Modern American Poetry

Mauberley 57

playgrounds into thin cruel daylight. Its postures and conflicts continue, as
we have indicated, those of Propertius,the robustezzaof which could scarcely
be confounded with hurt awakening.^2 If a decisive point of maturation must
be found, it is to be found in Propertius,the earlier poem, it is not always
remembered, by some three years. It is easy, for that matter, to over-estimate
the reorientation there involved vis-à-visthe earlier work. There need be
nothing traumatic about supervening maturity; the bulk of Personaeis the
work of a young man in his twenties. Pound was born in 1885. The earliest
Personae,dated 1908, belong therefore to ætat.23. He published the Seafarer
translation at 27; Lustraat 30, Cathayat 31. The next year saw Propertiusand
the first drafts of the earliest Cantos.He published Mauberleyat 35. The Pisan
Cantosare the work of a man of 60. Emotional maturation may be seen going
on in the Lustravolume; and there is enough difference between the
monolinear intensity of ‘The Needle’ (Ripostes,1912):

Come, or the stellar tide will slip away,

Eastward avoid the hour of its decline,

Now! for the needle trembles in my soul! ...

and the calm detached emotion of. ‘Gentildonna’ (Lustra,1915):

She passed and left no quiver in the veins, who now

Moving among the trees, and clinging in the air she severed,

Fanning the grass she walked on then, endures:

Grey olive leaves beneath a rain-cold sky.

to preclude any suggestion of a cataclysmic reorientation a few years later.

These pages will have performed their function if they can arm the

reader against the too-easy supposition that Pound found in Mauberleyan

eloquence of disillusion. The subtle balance of diverse strong emotions in

that poem will be utterly destroyed by too ready a response to one or two

elements. We may now look, belatedly, at the text.

The subtitle (‘Life and Contacts’) and the title-page footnote

(‘...distinctly a farewell to London’) furnish a perspective on the title of the

first of the eighteen poems: ‘E.P. Ode Pour L’Election de son Sepulchre.^3 ’ This

is largely Pound’s career in London seen through the eyes of

uncomprehending but not unsympathetic conservers of the ‘better tradition’:

a strenuous but ineffectual angel, his subtleties of passion ‘wrong from the

start’, accorded the patronizing excuse of having been born ‘in a half savage

country, out of date’, and given to Yankee intensities (‘bent resolutely on