[Dichtung]

Ezra Pound
Collected Shorter Poems (Faber and Faber, 1973)
In Durance*
I am homesick after mine own kind,
Oh I know that there are folk about me,
friendly faces,
But I am homesick after mine own kind.

"These sell our pictures"**! Oh well,
They reach me not, touch me some edge or that,
But reach me not and all my life's*** become
One flame***, that reaches not beyond
My heart's own hearth,
Or hides among the ashes there for thee.
"Thee" ? Oh, "Thee" is who cometh first
Out of mine own soul-kin,
For I am homesick after mine own kind
And ordinary people touch me not.
And I am homesick
After mine own kind that know, and feel
And have some breath for beauty and the arts.

Aye, I am wistful for my kin of the spirit
And have none about me save in the shadows
When come they, surging of power, "DAEMON,"
"Quasi KALOUN." S.T.**** says Beauty is most that, a
"calling to the soul."
Well then, so call they, the swirlers out of the mist
of my soul,
They that come mewards, bearing old magic.

But for all that, I am homesick after mine own kind
And would meet kindred even as I am,
Flesh-shrouded bearing the secret.
"All they that with strange sadness"
Have the earth in mockery, and are kind to all,
My fellows, aye I know the glory
Of th' unbounded ones, but ye, that hide
As I hide most the while
And burst forth to the windows only whiles or whiles
For love, or hope, or beauty or for power,
Then smoulder, with the lids half closed
And are untouched by echoes of the world.

Oh ye, my fellows: with the seas between us some be,
Purple and sapphire for the silver shafts
Of sun and spray all shattered at the bows;
And some the hills hold off,
The little hills to east of us, though here we
Have damp and plain to be our shutting in.

And yet my soul sings "Up!" and we are one.
Yea thou, and Thou, and THOU, and all my kin
To whom my breast and arms are ever warm,
For that I love ye as the wind the trees
That holds their blossoms and their leaves in cure
And calls the utmost singing from the boughs
That 'thout him, save the aspen, were as dumb
Still shade, and bade no whisper speak the birds of
how
"Beyond, beyond, beyond, there lies . . . "

Notes

*In Durance - The title alludes to a passage in Samuel Butler's "Hudibras" (II,i):
And though I'm now in durance fast,...
I'll make this low dejected fate
Advance me to a greater height.
A few years later, in "The Rest", Pound announced that he was no longer "in durance". "In Durance" belongs to the period when Pound was "stranded in a most Godforsakenest area of the Middle West and employed as an instructor in French and Spanish at Wabash College, Crawfordville, Indiana

**sell our pictures In Browning's "Pictor Ignotus" the speaker complains of the way in which art is debased by becoming a middle-class commodity:
These buy and sell our pictures, take and give,
Count them for garniture and household-stuff,
And where they live needs must our pictures live
And see their faces, listen to their prate,
Partakers of their daily pettiness...

*** life...flame: "To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life" (Pater, "The Renaissance (1888), "Conclusion").

**** Pound alludes here to Coleridge's essay "On the Principals of Genial Criticism": the Greeks called a beautiful object "kalon" quasi "kaloin", i.e., calling on the soul, which receives instantly, and welcomes it as something connatural" (p. 243). In "The Spirit of Romance" (1910) Pound says this epigram (adapted from Plato's "Cratulus", 416c) is "Coleridge's most magical definition of beauty" (p. 156). This allusion is made in a manner that prefigures the elliptical mode of the "Cantos".
Pound may have borrowed from the same essay by Coleridge the idea of dividing poetry "melopoeia, phanopoeia, and logopoeia.

(c)