[Lika_k]

Ezra Pound
Collected Shorter Poems (Faber and Faber, 1973)
Famam Librosque Cano*
Your songs?
Oh! The little mothers
Will sing them in the twilight,
And when the night
Shrinketh the kiss of the dawn
That loves and kills,
What time the swallow fills
Here note, the little rabbit folk
That some call children,
Such as are up and wide,
Will laugh your verses to each other,
Pulling on their shoes for the day's business,
Serious child business that the world
Laughs at, and grows stale;
Such is the tale
-Part of it-of thy song-life.

Mine?

A book is known by them that read
That same. Thy public in my screed
Is listed. Well! Some score years hence
Behold mine audience,
As we had seen him yesterday.

Scrawny, be-spectacled, out at heels,
Such an one as the world feels
A sort of curse against its guzzling
And its age-lasting wallow for red greed
And yet; full speed
Though it should run for its own getting,
Will turn aside to sneer at
'Cause he hath
No coin, no will to snatch the aftermath
Of Mammon
Such an one as women draw away from
For the tobacco ashes scattered on his coat
And sith his throat
Show's razor's unfamiliarity
And three days' beard;

Such an one picking a ragged
Backless copy from the stall,
Too cheap for cataloguing,
Loquitur,

'Ah-eh! the strange rare name . . .
Ah-eh! He must be rare if even I have not . . .’
And lost mid-page
Such age
As his pardons the habit,
He analyses form and thought to see
How I 'scaped immortality.

*Famam Librosque Cano - The Latin title (I sing of fme and books) parodies the opening line of Virgile's "Aeneid": "Arma virumque cano" (Arms I sing and the man" (Loeb), a phrase given a fresh currency after the production of G.B. Shaw's "Arms and the Man" (1894) (c)

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