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.
poem by Ezra Pound
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The Faun
Ha! sir, I have seen you sniffing and snoozling
about among my flowers.
And what, pray, do you know about
horticulture, you capriped?
'Come, Auster, come Apeliota,
And see the faun in our garden.
But if you move or speak
This thing will run at you
And scare itself to spasms.'
poem by Ezra Pound
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The Three Poets
Candidia has taken a new lover
And three poets are gone into mourning.
The first has written a long elegy to 'Chloris',
To 'Chloris chaste and cold,' his 'only Chloris'.
The second has written a sonnet
upon the mutability of woman,
And the third writes an epigram to Candidia.
poem by Ezra Pound
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A Girl
The tree has entered my hands,
The sap has ascended my arms,
The tree has grown in my breast -
Downward,
The branches grow out of me, like arms.
Tree you are,
Moss you are,
You are violets with wind above them.
A child - so high - you are,
And all this is folly to the world.
poem by Ezra Pound
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[Greek]
Be in me as the eternal moods
of the bleak wind, and not
As transient things are—
gaiety of flowers.
Have me in the strong loneliness
of sunless cliffs
And of gray waters.
Let the gods speak softly of us
In days hereafter,
the shadowy flowers of Orcus
Remember thee.
poem by Ezra Pound
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Coitus
The gilded phaloi of the crocuses
are thrusting at the spring air.
Here is there naught of dead gods
But a procession of festival,
A procession, Giulio Romano,
Fit for your spirit to dwell in.
Dione, your nights are upon us.
The dew is upon the leaf.
The night about us is restless.
poem by Ezra Pound
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A Pact
I make a pact with you, Walt Whitman -
I have detested you long enough.
I come to you as a grown child
Who has had a pig-headed father;
I am old enough now to make friends.
It was you that broke the new wood,
Now is a time for carving.
We have one sap and one root -
Let there be commerce between us.
poem by Ezra Pound
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Erat Hora
‘Thank you, whatever comes.' And then she turned
And, as the ray of sun on hanging flowers
Fades when the wind hath lifted them aside,
Went swiftly from me. Nay, whatever comes
One hour was sunlit and the most high gods
May not make boast of any better thing
Than to have watched that hour as it passed.
poem by Ezra Pound
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The White Stag
I ha' seen them 'mid the clouds on the heather.
Lo! they pause not for love nor for sorrow,
Yet their eyes are as the eyes of a maid to her lover,
When the white hart breaks his cover
And the white wind breaks the morn.
‘'Tis the white stag, Fame, we're a-hunting,
Bid the world's hounds come to horn!’
poem by Ezra Pound
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Fratres Minores
With minds still hovering above their testicles
Certain poets here and in France
Still sigh over established and natural fact
Long since fully discussed by Ovid.
They howl. They complain in delicate and exhausted metres
That the twitching of three abdominal nerves
Is incapable of producing a lasting Nirvana.
poem by Ezra Pound
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