Alf’s Eighth Bit - Ezra Pound

Vex not thou the banker's mind
(His what?) with a show of sense,
Vex it not, Willie, his mind,
Or pierce its pretence
On the supposition that it ever
Was other, or that this cheerful giver
Will give, save to the blind.

Come not anear the dark-browed sophist
Who on the so well-paid ground
Will cheerfully tell you a fist is no fist,
Come not here
With 2 and 2 making 4 in reason,
Knowest thou not the truth is never in season
In these quarters or Fleet St.?

In his eye there is death, I mean the banker's,
In his purse there is deceit,
It is he who buys gold-braid for the swankers
And gives you Australian iced rabbits' meat
In place of the roast beef of Britain,
And leaves you a park bench to sit on
If you git off the Embankment.

This is the kind of tone and Solemnity
That used to be used on the young,
My old man got no indemnity
But he swaller'd his tongue.
Like all his class was told to hold it in those days,
To mind their ‘p’s’ and their ‘q’s’ and their ways
An' be thankful for occasional holidays.

I don't quite see the joke any more,
Or why we should stand to attention
And lick the dirt off the floor
In the hope of honourable mention
From a great employer like Selfridge
Or a buyer of space in the papers.
I'm getting too old for such capers.


Ezra Pound

Albatre - Ezra Pound

This lady in the white bath-robe which she calls a
peignoir,
Is, for the time being, the mistress of my friend,
And the delicate white feet of her little white dog
Are not more delicate than she is,
Nor would Gautier himself have despised their contrasts
in whiteness
As she sits in the great chair
Between the two indolent candles.


Ezra Pound

Alba - Ezra Pound

As cool as the pale wet leaves
Tof lily-of-the-valley
She lay beside me in the dawn.


Ezra Pound

A Virginal - Ezra Pound

No, no! Go from me. I have left her lately.
I will not spoil my sheath with lesser brightness,
For my surrounding air hath a new lightness;
Slight are her arms, yet they have bound me straitly
And left me cloaked as with a gauze of aether;
As with sweet leaves; as with subtle clearness.
Oh, I have picked up magic in her nearness
To sheathe me half in half the things that sheathe her.
No, no! Go from me. I have still the flavour,
Soft as spring wind that's come from birchen bowers.
Green come the shoots, aye April in the branches,
As winter's wound with her sleight hand she staunches,
Hath of the trees a likeness of the savour:
As white their bark, so white this lady's hours.


Ezra Pound

A Villonaud: Ballad Of The Gibbet - Ezra Pound

SCENE: 'En ce bourdel ou tenons nostre estat.'

It being remembered that there were six of us with Master Villon, when
that expecting presently lo be hanged he writ a ballad whereof ye know:

‘Freres humains qui apres nous vivez.'

Drink ye a skoal for the gallows tree!
Francois and Margot and thee and me,
Drink we the comrades merrily
That said us, 'Till then' for the gallows tree!

Fat Pierre with the hook gauche-main,
Thomas Larron 'Ear-the-less',
Tybalde and that armouress
Who gave this poignard its premier stain
Pinning the Guise that had been fain
To make him a mate of the 'Haulte Noblesse'
And bade her be out with ill address
As a fool that mocketh his drue's disdeign.

Drink we a skoal for the gallows tree!
Francois and Margot and thee and me,
Drink we to Marienne Ydole,
That hell brenn not her o'er cruelly.

Drink we the lusty robbers twain,
Black is the pitch o' their wedding dress,
Lips shrunk back for the wind's caress
As lips shrink back when we feel the strain

Of love that loveth in hell's disdeign,
And sense the teeth through the lips that press
'Gainst our lips for the soul's distress
That striveth to ours across the pain.

Drink we skoal to the gallows tree!
Francois and Margot and thee and me,
For Jehan and Raoul de Vallerie
Whose frames have the night and its winds in fee.

Maturin, Guillaume, Jacques d'Allmain,
Culdou lacking a coat to bless
One lean moiety of his nakedness
That plundered St. Hubert back o' the fane:
Aie! the lean bare tree is widowed again
For Michault le Borgne that would confess
In 'faith and troth' to a traitoress,
'Which of his brothers had he slain?'

But drink we skoal to the gallows tree!
Francois and Margot and thee and me:

These that we loved shall God love less
And smite always at their faibleness?

Skoal!! to the gallows! and then pray we:
God damn his hell out speedily
And bring their souls to his 'Haulte Citee'.


Ezra Pound