Canto VII

ELEANOR (she spoiled in a British climate)

Ἓλανδρος and Ἑλέπτολις, and

poor old Homer blind,

blind as a bat,

5

Ear, ear for the sea-surge;

rattle of old men’s voices.

And then the phantom Rome,

marble narrow for seats

“Si pulvis nullus” said Ovid,

10

“Erit, nullum tamen excute.”

Then file and candles, e li mestiers ecoutes;

Scene for the battle only, but still scene,

Pennons and standards y cavals armatz

Not mere succession of strokes, sightless narration,

15

And Dante’s “ciocco,” brand struck in the game.

Un peu moisi, plancher plus bas que le jardin.

“Contre le lambris, fauteuil de paille,

“Un vieux piano, et sous le baromètre…”

The old men's voices, beneath the columns of false marble,

20

The modish and darkish walls,

Discreeter gilding, and the panelled wood

Suggested, for the leasehold is

Touched with an imprecision... about three squares;

The house too thick, the paintings

25

a shade too oiled.

And the great domed head, con gli occhi onesti e tardi

Moves before me, phantom with weighted motion,

Grave incessu, drinking the tone of things,

And the old voice lifts itself

30

weaving an endless sentence.

We also made ghostly visits, and the stair

That knew us, found us again on the turn of it,

Knocking at empty rooms, seeking for buried beauty;

And the sun-tanned, gracious and well-formed fingers

35

Lift no latch of bent bronze, no Empire handle

Twists for the knocker’s fall; no voice to answer.

A strange concierge, in place of the gouty-footed.

Sceptic against all this one seeks the living,

Stubborn against the fact. The wilted flowers

40

Brushed out a seven year since, of no effect.

Damn the partition! Paper, dark brown and stretched,

Flimsy and damned partition.

Ione, dead the long year

My lintel, and Liu Ch’e’s lintel.

45

Time blacked out with the rubber.

The Elysée carries a name on

And the bus behind me gives me a date for peg;

Low ceiling and the Erard and the saver,

These are in “time.” Four chairs, the bow-front dresser,

50

The panier of the desk, cloth top sunk in.

“Beer-bottle on the statue’s pediment!

“That, Fritz, is the era, to-day against the past,

“Contemporary.” And the passion endures.

Against their action, aromas. Rooms, against chronicles.

55

Smaragdos, chrysolithos; De Gama wore striped pants in Africa

And “Mountains of the sea gave birth to troops”;

Le vieux commode en acajou:

beer-bottles of various strata,

But is she dead as Tyro? In seven years?

60

Ελέναφς, ἕλανδρος, ἑλέπτολις

The sea runs in the beach-groove, shaking the floated pebbles,

Eleanor!

The scarlet curtain throws a less scarlet shadow;

Lamplight at Buovilla, e quel remir,

65

And all that day

Nicea moved before me

And the cold grey air troubled her not

For all her naked beauty, bit not the tropic skin,

And the long slender feet lit on the curb's marge

70

And her moving height went before me,

We alone having being.

And all that day, another day:

Thin husks I had known as men,

Dry casques of departed locusts

75

speaking a shell of speech...

Propped between chairs and table...

Words like the locust-shells, moved by no inner being;

A dryness calling for death;

Another day, between walls of a sham Mycenian,

80

"Toc " sphinxes, sham-Memphis columns,

And beneath the jazz a cortex, a stiffness or stillness,

Shell of the older house.

Brown-yellow wood, and the no colour plaster,

Dry professorial talk...

85

now stilling the ill beat music,

House expulsed by this house.

Square even shoulders and the satin skin,

Gone cheeks of the dancing woman,

Still the old dead dry talk, gassed out --

90

It is ten years gone, makes stiff about her a glass,

A petrefaction of air.

The old room of the tawdry class asserts itself;

The young men, never!

Only the husk of talk.

95

O voi che siete in piccioletta barca,

Dido choked up with sobs, for her Sicheus

Lies heavy in my arms, dead weight

Drowning, with tears, new Eros,

And the life goes on, mooning upon bare hills;

100

Flame leaps from the hand, the rain is listless,

Yet drinks the thirst from our lips,

solid as echo,

Passion to breed a form in shimmer of rain-blur;

But Eros drowned, drowned, heavy-half dead with tears

105

For dead Sicheus.

Life to make mock of motion:

For the husks, before me, move,

The words rattle: shells given out by shells.

The live man, out of lands and prisons,

110

shakes the dry pods,

Probes for old wills and friendships, and the big locust-casques

Bend to the tawdry table,

Lift up their spoons to mouths, put forks in cutlets,

And make sound like the sound of voices.

115

Lorenzaccio

Being more live than they, more full of flames and voices.

Ma se morisse!

Credesse caduto da sè, ma se morisse.

And the tall indifference moves,

120

a more living shell,

Drift in the air of fate, dry phantom, but intact.

O Alessandro, chief and thrice warned, watcher,

Eternal watcher of things,

Of things, of men, of passions.

125

Eyes floating in dry, dark air,

E biondo, with glass-grey iris, with an even side-fall of hair

The stiff, still features.

—
Ezra Pound

A Draft of XXX Cantos, 1930