The Garden by Ezra Pound
“En robe de parade.” Samain.
Like a skein of loose silk blown against a wall
She walks by the railing of a path in Kensington Gardens,
And she is dying piece-meal
of a sort of emotional anemia.
And round about there is a rabble
Of the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor.
They shall inherit the earth.
In her is the end of breeding.
Her boredom is exquisite and excessive.
She would like someone to speak to her,
And is almost afraid that I
will commit that indiscretion.
Dear Friends,
“Like a skein of loose silk blown against a wall”: a patch of color blown hither and thither by the wind, blown hither and thither without direction of its own, she has reached a limit. She cannot transcend this limit to touch what is real, cannot go on the grass — so she is dying, of an anemia not of the body, but the heart.
“Like a skein of loose silk”: hear the S sounds, and their contrast with the O of “blown”. And in the first three lines, hear the classic rhythm: as in the poetry of France, six beats to the line, with a caesura after the third. Pound feels the beats, but does not count the syllables; he is writing accent verse, not metric. Nonetheless, the writing has a spine; it is not “free” — the words emerge like branches on a vine.
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