The Tea Shop
The girl in the tea shop
Is not so beautiful as she was,
The August has worn against her.
She does not get up the stairs so eagerly;
Yes, she also will turn middle-aged,
And the glow of youth that she spread about us
As she brought us our muffins
Will be spread about us no longer.
She also will turn middle-aged.
In a Station of the Metro
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
petals on a wet, black bough.
Alba
As cool as the pale wet leaves
Tof lily-of-the-valley
She lay beside me in the dawn.
VORTEX - EZRA POUND
Introduction
Modernist poet Ezra Pound played a central role in the Imagist and Vorticist movements.
Vorticism, a pre–World War I movement led by British painter and writer Wyndham Lewis,
sought to capture the mechanical dynamism of its age as well as the stillness at its core.
While Vorticist art often emphasizes structural mass and a combination of movement and
central stillness through the use of thick borders and typographical inventiveness, Vorticist
poetry focuses on locating the movement and stillness within the image.
Pound is credited with coining the term Vorticism. His essay “Vortex” appeared in BLAST,
published by Lewis, in 1914. Here Pound emphasizes Vorticism’s relationship to motion,
noting, “The vortex is the point of maximum energy. It represents, in mechanics, the greatest
efficiency. We use the words ‘greatest efficiency’ in the precise sense—as they would be
used in a text book of MECHANICS.”
Despite continued advocacy from Pound, the Vorticist movement ended just three years
after it began, as World War I engaged many of the movement’s members and popular
support dwindled. In the 1920s and ’30s, Pound would continue to advance his poetic
theories beyond those expressed by him in “Vortex” and through the Vorticist movement.
VORTEX.
POUND.
______
The vortex is the point of maximum energy.
It represents, in mechanics, the greatest efficiency.
We use the words “greatest efficiency” in the precise sense—as they would be used in
a text book of MECHANICS.
You may think of man as that toward which perception moves. You may think of him as
the TOY of circumstance, as the plastic substance RECEIVING impressions.
OR you may think of him as DIRECTING a certain fluid force against circumstance, as
CONCEIVING instead of merely observing and reflecting.
THE PRIMARY PIGMENT.
The vorticist relies on this alone; on the primary pigment of his art, nothing else.
Every conception, every emotion presents itself to the vivid consciousness in some
primary form.
It is the picture that means a hundred poems, the music that means a hundred
pictures, the most highly energized statement, the statement that has not yet SPENT itself it
expression, but which is the most capable of expressing.
THE TURBINE.
All experience rushes into this vortex. All the energized past, all the past that is living
and worthy to live. All MOMENTUM, which is the past bearing upon us, RACE,
RACE-MEMORY, instinct charging the PLACID,
NON-ENERGIZED FUTURE.
The DESIGN of the future in the grip of the human vortex. All the past that is vital, all
the past that is capable of living into the future, is pregnant in the vortex, NOW.
Hedonism is the vacant place of a vortex, without force, deprived of past and of future,
the vertex of a small spool or cone.
Futurism is the disgorging spray of a vortex with no drive behind it, DISPERSAL.
EVERY CONCEPT, EVERY EMOTION PRESENTS ITSELF TO THE VIVID
CONSCIOUSNESS IN SOME PRIMARY FORM. IT BELONGS TO THE ART OF THIS
FORM. IF SOUND, TO MUSIC; IF FORMED WORDS, TO LITERATURE; THE IMAGE, TO
POETRY; FORM, TO DESIGN; COLOUR IN POSITION, TO PAINTING; FORM OR DESIGN
IN THREE PLANES, TO SCULPTURE; MOVEMENT TO THE DANCE OR TO THE
RHYTHM OF MUSIC OR OF VERSES.
Elaboration, expression of second intensities, of dispersedness belong to the
secondary sort of artist. Dispersed arts HAD a vortex.
Impressionism, Futurism, which is only an accelerated sort of impressionism, DENY
the vortex. They are the CORPSES of VORTICES. POPULAR BELIEFS, movements, etc.,
are the CORPSES OF VORTICES. Marinetti is a corpse.
THE MAN.
The vorticist relies not upon similarity or analogy, not upon likeness or mimcry.
In painting he does not rely upon the likeness to a beloved grandmother or to a
caressable mistree.
VORTICISM is art before it has spread itself into a state of flacidity, of elaboration, of
secondary applications.
ANCESTRY.
“All arts approach the conditions of music.”—Pater.
“An Image is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of
time.”—Pound.
“You are interested in a certain painting because it is an arrangement of lines and
colours.”—Whistler.
Picasso, Kandinski, father and mother, classicism and romanticism of the of the
movement.
POETRY.
The vorticist will use only the primary media of his art.
The primary pigment of poetry is the IMAGE.
The vorticist will not allow the primary expression of any concept or emotion to drag
itself out into mimicry.
In painting Kandinski, Picasso.
In poetry this by, “H. D.”
Whirl up sea —
Whirl your pointed pines,
Splash your great pines
On our rocks,
Hurl your green over us,
Cover us with your pools of fir.
Canto I
BY EZRA POUND
And then went down to the ship,
Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and
We set up mast and sail on that swart ship,
Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also
Heavy with weeping, and winds from sternward
Bore us out onward with bellying canvas,
Circe’s this craft, the trim-coifed goddess.
Then sat we amidships, wind jamming the tiller,
Thus with stretched sail, we went over sea till day’s end.
Sun to his slumber, shadows o’er all the ocean,
Came we then to the bounds of deepest water,
To the Kimmerian lands, and peopled cities
Covered with close-webbed mist, unpierced ever
With glitter of sun-rays
Nor with stars stretched, nor looking back from heaven
Swartest night stretched over wretched men there.
The ocean flowing backward, came we then to the place
Aforesaid by Circe.
Here did they rites, Perimedes and Eurylochus,
And drawing sword from my hip
I dug the ell-square pitkin;
Poured we libations unto each the dead,
First mead and then sweet wine, water mixed with white flour.
Then prayed I many a prayer to the sickly death’s-heads;
As set in Ithaca, sterile bulls of the best
For sacrifice, heaping the pyre with goods,
A sheep to Tiresias only, black and a bell-sheep.
Dark blood flowed in the fosse,
Souls out of Erebus, cadaverous dead, of brides
Of youths and of the old who had borne much;
Souls stained with recent tears, girls tender,
Men many, mauled with bronze lance heads,
Battle spoil, bearing yet dreory arms,
These many crowded about me; with shouting,
Pallor upon me, cried to my men for more beasts;
Slaughtered the herds, sheep slain of bronze;
Poured ointment, cried to the gods,
To Pluto the strong, and praised Proserpine;
Unsheathed the narrow sword,
I sat to keep off the impetuous impotent dead,
Till I should hear Tiresias.
But first Elpenor came, our friend Elpenor,
Unburied, cast on the wide earth,
Limbs that we left in the house of Circe,
Unwept, unwrapped in sepulchre, since toils urged other.
Pitiful spirit. And I cried in hurried speech:
“Elpenor, how art thou come to this dark coast?
“Cam’st thou afoot, outstripping seamen?”
And he in heavy speech:
“Ill fate and abundant wine. I slept in Circe’s ingle.
“Going down the long ladder unguarded,
“I fell against the buttress,
“Shattered the nape-nerve, the soul sought Avernus.
“But thou, O King, I bid remember me, unwept, unburied,
“Heap up mine arms, be tomb by sea-bord, and inscribed:
“A man of no fortune, and with a name to come.
“And set my oar up, that I swung mid fellows.”
And Anticlea came, whom I beat off, and then Tiresias Theban,
Holding his golden wand, knew me, and spoke first:
“A second time? why? man of ill star,
“Facing the sunless dead and this joyless region?
“Stand from the fosse, leave me my bloody bever
“For soothsay.”
And I stepped back,
And he strong with the blood, said then: “Odysseus
“Shalt return through spiteful Neptune, over dark seas,
“Lose all companions.” And then Anticlea came.
Lie quiet Divus. I mean, that is Andreas Divus,
In officina Wecheli, 1538, out of Homer.
And he sailed, by Sirens and thence outward and away
And unto Circe.
Venerandam,
In the Cretan’s phrase, with the golden crown, Aphrodite,
Cypri munimenta sortita est, mirthful, orichalchi, with golden
Girdles and breast bands, thou with dark eyelids
Bearing the golden bough of Argicida. So that:
Canto III
BY EZRA POUND
I sat on the Dogana’s steps
For the gondolas cost too much, that year,
And there were not “those girls”, there was one face,
And the Buccentoro twenty yards off, howling, “Stretti”,
And the lit cross-beams, that year, in the Morosini,
And peacocks in Koré’s house, or there may have been.
Gods float in the azure air,
Bright gods and Tuscan, back before dew was shed.
Light: and the first light, before ever dew was fallen.
Panisks, and from the oak, dryas,
And from the apple, mælid,
Through all the wood, and the leaves are full of voices,
A-whisper, and the clouds bowe over the lake,
And there are gods upon them,
And in the water, the almond-white swimmers,
The silvery water glazes the upturned nipple,
As Poggio has remarked.
Green veins in the turquoise,
Or, the gray steps lead up under the cedars.
My Cid rode up to Burgos,
Up to the studded gate between two towers,
Beat with his lance butt, and the child came out,
Una niña de nueve años,
To the little gallery over the gate, between the towers,
Reading the writ, voce tinnula:
That no man speak to, feed, help Ruy Diaz,
On pain to have his heart out, set on a pike spike
And both his eyes torn out, and all his goods sequestered,
“And here, Myo Cid, are the seals,
The big seal and the writing.”
And he came down from Bivar, Myo Cid,
With no hawks left there on their perches,
And no clothes there in the presses,
And left his trunk with Raquel and Vidas,
That big box of sand, with the pawn-brokers,
To get pay for his menie;
Breaking his way to Valencia.
Ignez de Castro murdered, and a wall
Here stripped, here made to stand.
Drear waste, the pigment flakes from the stone,
Or plaster flakes, Mantegna painted the wall.
Silk tatters, “Nec Spe Nec Metu.”