(Mauberley)

URNED from the “eau-forte

Par Jaquemart”

To the strait head

Of Messalina:

“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.

“Qu’est ce quils savent de l’amour, et

qu’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

OR 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 ærial 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 AGE DEMANDED”

Vide Poem II. Page 10

OR this agility chance found

Him of all men, unfit

As the red-beaked steeds of

The Cytheræan for a chain-bit.

The glow of porcelain

Brought no reforming sense

To his perception

Of the social inconsequence.

Thus, if her colour

Came against his gaze,

Tempered as if

It were through a perfect glaze

He made no immediate application

Of this to relation of the state

To the individual, the month was more temperate

Because this beauty had been

.....

The coral isle, the lion-coloured sand

Burst in upon the porcelain revery:

Impetuous troubling

Of his imagery.

.....

Mildness, amid the neo-Neitzschean clatter,

His sense of graduations,

Quite out of place amid

Resistance to current exacerbations

Invitation, mere invitation to perceptivity

Gradually led him to the isolation

Which these presents place

Under a more tolerant, perhaps, examination.

By constant elimination

The manifest universe

Yielded an armour

Against utter consternation,

A Minoan undulation,

100

Seen, we admit, amid ambrosial circumstances

Strengthened him against

The discouraging doctrine of chances

And his desire for survival,

Faint in the most strenuous moods,

105

Became an Olympian apathein

In the presence of selected perceptions.

A pale gold, in the aforesaid pattern,

The unexpected palms

Destroying, certainly, the artist’s urge,

110

Left him delighted with the imaginary

Audition of the phantasmal sea-surge,

Incapable of the least utterance or composition,

Emendation, conservation of the “better tradition”,

Refinement of medium, elimination of superfluities,

115

August attraction or concentration.

Nothing in brief, but maudlin confession

Irresponse to human aggression,

Amid the precipitation, down-float

Of insubstantial manna

120

Lifting the faint susurrus

Of his subjective hosannah.

Ultimate affronts to human redundancies;

Non-esteem of self-styled “his betters”

Leading, as he well knew,

125

To his final

Exclusion from the world of letters.

IV.

CATTERED Moluccas

Not knowing, day to day,

130

The first days end, in the next noon;

The placid water

Unbroken by the Simoon;

Thick foliage

Placid beneath warm suns,

135

Tawn fore-shores

Washed in the cobalt of oblivions;

Or through dawn-mist

The grey and rose

Of the juridical

140

Flamingoes;

A consciousness disjunct,

Being but this overblotted

Series

Of intermittences;

145

Coracle of Pacific voyages,

The unforecasted beach:

Then on an oar Read this:

“I was

And I no more exist;

150

Here drifted

An hedonist”

MEDALLION

UINI in porcelain!

The grand piano

155

Utters a profane

Protest with her clear soprano.

The sleek head emerges

From the gold-yellow frock

As Anadyomene in the opening

160

Pages of Reinach.

Honey-red, closing the face-oval

A basket-work of braids which seem as if they were

Spun in King Minos’ hall

From metal, or intractable amber;

165

The face-oval beneath the glaze,

Bright in its suave bounding-line, as

Beneath half-watt rays

The eyes turn topaz.

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—
Ezra Pound

Hugh Selwyn Mauberly, 1920