The Seventh Canto

Eleanor (she spoiled in a British climate)

‘Eλανδρος and Eλέπτολις, and poor old Homer

blind, blind as a bat,

Ear, ear for the sea-surge—; rattle of old men’s voices;

And then the phantom Rome, marble narrow for seats

“Si pulvis nullus. . . .”

In chatter above the circus, “Nullum excute tamen.”

Then: tile and candles, e li mestiers ecoutes;

Scene—for the battle only,—but still scene,

Pennons and standards y cavals armatz,

Not mere succession of strokes, sightless narration,

To Dante’s “ciocco,” the brand struck in the game.

Un peu moisi, plancher plus bas que le jardin.

Contre le lambris, fauteuil de paille,

Un vieux piano, et sous le barométre . . .

The old men’s voices—beneath the columns of false marble

And the walls tinted discreet, the modish, darkish green-blue,

Discreeter gilding, and the panelled wood

Not present, but suggested, for the leasehold is

Touched with an imprecision . . . about three squares;

The house a shade too solid, and the art

A shade off action, paintings a shade too thick.

And the great domed head, con gli occhi onesti e tardi

Moves before me, phantom with weighted motion,

Grave incessu, drinking the tone of things,

And the old voice lifts itself

weaving an endless sentence.

We also made ghostly visits, and the stair

That knew us, found us again on the turn of it,

Knocking at empty rooms, seeking a buried beauty;

And the sun-tanned gracious and well-formed lingers

Lift no latch of bent bronze, no Empire Handle

Twists for the knocker’s fall; no voice to answer.

A strange concierge, in place of the gouty-footed.

Sceptic against all this one seeks the living,

Stubborn against the fact. The wilted flowers

Brushed out a seven year since, of no ehect.

Damn the partition! Paper, dark brown and stretched,

Flimsy and damned partition.

Ione, dead the long year,

My lintel, and Liu Ch’e’s lintel.

Time blacked out with the rubber.

The Elysée carries a name on

And the bus behind me gives me a date for peg;

Low ceiling and the Erard and silver,

These are in “time.” Four chairs, the bow-front dresser

The pannier of the desk, cloth top sunk in.

“Beer-bottle on the statue’s pediment!

“That, Fritz, is the era, to-day against the past,

“Contemporary.” And the passion endures.

Against their action, aromas; rooms, against chronicles.

Smaragdos, chrysolitos, De Gama wore striped pants in Africa

And “Mountains of the sea gave birth to troops,”

Le Vieux commode en acajou:

beer bottles of various strata.

But is she as dead as Tyro? In seven years?

Ἑλέναυς, ἑλανδρος, ἑλέπτολις,

The sea runs in the beach-groove, shaking the floated pebbles

Eleanor!

The scarlet curtain throws a less scarlet shadow;

Lamplight at Buovilla, e quel remir,

And all that day

Nicea moved before me

And the cold gray air troubled her not

For all her naked beauty, bit not the tropic skin,

And the long slender feet lit on the curb's marge

And her moving height went before me,

We alone having being.

And all that day, another day:

Thin husks I had known as men,

Dry casques of departed locusts

speaking a shell of speecn . . .

Propped between chairs and table . . .

Words like the locust-shells, moved by no inner being,

A dryness calling for death.

Another day, between walls of a sham Mycenian,

“Toc” sphinxes, sham-Memphis columns,

And beneath the jazz a cortex, a stiffness or stillness,

The older shell, varnished to lemon colour,

Brown-yellow wood, and the no colour plaster,

Dry professorial talk . . .

now stilling the ill beat music,

House expulsed by this house, but not extinguished.

Square even shoulders and the satin skin,

Gone cheeks of the dancing woman,

Still the old dead dry talk, gassed out

It is ten years gone, makes stiff about her a glass,

A petrification of air.

The old room of the tawdry class asserts itself.

The young men, never!

Only the husk of talk.

O voi che siete in piccioletta barca,

Dido choked up with sobs for her Sicheus

Lies heavy, in my arms, dead weight

Drowning with tears, new Eros,

And the life goes on, mooning upon bare hills;

Flame leaps from the hand, the rain is listless,

Yet drinks the thirst from our lips,

solid as echo,

100

Passion to breed a form in shimmer of rain-blurr;

But Eros drowned, drowned, heavy-half dead with tears

For dead Sicheus.

Life to make mock of motion:

For the husks, before me, move,

105

The words rattle: shells given out by shells.

The live man, out of lands and prisons,

shakes the dry pods,

Probes for old wills and friendships, and the big locust-casques

Bend to the tawdry table,

110

Lift up their spoons to mouths, put forks in cutlets,

And make sound like the sound of voices.

Lorenzaccio

Being more live than they, more full of flames and voices.

Ma si morisse!

115

Credesse caduto da se, ma si morisse.

And the tall indifference moves,

a more living shell,

Drift in the air of fate, dry phantom, but intact,

O Alessandro, chief and thrice warned, watcher,

120

Eternal watcher of things,

Of things, of men, of passions.

Eyes floating in dry, dark air;

E biondo, with glass-gray iris, with an even side-fall of hair

The stiff, still features.

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—
Ezra Pound

Poems 1918-21, 1921