Heart Play

          Ezra Loomis Pound 1885-1972

                "THE AGE DEMANDED"

                      Vide Poem II. Page 188

      1.1       For this agility chance found

      1.2       Him of all men, unfit

      1.3       As the red-beaked steeds of

      1.4       The Cytheræan for a chain bit




      2.1       The glow of porcelain

      2.2       Brought no reforming sense

      2.3       To his perception

      2.4       Of the social inconsequence.




      3.1       Thus, if her colour

      3.2       Came against his gaze,

      3.3       Tempered as if

      3.4       It were through a perfect glaze





      4.1       He made no immediate application

      4.2       Of this to relation of the state

      4.3       To the individual, the month was more temperate

      4.4       Because this beauty had been.




      5.1           
           The coral isle, the lion-coloured sand

      5.2           
           Burst in upon the porcelain revery:

      5.3           
           Impetuous troubling

      5.4           
           Of his imagery.




      6.1       Mildness, amid the neo-Nietzschaen clatter,

      6.2       His sense of graduations,

      6.3       Quite out of place amid

      6.4       Resistance to current exacerbations,




      7.1       Invitation, mere invitation to perceptivity

      7.2       Gradually led him to the isolation

      7.3       Which these presents place

      7.4       Under a more tolerant, perhaps, examination.




      8.1       By constant elimination

      8.2       The manifest universe

      8.3       Yielded an armour

      8.4       Against utter consternation,




      9.1       A Minoan undulation,

      9.2       Seen, we admit, amid ambrosial circumstances,

      9.3       Strengthened him against

      9.4       The discouraging doctrine of chances,




      10.1       And his desire for survival,

      10.2       Faint in the most strenuous moods,

      10.3       Became an Olympian apathein

      10.4       In the presence of selected perceptions.




      11.1       A pale gold, in the aforesaid pattern,

      11.2       The unexpected palms

      11.3       Destroying, certainly, the artist's urge

      11.4       Left him delighted with the imaginary

      11.5       Audition of the phantasmal sea-surge,




      12.1       Incapable of the least utterance or composition,

      12.2       Emendation, conservation of the "better tradition,"

      12.3       Refinement of medium, elimination of superfluities,

      12.4       August attraction or concentration.




      13.1       Nothing, in brief, but maudlin confession,

      13.2       Irresponse to human aggression,

      13.3       Amid the precipitation, down-float

      13.4       Of insubstantial manna,

      13.5       Lifting the faint susurrus

      13.6       Of his subjective hossannah.




      14.1       Ultimate affronts to

      14.2       Human redundancies;




      15.1       Non-esteem of self-styled "his betters"

      15.2       Leading, as he well knew,

      15.3       To his final

      15.4       Exclusion from the world of letters.

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Notes

1.2 H. S. Mauberley: the name of a fictitious poet of limited ability contemporary with Pound.

Greek Legend