Modern American Poetry

Mauberley 67

an epitaph scrawled on an oar,

‘I was

And I no more exist;

Here drifted

An hedonist.’

pathetic echo of the elaborate opening ‘Ode Pour L’Election de son
Sepulchre’. The final ‘Medallion’, to be balanced against the ‘Envoi’ of the
first part, recurs in witty disenchantment to the singing lady. Neither the
Envoi’s passion:

Tell her that sheds

Such treasure on the air,

Recking naught else but that her graces give

Life to the moment ...

nor Mauberley’s ‘porcelain reverie’:

Thus if her colour

Came against his gaze,

Tempered as if

It were through a perfect glaze

is denied by the paradoxical dispassion of the final picture:

Luini in porcelain!

The grand piano

Utters a profane

Protest with her clear soprano.

But the tone is ‘objective’ in a way that detaches the ‘Medal lion’ from the
claims of the various worlds of perception projected in earlier parts of the
poem. There are witty echoes of those worlds: the ‘profane protest’ of heavy-
fingered clubbably professional letters;^5 an ambrosial Mauberleian dream of
braids

Spun in King Minos’ hall

From metal, or intractable amber;