(^68) Hugh Kenner
but the closing stanza is pitched to a key of quasi-scientific meticulousness
that delivers with Flaubertian inscrutability a last voiceless verdict of
inadequacy on all the human squinting, interpreting, and colouring that has
preceded: fact revenging itself on art and the artists—
The face-oval beneath the glaze,
Bright in its suave bounding-line, as,
Beneath half-watt rays,
The eyes turn topaz.
Beauty? Irony? Geometrical and optical fact?
And this last poem yields a final irony. ‘To present the series / Of
curious heads in medallion’ was, we remember, Mauberley’s ambition, and
this sample Medallion in its very scrupulousness exemplifies his sterility. His
imagination falls back upon precedents; his visual particularity comes out of
an art-gallery and his Venus Anadyomene out of a book. The ‘true Penelope’
of both poets was Flaubert, but Pound’s contrasting Envoi moves with
authority of another order. Mauberley cringed before the age’s demands; he
wrote one poem and collapsed. Pound with sardonic compliance presents the
age with its desiderated ‘image’ (poems 3–12); then proves he was rightfrom
the start by offering as indisputable climax the ‘sculpture of rhyme’ and the
‘sublime in the old sense’ which the epitaph-writer had dismissed as a foolish
quest. And he adds a sympathetic obituary and epitaph of his own for the
alter ego.
This thin-line tracing of the action of Mauberleyis offered with no
pretence to fulness. It is possible, as we have seen, to spend a page meditating
on a line. The writer professes two objectives in proceeding as above. First, it
seemed profitable to trace the ‘intaglio method’ through an entire work, with
a detail which will be impossible when we come to the Cantos.Secondly, it
seemed important to guide the reader towards an apprehension of Mauberley
in terms that will not falsify his notion of Pound’s later or earlier work. The
poem has commended itself too readily as a memorable confession of failure
to those whom it comforts to decide that Pound has failed. Anyone to whom
the above pages are persuasive will perhaps agree that a less obvious
perspective augments, if anything, the stature of this astonishing poem.
NOTES
- The primary echo is as a matter of fact with Corbière.
- Since writing this I find in Pound’s recently published Letters a reference to