Blog424
Daily Notes on Poetry & Related Matters


31 March 2005:

FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS 

Come, my songs, let us express our baser passions,
Let us express our envy of the man with a steady job and no
worry about the future.
You are very idle, my songs.
I fear you will come to a bad end.
You stand about in streets,
You loiter at the corner and bus-stops,
You do next to nothing at all. 

You do not even express our inner nobilities,
You will come to a very bad end. 

And I?
I have gone half cracked,
I have talked to you so much that
                              I almost see you about me,
Insolent little beasts, shameless, devoid of clothing!

But you, newest song of the lot,
You are not old enough to have done much mischief,
I will get you a green coat out of China
With dragons worked upon it,
I will get you scarlet silk trousers
From the statue of the infant Christ in Santa Maria Novella,
Lest they say we are lacking in taste,
Or that there is no caste in this family.

-- Ezra Pound.  

--From: Personae.  Lea Baechler and A. Walton Litz, eds.
  NY: New Directions, 1990 (1926). p. 95.

Tia Ballantine sends out a poem a day to a list of people my name is on, so I got the above yesterday from her. It was a surprise, for I didn't remember having read it, and I would have, because I very much like it. So silly but right-on a metaphor, extended so smoothly! And bringing its persona so authentically into one small, permanently captured brightness.



























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