John Sears first chose The Point, the Turning by Gregory Warren Wilson. It's in his collection Jeopardy, published by Enitharmon, but unfortunately nowhere on the internet at the moment.
So he kindly went on to pick a poem that we could all share, and also provided this commentary on it, for which I thank him very much indeed. I'm always grateful for any help I can get with Ezra Pound.
Thomas Ernest Hulme (1883-1917)
The Embankment
(The fantasia of a fallen gentleman on a cold, bitter night.)
Once, in finesse of fiddles found I ecstasy,
In the flash of gold heels on the hard pavement.
Now see I
That warmth’s the very stuff of poesy.
Oh, God, make small
The old star-eaten blanket of the sky,
That I may fold it round me and in comfort lie.
(from Ian Lancashire’s resource at http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem/1082.html)
Hulme’s poem, first published in January 1909, was one of The Complete Poetical Works of T E Hulme appended to Ezra Pound’s Ripostes (1915), which is where I first read it when I was a teenager, and it made much more sense to me then than Pound’s poetry did.
It’s a precursor of the Imagist style Pound will promote, a meticulously crafted poem that embeds in ‘small epiphanies’ and by implication an entire narrative on which the reader can speculate. It shifts from alliterative, Middle English patterning (all those labio-dental ‘fs’ in the italicized introduction and the opening line, returning in ‘fold’ and comfort’ at the end), through deliberate Keatsian archaisms (‘poesy’) and inverted word-order to facilitate rhyme, to an appeal in the last three lines that resonates harder when one knows that Hulme died at Neiuport in September 1917, after living what he described in a letter as ‘the most miserable existence you can conceive of’ in the trenches of the First World War.
The poem operates and achieves its effects with what seems to be a restricted sound palette, ‘cold’, ‘gold’, ‘old’ and ‘fold’ insisting throughout, three ‘Is’ asserting subjectivity, ‘small’ echoing ‘fallen’, ‘’found’ repeated in ‘round’. For all its imagistic force, other senses predominate: the conflicting tactility of the ‘hard pavement’ remembered and the ‘star-eaten blanket’ desired, and, at the centre, ‘warmth’, suggesting both heat and emotion.
It’s stayed with me for 25 years. Patrick McGuinness’s excellent edition of Hulme’s Selected Writings (Carcanet 1998) provides the essays and lectures, notes, poems and fragments needed to contextualize this remarkable little poem.
John Sears is the author of Reading George Szirtes (Bloodaxe, 2008)
http://www.bloodaxebooks.com/titlepage.asp?isbn=1852248149
The Embankment
(The fantasia of a fallen gentleman on a cold, bitter night.)
Once, in finesse of fiddles found I ecstasy,
In the flash of gold heels on the hard pavement.
Now see I
That warmth’s the very stuff of poesy.
Oh, God, make small
The old star-eaten blanket of the sky,
That I may fold it round me and in comfort lie.
(from Ian Lancashire’s resource at http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem/1082.html)
Hulme’s poem, first published in January 1909, was one of The Complete Poetical Works of T E Hulme appended to Ezra Pound’s Ripostes (1915), which is where I first read it when I was a teenager, and it made much more sense to me then than Pound’s poetry did.
It’s a precursor of the Imagist style Pound will promote, a meticulously crafted poem that embeds in ‘small epiphanies’ and by implication an entire narrative on which the reader can speculate. It shifts from alliterative, Middle English patterning (all those labio-dental ‘fs’ in the italicized introduction and the opening line, returning in ‘fold’ and comfort’ at the end), through deliberate Keatsian archaisms (‘poesy’) and inverted word-order to facilitate rhyme, to an appeal in the last three lines that resonates harder when one knows that Hulme died at Neiuport in September 1917, after living what he described in a letter as ‘the most miserable existence you can conceive of’ in the trenches of the First World War.
The poem operates and achieves its effects with what seems to be a restricted sound palette, ‘cold’, ‘gold’, ‘old’ and ‘fold’ insisting throughout, three ‘Is’ asserting subjectivity, ‘small’ echoing ‘fallen’, ‘’found’ repeated in ‘round’. For all its imagistic force, other senses predominate: the conflicting tactility of the ‘hard pavement’ remembered and the ‘star-eaten blanket’ desired, and, at the centre, ‘warmth’, suggesting both heat and emotion.
It’s stayed with me for 25 years. Patrick McGuinness’s excellent edition of Hulme’s Selected Writings (Carcanet 1998) provides the essays and lectures, notes, poems and fragments needed to contextualize this remarkable little poem.
John Sears is the author of Reading George Szirtes (Bloodaxe, 2008)
http://www.bloodaxebooks.com/titlepage.asp?isbn=1852248149
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.