from The Paris Review http://ift.tt/2ycrJ6X

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Sphere

Photograph by Elena Saavedra Buckley. Once when I was about twelve I was walking down the dead-end road in Albuquerque where I grew up, around twilight with a friend. Far beyond the end of the road was a mountain range, and at that time of evening it flattened into a matte indigo wash, like a mural. While kicking down the asphalt we saw a small bright light appear at the top of the peaks, near where we knew radio towers to occasionally emit flashes of red. But this glare, blinding and colorless, grew at an alarming rate. It looked like a single floodlight and then a tight swarm beginning to leak over the edge of the summit. My friend and I became frightened, and as the light poured from the crest, our murmurs turned into screams. We stood there, clutching our heads, screaming. I knew this was the thing that was going to come and get me. It was finally going to show me the horrifying wiring that lay just behind the visible universe and that was inside of me too. And then, a couple se...
Post a Comment
Read more

DEMOCRACY DAY SPEECH BY PMB; MAY 29 2016

www.naijaloaded.com My compatriots, It is one year today since our administration came into office. It has been a year of triumph, consolidation, pains and achievements. By age, instinct and experience, my preference is to look forward, to prepare for the challenges that lie ahead and rededicate the administration to the task of fixing Nigeria. But I believe we can also learn from the obstacles we have overcome and the progress we made thus far, to help strengthen the plans that we have in place to put Nigeria back on the path of progress. We affirm our belief in democracy as the form of government that best assures the active participation and actual benefit of the people. Despite the many years of hardship and disappointment the people of this nation have proved inherently good, industrious tolerant, patient and generous. The past years have witnessed huge flows of oil revenues. From 2010 average oil prices were $100 per barrel. But economic and security co...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Private Life: On James Baldwin

JAMES BALDWIN IN HYDE PARK, LONDON. PHOTOGRAPH BY ALLAN WARREN. Via Wikimedia Commons , licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 .   In his review of James Baldwin’s third novel, Another Country , Lionel Trilling asked: “How, in the extravagant publicness in which Mr. Baldwin lives, is he to find the inwardness which we take to be the condition of truth in the writer?” But Baldwin’s sense of inwardness had been nourished as much as it had been damaged by the excitement and danger that came from what was public and urgent. Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovanni’s Room dramatized the conflict between a longing for a private life, even a spiritual life, and the ways in which history and politics intrude most insidiously into the very rooms we try hardest to shut them out of. Baldwin had, early in his career, elements of what T. S. Eliot attributed to Henry James, “a mind so fine that it could not be penetrated by an idea.” The rest of the time, however, he did not have this luxury, as pub...
Post a Comment
Read more