CHAPTER V

H u g h Se l w y n M a u b e r l e y
 HUGH SELWYN MAUBERLEY1

Hugh Selwyn Mauberley is a set of eighteen short poems having four

hundred lines altogether. This poem marks a crucial turning point in Pound s

career. It is a farewell to the aestheticism which played a large part in his

poetic experiments up to this time (i.e. 1920) in London. In the volume of

Collected Shorter Poems (1926), it is written in the title page:

The sequence is so distinctly a farewell to London that

the reader who chooses to regard this as an exclusively
American edition may as well omit i t ...

The poem is also an ironic and bitter indictment of modem society. In spite of

Pound's insistence on objectivity in poetry, the poem is autobiographical. It is

quite significant that Pound added a sub-title, 'Life and Contacts' for the

poem. This life and these contacts were partly his own life and contacts. One

of the most significant facts on Hugh Selwyn Mauberley is that many readers

who come across this poem after reading Eliot's The Waste Land, often make

comparison of the poems. An ironic and bitter indictment of the modern

society is common to both, with an abundance of unacknowledged

quotations from the poets of the past, which are interlarded with various

In consideration of the space problems, the full text o f the poem is not printed as other shorter Imagist poems.
However, relevant passages and stanzas from the poem are quoted frequently.

H/ra Pound , Collected Shorter Poems. (1926, rpt., London : Faber and Faber, 1971) p. 185.
indirect references and allusions to different myths, legends and works.

Pound also did not care to provide any clues to the readers who do not

happen to know what he knows. It is, therefore, quite natural that many

critics and readers are caught in the terrible tangles while interpreting the

poem. Hugh Kenner wrote:

Mauberley, that is, is a tricky poem. It is difficult for men

of a certain training not to misread it subtly, to select
from its elements certain strings that reverberate to an
Eliotic tuning fork.

Although the poem has been commended in literary circles by

eminent critics including Eliot and Lea vis, the echo of the 'Eliotic tuning fork'

perhaps led the general readers to too much expectations out of it. Even some

regard it as a confession of failure as the other poem, The Waste Land. But it

is a mistaken overreaction on the success of the poem.

The poem is undoubtedly one of the most successful poems of Pound,

and though it is not regarded as an Imagist poem in its strictest sense, the

Imagist elements of the poem which contributed enormously to its success

can not simply be ignored. It is pertinent, therefore, to make an attempt to

analyse the poem in the Imagist polemics in order to illustrate the validity of

Imagism in modern poetry.

Hugh Kenner, The Poetry o f Ezra Pound (Norfolk, C o n n .: New Directions, 1974) p. 165.
 When Mauberley first appeared in 1920, Times Literary Supplement

described it as an 'esoteric volume' and 'needlessly obscure' and concluded

'As they are, they had a mathematical charm'.4 But Yeats wrote that the first

section had 'an extraordinary distinction and an utterly new music and that

the second section had 'lovely lines'. At the first reading, the poem seems to

reflect Pound's Imagist techniques of "poetry as inspired mathematics" and

the beautiful language, crafted in the Imagist principles. Pound created a

series of images and superimposed them against one another to give an

impression of 'image becoming the speech'. F.R. Leavis, in N ew Bearings in

English Poetry writes :

In Mauberley we feel a pressure of experience, an

impulsion from deep within. The verse is extraordinarily
subtle, and its subtlety is the subtlety of the sensibility
that it expresses. No one would think here of
distinguishing the way of saying from the thing said.5

Pound ridiculed and criticised the society of his time in which he lived

and worked. And his very personal and even private experiences are

reflected throughout the poem. The poem can be fully understood only when

one has become acquainted with Pound's associations with the people of his

time, his friends, the history of the period, and has read what Pound himself

Eric Homberger ed.. The Critical Heritage, (London : Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972) p. 194.

F.R. Leavis, ‘from New Bearings in English Poetry’, Ezra Pound : A Critical Anthology, ed., J.P. Sullivan
(Harmondsworth : Penguin Books, 1970) p. 123.
 224

had read and also willing to learn and recognise all sorts of archaic literary

allusions. Hugh Selwyn Mauberley is, of course, much more than a highly

personal document, but it is at the least that.6

The complexity of the poem can be accounted to the tension that exists

between Pound's own dejection and the problems of modern civilization.

Pound has directed his ironies equally at his own misconceived attempts to

'resuscitate the dead art of poetry' and at the social values which provided

the artist, 'No adjunct to the Muses' diadem'. There is a general tendency of

the readers to imagine that if Pound is criticising the modern world, he must

be vindicating the artist, or vice versa. But it is very confusing to decide the

exact position of Pound in this regard. Trying to interpret the poem on such a

line will only make the issue more complicated. Because Pound was

simultaneously creating an image of his own failures and that of the society.

It was the need of the time. He wrote:

The age demanded an image

Of its accelerated grimace,
Something for the modem stage,
Not, at any rate, an Attic grace;

Pound is not abandoning his ideal of art ; but he is keeping it in ironic

contrast to the products of modern culture in the poem which is an attempt to

come to terms with the situation of his times. Christine Froula wrote :

6 Cleanth Brooks, R .W .B . Lewis, Robert Penn Warren, American Literature : The M akers and the Making (New
York : St. Martin’s Press, 1973) p.2064.
 225

He (Pound) does not value his own or Mauberley s

aestheticist productions, which only affirm the social
irrelevance of art; but at the same time he neither denies
nor approves a society whose authentic art is on the
order of the "prose kinema" and the "mould in plaster".

Hugh Selwyn Mauberley is divided into two parts. The sequence of

the first thirteen poems constitute the Part-I. The remaining five poems are in

Part-II. The first part opens with a funerary ode of E.P. (Ezra Pound), a

mock-burial, followed by eleven London vignettes and concludes with an

'Envoi' or send-off, for the whole. The second part, subtitled 'Mauberley'

depicts the character, career and fate of this fictional aesthete in the first four

poems and closes with 'Medallion', an example of Mauberley's art.

Pound himself has said that Hugh Selwyn Mauberley originated as an

attempt to repeat the 'message' of one of his earlier poems, Homage to Sextus

Propertius:

Propertius is related to ANY empire declining onto the

shit pile. When even tolerably intelligent people couldn't
• understand THAT, I did the Mauberley, all on top ; or at
least external details modern.8

Commenting on the relationship between the two poems, Noel Stock wrote :

7Christine Froula, A Guide to Ezra Pound’s Selected Poems (Norfolk, C on n.: New Directions. 1983) p.79.

8 Quoted in Humphrey Carpenter, A Serious C haracter , p. 79.

 PARTI

The ep ig rap h o f th e p o em , Vo ca t aestus in umbram is a q uotation from

a conventional pastoral poem in Latin written by Nemesianus and has been

translated : 'The heat calls (us) into the shade'.10 Though no obvious reason

for Pound's choosing it as an epigraph for the poem can be ascertained, it

may be related to his preparation to leave London, the literary capital of the

world of English letters. In Pound's view the city was not in order, and in a

sense it was full of heat. As the original writer of this epigraph felt, Pound

wanted to retire into shade and obscurity.11 This epigraph serves as the key

to the whole sequence of the poem. The title of the poem 'E.P. Ode Pour

L'election De Son Sepulchre' (Ezra Pound's Ode for the Selection of his
12
Tomb) is also important as it differentiates Pound from Mauberley.

In the first section of the poem Pound writes about himself as he feels

he must have appeared to the London literary world : Wrong-headed,

obstinate, and a failure — 'wrong from the start'. Pound uses the speech-type

rhythms and the quatrain stanza pattern. The form of the poem becomes

fairly tight and it establishes an equilibrium by setting emphases and figures,

10 Cleanth Brooks, R.W .B. Lewis, Robert Penn Warren, American Literature : The Makers and the Making (New
York : St. Martin’s Press, 1973) p.2079.

" As Pound came from America and lived in London, Nemesianus though in writes in Latin came not from
Rome but from the provincial city o f Carthege.

12 Pound adapted his title from an ode of Ronsard's ‘De 1 ‘Election de son Sepulchre' and built in a pun on
‘epode’ which refers to the concluding section o f a Greek lyric ode, following the strophe couplet Christine
Froula, Guide, p.82.
 22X

neither being able to overcome the other, but one against the other to

maintain a constant tension.13 The technique, thus, becomes Imagistic.

For three years, out of key with his time.

He strove to resuscitate the dead art
Of poetry, to maintain “The sublime”
In the old sense. Wrong from the start.

Noel Stock writes:

The run-over from the second to the third line does not
disrupt the form; it does justice to both the natural fall of
the words and the forms simultaneously. The second
run-over is different from the first:

to maintain “The Sublime”

In the old sense, Wrong from the start

Noel Stock has further to say on the Imagist interpretation of the quatrain as

follows:

As recorded in the ear the "art" of the first includes an

almost imperceptible pause, followed by a quick leap to
the words "Of Poetry". Almost like the springboard
. being forced down and then let go. With 'sublime', on
the other hand, the ear records a long and smooth
diminuendo, followed by a graceful scooping up of the
phrase 'In the old sense', which is needly deposited to

13 Noel Stock. The Life o f Ezra Pound, p.231.

 22‘
)

rest. The phrase 'Wrong from the start —' completes the

quatrain.14

Christine Froula is of the opinion that Ezra Pound has used the quatrain

stanza of the English version of Theophile Gautier's Emaux et Camees

(1852). Pound also said :

The metre in Mauberley'is Gautier and Bion's Adonis, or

at least those are the two grafts I was trying to flavour it
with. Syncopation from the Greek; and a general distaste
for the slushiness and swishiness of the post-
Swinburnian British line (Cf. Dante's remarks in
D.V.E.)15

In the next quatrain, Pound destroys the traditional cadence and it is

followed by several lines of syncopation and counter-rhythm. He

successfully explored the possibilities of language in the Imagist line in

parodying his own aestheticism. He was born in a 'half savage country' (i.e.

America) and soon became 'out of date'. In 1912, Pound remarked ironically

of his early poems :

You were praised my books,

because I had just come from the country;
I was twenty years behind the times
so you found an audience ready.

[Salutation the Second]16

14 Noel Stock. The Life o f Ezra Pound, p.231.

15 Ezra Pound, Selected Letters. ed„ D.D. Paige (1950 rpt.. London : Faber and Faber, 1982) p. 181.

16 Ezra Pound, Selected Poems (1926 rpt, London : Faber and Faber, 1975) p.42.
 230

Now Pound reassesses his works and finds that he had succumbed to the

siren song of 'Literature'. His early poetics was a literary one, modelled on

art and not on life. The imaginary funeral marks a break between the early

career and the later one. The old aesthete having been buried, a reborn E.P.

begins his most important work. But Pound remembers with nostalgia his

unfruitful attempt of the past:

Bent resolutely on wringing lilies from the acorn;

Capaneus; trout for factitious bait:

The image of breeding lilies from oak trees signifies the useless efforts of

Pound trying to promote art in a hostile environment. Earlier, Pound wrote

about the integrity of ideas and emotions in his essay, 'The Serious Artist':

... ideas, or fragments of ideas, the emotion and

concomitant emotions of this 'Intellectual and Emotional
Complex' (for we have come to the intellectual and
emotional complex) must be in harmony, they must form
an organism, they must be an oak sprung from an
17
acorn.

Capaneus, who figures in the Greek story 'Seven against Thebes' and whose

story is told in Aeschylus' play of that title and Euripides' The Suppliants,

seeking to help Polyneices take Thebes from his brother Eteocles, boasted

that not even Zeus could stop him from taking the city. But Zeus killed him

17 Ezra Pound, Literary Essays. ed„ T .S . Eliot, (1954 rpt., London : Faber and Faber. 1968) p.51.
with a thunderbolt. Dante put him in the seventh circle of Hell as one of

those 'violent against God' {Inferno, Canto 16). Pound again likens himself to

Capaneus, defiant in defeat in Canto LXXIX.

The next quatrain of the poem begins with a line in Greek which is

translated, 'for we know all things that (are) in Troy' and is taken from the

Odyssey (Bk. XII, line 189). It is the song of the Sirens who tried to lure

Odysseus into their power.18

His true Penelope was Flaubert,

He fished by obstinate isles ;
Observed the elegance of Circe’s hair
Rather than the mottoes on sun-dials.

In this stanza and the next, Pound is compared to Odysseus trying to get

back to Troy, to his home in Ithaca and his faithful wife, Penelope. One of the

adventures of Odysseus was with the goddess Circe. But the goal towards

which Pound, the poet strives (comparable to Odysseus' Penelope) is Gustave

Flaubert, the great French novelist who insisted on achieving perfection in his

art. Flaubert was greatly admired by Pound for his advocacy of le m ot juste

— the precise word. It influenced Pound's Imagist reform of the 'Slush'

which had infected the poetic language. Odysseus took ten years getting back

to Penelope, after having been detained by the goddess Circe19 and other

18 This is the first line o f the song that the dangerous Sirens sing to Odysseus, as he sails by strapped to the mast
of is ship so as not to give himself up to that fatally alluring song. His crewmen were oblivious to the song tor
he had plugged their ears with bees wax.

19 Circe in the Odyssey is a formidable seducer.

 232

adventures ; and Pound here implies that E.P. lingered too long by the

obstinate British isles.

Unaffected by “the march of events”,

He passed from men’s memory in Van trenluniesme
De son eage ; the case presents
No adjunct to the Muses’ diadem.

In the last stanza of the first section, Pound places the phrase the

march of events' in quotation marks. Because it is a well-known cliche, which

Pound disclaimed. He had written to Harriet Monroe regarding the

uselessness of cliche:

There must be no cliches, set phrases, stereotyped

journalese. The only escape from such is by precision, a
result of concentrated attention to what is writing. The
test of a writer is his ability for such concentration AND
for his power to stay concentrated till he gets to the end
20
of his poem, whether it is two lines or two hundred.

French words, l'an trentuniesme and De son eage meaning 'the thirty-first

year of his age' is adapted by Pound from the great medieval poet Francis

Villon's Grand Testament, the first line of which reads 'thirtieth year of [his]

age [he] had drunk all [his] shames'.21 Pound was 31 years old in 1916. The

20Ezra Pound, Selected Letters, p.49.

21 Cleanth Brooks, R .W .B . Lewis. Robert Penn Warren, American Literature : The M akers and the Making
p.2079.
fact that Pound exits under the aegis of Villon is significant. Pound wrote in

his ABC o f Reading:

Villon, the first voice of man ... represents also the end of
a tradition, the end of the medieval dream, the end of a
whole body of knowledge, fine subtle,.... that had lain in
22
the secret mind of Europe for centuries.

As Villon signifies the end of an era, Pound's earlier attempt to write hard

and pure poetry also ended under hostile circumstances which gave No

adjunct to the Muses' diadem. The 'Ode' thus ends in an enigmatic irony that

partially appeals the case of E.P., and it leads into the second poem, which

treats the failure of the age.

The age demanded an image

Of its accelerated grimace,
Something for the modem stage,
Not, at any rate, an Attic grace;

In the second poem, Pound, having buried his past, now portrays the

antipathy of his age to serious art. According to Hugh Kenner the eleven

poems starting from it (II-XII) present an ideogrammic survey of the cultural

* 23
state of post-war England. Pound ironically answers the age's demand for

'an image/of its accelerated grimace' with a brilliant caricature of the poem

‘2 Ezra Pound, ABC o f Reading (London : Faber and Faber, 1963) p. 104

23 Hugh Kenner, The Poetry o f Ezra Pound (Norfolk : Conn. New Directions, 1974) p. 164
 234

itself. Pound referred to the Futurist movement as a kind of accelerated

impressionism and he was wholly opposed to its aesthetic principles:

But 'futurism', when it gets into art, is for the most part,
a descendant of impressionism. It is a sort of accelerated
24
impressionism.

The modern age cannot appreciate the beauty of 'Attic grace' as the next
25
stanza implies the frailty of sensibilities:

Not, not certainly, the obscure reveries

of the inward gaze
Better mendacities
Than the classics in paraphrase!

The satire in the last two lines 'Better mendacities/Than the classics in

paraphrase !' is a moving image. Similarly, in the next stanza :

A prose kinema, not, not assuredly, alabaster

Or the “sculpture” of rhyme.

give the image of disillusionment in the modern age. In its early years,

cinematography was more of a medium of social history than the serious art,

characterised by 'slapstick and self-mocking exploitation of its own inherent

26
realism. Its status as a mechanical art of projecting instant images opposes

24 Ezra Pound, ‘Vorticism’ , Ezra Pound : A Critical Anthology, ed„ J. P. Sullivan. (Harmondsworth : Penguin
Books Ltd., 1970) p.47.

Attica is a region of south-Central Greece dominated by Athens.

26 Christine Froula, A Guide to Ezra Pound’s Selected Poems (Norfolk, C on n.: New Directions. 19X3) p.X4-X5.
the more arduous craft of cutting shapes into stone or words. Edwin Muir, in

a review in the N ew Age wrote about these two stanzas:

The scorn in these lines is so great that it does not even

express itself. And simply because pity is not asked for
H.S. Mauberley, our indignation, or, more exactly, our
disgust with his time is the greater. There remains that
only.27

However, Hugh Kenner is of the opinion that the implications of line after

line, irony upon irony used in the poem may be expanded. The whole series

must be considered before arriving at any 'too-easy supposition'. He wrote:

The subtle balance of diverse strong emotions in that

poem will be utterly destroyed by too ready a response
28
to one or two elements.

In the third poem Pound illustrates the 'tawdry cheapness' of late

Capitalist culture by juxtaposing its artefacts, conventions and spirit against

their classic counterparts:

The tea-rose tea-gown, etc.

Supplants the mousseline of Cos,
The pianola “replaces”
Sappho’s barbitos.

27 Eric Homberger, ed.. The Critical Heritage, p. 195.

28 Hugh Kenner, The Poetry o f Ezra Pound, pi 69.

 236

This is not satire, but despair. It is a poet's sin against an age that has sinned

grievously against poetry. Christine Froula, in this regard, wrote, 'Like the

tea-rose, a hybrid miniature rose deemed exceptionally elegant, the tea-

gown29 expresses for Pound decadent triviality'.3" The image of 'tea-gown

replacing the fine muslin cloth (Mousseline is a French word for muslin) of

the Greek island of Cos is significant. It is not simply one fabric replacing the

other. Pound's intention was that the two fabrics should represent the two

civilizations embodying the classical values and the degenerating modern

values. In the next two lines, the images of 'pianola' replacing Sappho s

barbitos' intensifies further the same theme of a decadence of classical

values.31 Giving an account of the splendour and beauty of the classical

music, Pound expressed the deterioration of the fine art of music in an essay

on 'Arnold Dolmetsch' with the following w ords:

Once people played music. It was gracious, exquisite

music, and it was played on instruments which gave out
the player's exact mood and personality—The clavichord
has the beauty of three or four lutes played together —
Now we have come to the pianola.32

29 t >
Tea-gown was a kind o f a haute couture popular in the early 1900s ; long dress adorned with lacc. ruffles,
tucks, pleats, flounces and sashes.

30 Christine Froula, A Guide to Ezra Pound’s Selected Poems, p.85.

31 Sappho of Lesbos was the celebrated Greek woman poet who was bom about the middle of the seventh
century B.C. Her barbitos was a kind o f lyre or lute.

3‘ Ezra Pound. Literary Essays, p.433

 237

In another essay, 'The tradition' Pound observed that 'both in Greek and in

Provence, poetry attained its highest rhythmic and metrical brilliance at times

when the arts of verse and music were most closely knit together'. It is to

be noted here that during the time of Sappho, the lyric was sung or chanted

to the accompaniment of the lyre, (barbitos). The fragmentary remains of

Sappho's lyrics have influenced the Imagist poetics of Pound, H.D. and

Richard Aldington to a great extent. However, Pound's way of comparing

past and present with certain Greek allusions and images has been criticised

by A.L. French as being inadequate. He wrote :

The poet (Pound) evidently thought that a bare mention

of Sappho was enough to bring in, by implication, the
whole Greek ethos. This is an astonishing but significant
miscalculation.34

He also asserts that Pound's hostility against the present, was too easily

assumed. The unreality of one term (pionola) as an antithesis makes the other

term (barbitos) unreal, too. A.L. French further wrote :

. It is a damaging comment, too, that Pound has to nudge

the reader in the ribs by those single quotation marks
round 'replaces' (a tactic resorted throughout Mauberley)
— as if this were the only means by which he could
make it clear that the replacing was in fact a catastrophic

33 Ezra Pound, Literary Essays, p .91.

34 A.L. French, ‘Olympian Apathein ’, Ezra P ou n d: A Critical Anthology, p.328

 loss. The attempted wit, when it emerges in tone,
movement, and the play on Supplants, seems
irrelevant.35

However, the juxtaposition of images in this account, and the way in

which Pound's allusions work in the Imagist technique are extended to the

rest of the Poem III. There are references to Dionysus, Heracleitus,

Samothrace, Pisistratus and Apollo and a quotation from Pindar s Olympian

Ode (II.2.). According to A.L. French, there is a perpetual gap between what

these Greek allusions are supposed to do, and what they actually achieve. In

his opinion these references are as inert as the references to Cos and Saphho.

But the message given in the following Images is not to be taken as mere

references:

Christ follows Dionysus

Phallic and ambrosial
Made way for macerations
Caliban casts out Ariel.

Pound here contrasts the ancient ecstatic rites of Dionysus, Greek god

of wine, music and tragedy, with the derivative Christian rite of 'macerating'

Christ's body in the symbolic communion wafer.36 The reference to

Shakespeare's The Tempest with the savage and deformed slave Caliban

casting out the airy spirit Ariel is the sign of the worsening modern society.

35 A.L.French, ‘Olympian Apathein '.Ezra Pound : A Critical Anthology, p.328.

36 Wafer is the consecrated bread offered in the Eucharist.

 239

The modern world wants neither Pagan beauty nor Christian Holiness. In the

next stanza the implication is extended to another reference of the Greek

philosopher Heracleitus (540-480 B.C.) who taught that all things in the

universe are constantly changing. Pound, here, insists ironically on the

durability of the 'tawdry cheapness' he is describing.

Even the Christian beauty

Defects — after Samothrace;

The Christian beauty is the great art to which the Christian religion gave rise

to ; such as Italian Renaissance poetry, painting, sculpture and architecture.

According to Pound, the present age can no longer produce these beauties.

They are as much a part of the past as the famous statue of 'Winged Victory',

on the Greek island of Samothrace, which was the home of the great mystery

cult of the Greeks.37

Faun’s flesh is not to us,

Nor the Saint’s vision.

Again this mystery cult, the ecstatic Dionysiac rites (Faun's flesh) has no

longer been practised now-a-days; and, the doctrines of Christ (Saint's vision)

are not followed.

We have the press for wafer

Franchise far circumcision.

37 The Winged Victory o f Samothrace is now m the Louvre, (t was erected by the Rhodians to commemorate a
navel victory (c. 190 B.C.)
 Pound here implies the degeneration of Christianity from mystical

vision to modern materialistic culture, in which the revelation is in the

province of the journalists ; tradition is bought by franchise, and the ritual of

38
communion centres on the daily newspaper.

Then, after bringing in the image of Pisistratus3 Pound ironically

makes a contrast between beneficent tyranny with ineffectual democracy.

And the reference to the Pindaric Ode suggests the degradation of arts in the

machine age, and leads ironically into the fourth poem, in which he crowns

not 'heroes' but the naive youths who lost their lives in the World War I.

The fourth poem surveys with compassion the moral dilemma of war.

There were ten million causalities in World War I. This poem exemplifies the

bitter disillusionment which blighted western consciousness after their

gruelling years of war and slaughter. The war ended with an overwhelming

catastrophe. The poem reflects Pound's views that the war was perpetuated

by lies, stupidity, and financial interests of those in power. Pound negates the

Roman poet Horace's famous line, Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori

(Odes XII. ii. 13) which says, 'It is sweet and fitting to die for one's country':

Died some, pro patria

non “dulce” non “decor” ...

■s Christine Froula, A Guide to Ezra Pound's Selected Poems, p.86.

w Pisistratus (605-527 B.C.) was an Athenian dictator, who gained popularity by liberal laws, ciicoutagal
Dionystic Worship, and also nurtured the arts.
It is not sweet and not fitting for those who died in the war. Pound again

poises the sacrifices of war against the domestic cheapness.

Walked eye-deep in hell

believing in old man’s lies, then unbelieving
Came home, home to lie,
home to many deceits,
home to old lies and new infamy;
Usury age-old and age-thick
and liars in public places.

World War I with its seemingly interminable trench warfare, frequently

inspired comparisons to hell in the annals of war literature. One of Pound s

closest friends, Gaudier-Brzeska who went to war wrote to Pound :

... a sight worthy of Dante, there was at the bottom a foot

deep of liquid mud in which we had to stand two days
and two nights, rest we had in small holes nearly as
muddy, add to this a position making a V point into the
enemy who shell us from three sides, the close vicinity of
800 putrefying German corpses and you are at the front
in the Marshes of Aisne.41

The war, indeed, was 'out of key' with everything that Pound valued most

deeply, although these values at this stage have not been satisfactorily

realised. However, the frequent repetition of Ties' along with other words

like 'deceits' and 'usury'42 gives an idea of what these values are not. Pound

40 Hugh Kenner, The Poetry o f Ezra Pound, p. 172.

41 Christine Froula, A Guide to Ezra Pound’s S elected Poems, pp.87-88.

Pound considered usury as the most important cause of degradation of the Society. He judged financial
interests, not patriotism, to be the real cause o f the war.
 242

expresses the horror of war and the complexity of the age, in the Imagistic

technique. Pound closes the poem with an ironic contrast of the images .

disillusion as never told in the old days,

hysterias, trench confessions,
laughter out of dead bellies

According to Hugh Kenner, it is Pound's 'quick evocation of the pullulating

new artistic soil, entrapping the artist in an opportunity for defined and

significant passions that all but swamp his Flaubertian criteria'.

Poem V is to be paired with poem IV as a section on the Great War

and it is a small bitter elegy.

There died a myriad

And of the best, among them,
For an old bitch gone in the teeth
For a botched civilization,

The lines look deceptively simple. Though Pound does not name any of the

'myriad', he recalls Gaudier-Brzeska in the following two lines :

Charm, smiling at the good mouth,

Quick eyes gone under earth’s lid

Remembering his friend Gaudier-Brzeska Pound wrote with nostalgia :

It is a part of the war waste. Among many good artists,

among other young men of promise there was this one
sculptor already great in achievement at the age of

43 Hugh Kenner. The Poetry o f Ezra Pound, p. 172.

 twenty-three, incalculably great in promise and in the

hopes of his friends.44

Pound implies that the very fact of the war is the evidence of the failure of

western cultural traditions. The idealism of the young who went to war

inspired by traditional beliefs of heroism and patriotism was completely lost

in the savagery of the brutal war. The result was the sacrifice of the living

present to an illusion thrown up by the past. Pound's bitterness about culture

arises from the discrepancy between its illusions and the actual values which

direct the course of history.

It is worth mentioning here that in the war poems (IV and V) Pound

abandons his ironic quatrains for sparely carved free-verse lines, which

express more subtly the complex tones of elegy and irony in the treatment of

the subject of war. The treatment is Imagistic. It is the climax of the sequence

and also of the superimposed tension of the apparent incommensurability of

human lives and civilized achievements45 Pound, then, prepares for the

change of the next six sections into a retrospective key.

In the next poem ' Yeux Glauqued Pound continues the theme of the

hypocritical schism between social realities and what is officially admitted to

be the case in this poem about Pre-Raphaelite art and its reception in mid­

44 Christine Fraula, A Guide to Ezra Pound's Selected Poem s, p.88.

45 Hugh Kenner, The Poetry o f Ezra Pound, pp. 172-73.

 244

nineteenth century England. The title 'Sea-Green eyes' refers to a painting by

the Pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-Jones, 'King Cophetua and the

Beggar Maid', now kept in the Tate gallery, London.46 Pound sees the image

of the painted woman as expressing the moral and social malaise of Victorian

England, of which Pre-Raphaelite art is both a critique and symptom of it.

Official 'morality', represented by Gladstone and Buchanan, is posed

ironically against the sentimental aestheticism of the Pre-Raphaelite artists,

who turned the misery of the prostitute into beautiful images. Another

symptom of the degradation of taste in the Victorian period, is the

indifference shown by people to the publication of Edward Fitzgerald s

translation of The Rubaiyat o f Omar Khayyam. That phase of Victorian

immorality is also shown in the image of 'Jenny':

The thin, clear gaze, the same

Still darts out faun like from the half ruined face
Questing and passive ...
“Ah, poor Jenny's case”

Rossetti wrote a poem called 'Jenny' about a prostitute, where the phrase

'Poor Jenny' recurred and he had chosen an epigraph from The Merry Wives

of Windsor (Act IV. Sc.I. 64) of Shakespeare.47 The passage in the play reads,

'if she be a whore !' But Pound had altered the epigraph to, 'Ah, poor Jenny's

case' as if to suggest that the face that looks out at the viewer from the Burne-

46 Elizabeth Siddal, who married Rossetti, modelled for this painting by Rossetti. Her life was difficult and
miserable, and she eventually committed suicide.

47 The epigraph read, ‘Vengeance o f Jenny’s Case ! Fie on Her ! Never name her.’
 245

Jones cartoons (and from 'Caphetua and the Beggar Maid') is that of a girl

named Jenny who was somewhat like the prostitute of Rossetti s poem,

whose degradation and victimisation helped to sustain the Victorian s fine

illusions of themselves.48

The next poem 'Siena M i fe ; Disfecemi Maremma is another

vignette presenting the end of the aestheticist period which Pound is leaving

behind. The title is from Dante's Purgatorio (canto V, line 135). In this half-

riddling way, one of the female characters that Dante meets in Purgatory

laconically gives the main facts of her life — that she had been murdered by

her husband in the Maremma marsh lands. Similarly the poem intensifies the

personal tragedy of the inheritor of the literary generation of the 'nineties', in

the person of 'Monsieur Verog', which is the fictitious name for Victor Gustav

Plarr (1863-1929).49

Among the pickled foetuses and bottled bones,

Engaged in perfecting the catalogue,
I found the last scion of the
Senatorial families of Strasbourg, Monsieur Verog.

The reminiscences of the period at the close of the century are reflected from

Verog's own experiences; and this section of the poem is plainly

autobiographical, and the atmosphere of the literary milieu of the period is

48There is no biographical warrant far linking Elizabeth Siddal with the girl who may have suggested to Rossetti
the story of Jenny.

Plarr came of an Alsatian family and came to England in 1870 after the Fnanco-Prussian war. It is natural,
therefore, that he should have talked to Pound.
 Z4< 1

ironically reflected in the line, 'The pickled foetuses and the bottled bones .

Donald Davie made the following comment regarding the irony in this poem

and the previous one :

To read these two poems as spoken by Mauberley rather

than Pound turns the edge of the otherwise weighty
objection that Pound's irony here is of the unfocussed
kind which enables him to have it both ways, so that the
tartness and the indulgence, the mockery and the
affection, lie side by side without modifying each
other.51

But if we regard the speaker to be Mauberley the unresolved attitude is

dramatically appropriate and effective and helps to account for his own

subsequent failure.

The next three poems are again vignettes of three contrasting literary

careers. 'Brennbaum' embodies what passes for the cult of style according to

Hugh Kenner,

The sky-like limpid eyes,

The circular infant’s face.
The stiffness from spats to collar
Never relaxing into grace ;

50 Pound ‘found’ Plarr among the “pickled foetuses and bottled bones’ because, Plarr was at this time librarian
to the Royal College o f Surgeons. Cleanth Brookes. R.B.W . Lewis, Robert Penn Warren. American Literature
: The M akers an d the Making, p.2080.

51 Donald Davie ‘Ezra Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberley'. The Pelican Guide to English Literature, vol. 7. cd„
Boris Ford (Harmondsworth : Penguin , 1964) p.322.
 247

It is one of the two shortest poems in MauberJey and quite gratuitous. It

depicts the deracinated wandering Jews, and reflects on the racial prejudice,

which blights much of modernist iconography, with 'the heavy memories of

Horeb, Sinai and the forty years'.52 Brennbaum may or may not have tried to

conceal his true nature with his 'limped eyes' and 'infant's face but he too

was concerned with something of the aesthetic and irreverent tradition of the

Nineties. The reference may be to Max Beerbohm53 as Ezra Pound wrote

about 'the impeccable Beerbohm' and the darkest period before the birth of

the modem era in his essay on 'Remy de Gourmont'.

...there was the Emerson-Tennyson plus optimism

period; there was the 'aesthetic' era during which people
'wrought' as the impeccable Beerbohm has noted.54

The heavy memories of Horeb, Sinai and the forty years,

Showed only when the daylight fell
Level across the face
Of Brennbaum “The Impeccable”

The reference to 'forty years' of exile, though hostile, is not devoid of fellow

feeling.

52 Horeb is the mountain where Moses struck the rock a second time to make water flow for his people, and was
punished by God for his lack o f faith with forty years of wandering in the desert. Sinai is the mountain where
Moses received the ten commandments.

53 Max Beerbohn was not a Jew. John J. Epsey, who studied the poem in detail points out that Pound was
mistaken if he thought that possessed any Jewish blood. Cleanth Brooks cl al, American Literature : The
Makers and the Making, p.2080.

54 Ezra Pound, Literary Essays, p.340.

 The next poem 'Mr. Nixon' is an ironic updating of Henry James

famous story 'The lesson of the Master' according to Christine Froula. This

is the portrait of the 'successful' writer who advises the younger generation

writers to abandon serious art and aim for commercial success. Regarding the

title, Pound himself has admitted that a real person is alluded to under the

name of Mr. Nixon. Hugh Kenner suggests that the person may be Arnold

Bennett, the popular British novelist of the first part of the twentieth

. 56
century.

In the cream gilded cabin of his steam yacht

Mr. Nixon advised me kindly, to advance with fewer
Dangers of delay.

In the first section of the poem (Exhibit No. 1), Pound tries to give new

effects out of colloquial speech. According to F.R. Leavis it is 'sardonic

comedy'. He w rote:

Mr. Pound's earlier satiric verse is always technically

adroit and often amusing ; but no one would have
thought the author capable of a satiric note that should
be in keeping with tragic seriousness. Mr. Nixon is.57

55 Christine Froula, A G uide to E zra Pound's Selected Poems, p.94.

56 Bennett was also a journalist and editor, and he bought his first yatch in 1992. Christine Froula. A Guide to
Ezra Pound’s S elected Poems, p.94.

57 F.R. Leavis,'from New B earings in English Poetry'( 1932), Ezra P ound: Critical Anthology, p. 129.
Here Pound enacts his 'hearty grimace' to the association of commercial art

with as slovenly work, as the mockingly irregular stanzas, lines and the

forced rhymes of this poem imply :

... “Consider
“Carefully the reviewer
“I was as poor as you are
“The tep’s a good one, as for literature
“It gives no man a sinecure.

Pound was a great aesthete in the beginning and by 'style' he meant the

'smoothness of finish', orderly arrangement of sentences, coherence to the

Flaubertian method. But Pound observed in a 1918 review that

commercialism had resulted into 'the click of MR. Bennett's cash-register

finish'. However, years later, Pound noted :

E.P. rather modified his view of part of Bennett's writing

when he finally got round to reading An Old Wives' Tale
many years later.58

The pretentiously popular philosophy of the modern writers striving for

commercial success was parodied by Pound :

“And give up verse, my boy,

“There is nothing in it.

58Ezra Pound, Literary Essays, p.429.

 250

There is also an allusion to Robert Browning's poem "The Bishop Orders His

Tomb" in which Bishop Bloughram is shown to have lost all glimmerings of

the divine light in the zealous pursuit of his worldly interests :

Likewise a friend of Bloughzam’s once advised me:

Don’t kick against the pricks,59

The third exhibit (Poem X) gives an account of the genuine stylist in

hiding. The real character behind the 'stylist' is Ford Madox Ford, whom

Pound venerated as a stylist and superb craftsman whom the age did not

appreciate:

Beneath the sagging roof

The stylist has taken shelter,
Unpaid, uncelebrated,
At last from the world’s welter

According to Christine Froula, this contrasting portrait of the literary 'Stylist'

is based on an interlude in the life of Ford Madox Ford, 'who retreated in

1919 to a picturesque cottage with a big hole in the roof where he wrote,

gardened and cooked masterpieces of various genres'.60 Hugh Kenner is of

the opinion that this poem is 'an anti-climatic redaction' of the 'Lake Isle of

Innisfree' of W.B. Yeats :61

The haven from Sophistications and contentions

Leaks through its thatch;

59 Pound probably takes it from W histler’s The G entle Art o f Making Enemies (1890) : I feel (he folly o f kicking
against the parish pricks. A G uide to Ezra Pound's S elected Poetry, p.94.

60Christine Froula, A G uide to Ezra Pound’s Selected Poetry, p.95.

61 Hugh Kenner, The Poetry o f Ezra Pound, p. 174.

 251

He offers succulent cooking;

The door has a creaking latch.

In the Pre-war (1st World War) decade Ford was the lone enunciator

of the Flaubertian gospel in England.62 Commenting on the reference to Ford

Madox Ford in this poem, Hugh Kenner wrote:

His (Ford's) detailed account of the cultural state of post­

war London in the first third of It was the Nightingale
can be made to document Mauberley line by line. The
reviewing synod hastened to write his epitaph, so
effectively that his reputation is only beginning to
quicken a quarter of a century after the publication of his
best work__ It pleases at least one reader to suppose that
it is the spectacle of Ford's disillusion that animates
63
these three extraordinary stanzas.

F.R. Leavis says that this and the preceding poem (Number X and XI) might

have appeared in Lustra, though they have their place here in the context of

the whole.64

The next poem (IX) is another vignette of the fashionable city (London)

life presenting a post-war contrast to the intricate contemplative passion of

' Yeux Glauques'.65 It is a lampoon of middle-class sexual mores.

62 Ford, on his discharge from the army retired in disgust to Sussex to raise pigs, and ultimately at about (he
same time as Pound, left England.

63 Hugh Kenner, The P oetry o f Ezra Pound, pp. 174-175.

M F.R. Leavis, ‘from New B earin gs in English P oetry ’. Ezra P ou n d: A C ritical Anthology, p. 129.

65 Hugh Kenner, The P oetry o f Ezra Pound, p. 175.

 ‘Conservatrix of Milesicn’
Habit of mind and feeling.
Possibly. But in Ealing
With the most bank-clerky of Englishman.

Pound found the phrase 'des femmes ... ces conservatrices des traditions

milesiennes' ('women ... these conservers of Milesian traditions') in Remy de

Gourmont's short story 'Stragemes'.66 In an essay on Remy de Goumont,

67
Pound again quotes it as an example of controlled 'tonal variation

'Milesian' is the word which, used as a synecdoche for traditions, gives the

'tone' here. It is pertinent to mention in this connection that none of the

traditions of the erotic Greek 'Milesian Tales' have survived, nor has the

'tradition' been otherwise conserved in the modern times. Cleanth Brooks,

R.W.B. Lewis and Robert Penn Warren in their notes on the poem have

pointed out another passage from Remy de Gourmont, 'Desirs grenades

pleins de rubis, etc. which Pound, might have had in mind while writing

the poem; English translation of the passage as given by them is as follows:

Desires, pomegranates filled with imprisoned rubies,

from which one puncture of a tooth makes bedazzlement
. spill forth — one bite of a women's tooth. Some women,
encountered in just the right place, know how to bite.
They are not to be despised, these preservers of Milesian
68
[that is, voluptuous] traditions.

66 Christine Froula, A G uide to E zra Pound's S elected Poems, p.95.

67 Ezra Pound, Literary Essays, p.465.

68 Cleanth Brooks et al. A m erican Literature : The M akers and the Makings, p.2081.
 But this modern woman living in the lower middle-class Ealing (a district of

Greater London),69 whose husband is the most bank-clerky of Englishmen

can hardly be expected to have preserved very much of any voluptuous

habits or instincts. Christine Froula has given an observation regarding this

degradation of erotic culture as treated by other modem writers who

followed Pound. She wrote :

T.S. Eliot's famous modem lovers, the typist and the

young man carbuncular of the The Waste Land, may
have been inspired by Pound's suburbanites. Both scenes
70
use rhyme as an instrument of satire.

Regarding Pound's handling of images and symbols in such contexts the

authors of American Literature: The Makers and the Making remarked :

If the reader feels that Pound's own modification of the

Gourmont phrase ('Conservatrix of Milesien') is here
made to bear a very heavy burden of meaning and that
there will be few readers capable of recognising such an
unfamiliar passage, he has our full sympathy. Pound
does demand a great deal of his reader — not only in the
matter of picking up hints and suggestions, but of
knowing intimately the literature of the late nineteenth
71
century— French, British, and American.

m The London suburb o f Ealing is now a borough.

70 Christine Froula, A Guide to Ezra Pound's S elected Poems, p.95.

71 Cleanth Brooks et al, American Literature : The M akers an d the Making, p .2 0 8 1.

 254

Perhaps, that may be the reason why Micheal Alexander has observed:

Poem XI is the slightest of the cameos and depends upon

too recherche a reference to the widely intelligible,
72
though the obscurity is partly decent.

The next poem (XII) is again a portrait of the fashionable London

literary salon and closes the survey of the period which institutionalised 'the

belletristic isolation of art from social reality, that the poem Hugh Selwyn

Mauberley condemns. This poem also completes the sequence of the part I,

where Pound has reviewed the entire gamut of modem European culture.

The poem brings the review up to date and it opens with a brilliant image.

“Daphne with her thighs in bark

Stretches toward me her leafy hands,”—
Subjectively.

Pound translated freely the lines from Gautier's Le Chateau du Souvenir,

Daphne, les hanches dans I'ecorce

Etend toujours ses doigts toujfus.73
[Emaux et Cantees]

In Greek mythology, Daphne, a mortal, who fled from the god Apollo

who had fallen in love with her, was transformed into a laurel tree when

Apollo pursued and caught her. The idea of metamorphosis was used by

*
72 MichacI Alexander, The P oetic Achievement o f Ezra Pound (London : Faber and Faber, 1979) p. I 19.

73 Gautier. Emaux et Cam ees. ‘La Chateau du Souvenir’ quoted in A Guide to Ezra Pound’s Selected Poems.
pp.95-96.
 255

Pound earlier in the poem 'The Tree' and he used it with varying degrees of

seriousness and wit in the Cantos also. The addition of the word

'subjectively' here, makes the meaning more pregnant in the Imagist context.

According to Donald Davie the borrowed image is made utterly Poundian by

the deflating word 'subjectively', which meets the reader as he swings

around the line-ending, thus achieving the maximum surprise and shock ;

and he gives the explanation as follow s:

The sexual connotation is present here, as in other

episodes of Mauberley's career. But more important is
the allegorical meaning by which Apollo, the god of
poetry figures, sensationally diminished, as the poet
waiting humbly upon his patroness. What the poet wants
from her in the traditional acknowledgement of poetic
prowess, the laurel-wreath ; but when she seems to hold
this out to him ('her leafy hands') he reminds himself
that she does so only 'subjectively', only in his private
fantasy, for in objective fact she represents no such
respectable body or principle of taste as could permit the
poet to value her approval.74

It coordinates a personal dimension with a more objective overview. The

image is contrasted in the following two lines of the same stanza :

... In the Stuffed-Satin drawing room

I await The Lady Valentine’s Commands,

74 Donald Davie ‘Ezra Pound’s Hugh Selwyn M au berley’. Pelican Guide to English Literature, cd., Boris hold.
The Modern Age. Vol. 7. (London : Penguin Books Ltd.. 1970) p.323.
 256

If Daphne felt such awe, even terror at the approach of the god of poetry, the

fashionable London Hostess, Lady Valentine,75 obviously feels no awe at all.

For her, the cultivation of the arts is an amusement, a kind of literary

slumming, and a way of meeting those dubious bohemians of the artistic

world. This is 'a collocation of luminous details and a projection of distinctive

responses to them'. The two elements complement one another in the most

important and most successful achievements in form of the poetic images. B.

Foggleman in this regard wrote :

A culmination of Pound's Vorticist and earlier aesthetics,

Hugh Selwyn Mauberley proceeds through a shifting
succession of various states of awareness that presents
76
different facets of a single, unified consciousness.

The next four quatrains of the poem are full of vivid pictures covering

a wide range of the society lives of London. They are often compared to

Eliot's "Love Song o f J. Alfred Prufrock'. The mock, tentative words —

'precisely', 'somewhat', 'uncertain', 'possible' — become Prufrockian and the

satire (knowing my coat has never been etc.) reflects Prufrock's self

consciousness about his dress. Micheal Alexander remarked :

75 Lady Valentine is a fictious name for a London Literary hostess. According to Christine Froula she is a model
of possibly Lady Ottoline M orrell.

16 Bruce Foggleman, S haper o f P ow er : The Developm ent o f Ezra Pound’s P oetic Sequences, p. 161.
 257

Pound seems to have expected a lot of the aristrocacy.

The possibilities of a modern heroism, and the absence
77
of a role for the artist, are both themes of Mauberley.

And regarding the technique F.R. Leavis wrote :

... XII [Poem XII] exhibits again a technical mastery

functioning at the highest level. It is another marvel of
tone and poise. The movement is extraordinarily varied,
and the tempo and modulation are exquisitely
controlled.78

However, A.L. French in his criticism of the poem in 'Olympian Apatheiri

gives the observation that paradoxically the hardness of the verse results into
• 79
a kind of flabbiness and wishful indulgence. And it is far from being tragic.

The poem end s:

Conduct, on the other hand, the soul

“Which the highest cultures have nourished”
To Fleet where
Dr. Johnson flourished;

Beside this thoroughfare

The sale of half-hose has
Long since superseded the cultivation
Of Pierian roses.

These stanzas are among the best known in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, and

have been much used for epigraphs. The intention, here, is to enact the

77 Micheal Alexander. The P oetic Achievement o f Ezra Pound, p. 119.

78 F.R. Leavis, From New B earings in English P o e t r y E z r a P o u n d : A C ritical Anthology, p. 129.

79 A.L. French, 'Olympian Apathien'. Ezra P o u n d : A C ritical Anthology, p.337.

 25 X

breakdown of a cultural order by the 'grotesque rhyme' and 'dislocated

rhythms'. Another example of Pound's witty compactness of language and

the juxtaposition of images can be seen in the linking of 'Dr. Johnson' with

the 'Pierian roses'.81 But A.L. French gives the opinion that those 'Pierian
82
roses' would be more appropriate to Lionel Johnson than to Samuel.

The conclusion is not that Fleet Street is nowadays inhabited by

haberdashers rather than by Dr. Johnson, but that those who accept the

patronage of Fleet Strret, which once supported a Johnson, are condemned to

turn out, not even the tea-roses of Kensington, but 'half-hose'.

The first and much the longer part of the poem, specifically subtitled

'Part I' consists of the pieces we have so far considered. Now, standing on its

own, between Part I and Part II, is a poem entitled 'Envoi' (1919). This is one

poem where there is no doubt as to who is speaking, Donald Davie wrote :

It is Pound himself, suddenly stepping from behind the

wavering figure of Mauberley and all the veils of irony,
to speak out personally, even confessionally, into a

80 Dr. Samuel Johnson, the great champion o f literature in the 18th Century, who lived at the Fleet Street in
London, associated with journalism and the publishing industry.

81 Pieria in Greece is in legend the birthplace o f the Muses. Pound alludes to one of Sappho’s lines, which
translates ‘for you hold no claim to the Pierian roses (Fragment L X X I). A Guide to Ezra Pound's Selected
Poems, p.96.

82 A.L. French, ‘Olympian A pathein’ . Ezra Pound : A C ritical Anthology, p.337.

 25‘
J

situation which he had seemed to contrive just so as not

83
to speak in his own person at all.

This wonderfully dramatic moment is characterised by the sudden

appearance of a wholly unexpected metre and style. It is so wholly

traditional in every respect that the voice of the poet seems to be the

anonymous voice of the tradition of the English Song.84 An envoi is an

author's parting word to a literary composition often addressed to the book

itself. On one level, this 'Envoi' is a send-off to Part I of Hugh Selwyn

Mauberley ; on another level, it is a new version of Edmund Waller's

seventeenth-century poem 'Go lovely Rose' which was set to music by the
85
English composer Henry Lawes.

Go lovely Rose!
Tell her that wastes her time and me
That now she knows,
When I resemble her to thee
How sweet and fair she seems to be.

The rose evokes the Tudor lyric tradition summarised in Waller's words,

which themselves echo a further tradition stretching back to Sappho's roses.

As an envoi, the poem reverberates with ironies. Pound judged that

poetry reached its highest achievements in language set to music. Pound

wrote in his ABC o f Reading :

83 Donald Davie, ‘Ezra Pound’s Hugh Selwyn M auberley', P elican Guide to English Literature, vol. VH, p.325.

84 Donald Davie. ‘Ezra Pound’s Hugh Selwyn M auberley', Pelican Guide to English Literature, vol. VII, 11.325.

85Christine Froula. A G uide to E zra P ou n d’s S elected Poems, p.96.

 260

The great lyric age lasted while Campion made his own
music, while Lewis set Waller's verses, while verses, if
not actually sung or set to music, were at least made with
the intention of going to music.86

Also in a letter written to Margaret C. Anderson in 1918, Pound made a

reference to the poetic value of the lyric. He w rote:

And I desire also to resurrect the art of the lyric, I mean

words to be sung ... there is scarcely anything since the
time of Waller and Campion. And to mere imitation of
87
them won't do.

The 'Envoi' surpasses imitation as we see from the first stanza :

Go, dumb-born book.

Tell her that sang me once that song to Law es:
Hadst thou but song
As thou hast subjects known,
Then were there cause in thee that should condone
Even my faults that heavy upon me lie,
And build her glories their longevity.

The 'Envoi' is Pound's proud and triumphant salute to poetry as the

preserver of beauty, and a demonstration of his own superb command of art.

Pound's song is in a sense about the fact that the song is absent from

Mauberley as a whole : its graceful free verses, archaic diction and syntax,

and traditionally 'poetic' sentiments and imagery reproach the age in which

86Ezra Pound, ABC o f Reading, pp .60-61.

87 Ezra Pound. Selected Letters, p.128.

 26!

such graces are anachronistic. It is to be noted that the quatrain stanza pattern

is not followed in this poem. F.R. Leavis has described 'Envoi' as 'this lovely

little poem' and has said, 'Mr. Pound's metrical irregularities are not the

result of incompetence'.88 At the same time, though lovely in itself, the poem

is 'out of key' with its time. It is beautiful but 'dumb-born'. Commenting on

the 'audacity' of asserting a 'Shakespearean vocation of preserving transient

beauty against the tooth of time', Hugh Kenner has said that the first line (Go,

dumb-born book) is 'a magnificently sustained melodic line'.89 Consequently

in every turn of the phrase, the poem expresses ironically a yearning for the

freedom from the squabbles of preceding sections. Donald Davie is of the

opinion that the 'she' which the book must address to is surely England that

Pound is preparing to leave.90

The 'Envoi' has generated a certain amount of critical confusion. In its

duplicity of motives — one is a longing for lyric tradition and the other being

its own out-of-placeness in the very world Mauberley portrays — the poem is

also an exit from those bindings. In being about that, it reinstates itself as a

contemporary poem which does not merely imitate Walter's song but self-

slt F.R. Leavis, ‘from New B earings in English P oetry ’. Ezra P ou n d : A Critical Anthology, p. 130.

m Hugh Kenner, The Poetry o f Ezra Pound, p. 176.

m When Charles Norman asked Pound for the name o f the lady who sang ‘that song o f Lawes’Poundreplied,
"Your question is the kind o f damn fool enquiry into what nobody’s damn business’. Cleanth Brooks et at.
American Literature : The M akers an d the Making, p.2082.
 262

consciously 'm o d ern izes' it. P erh ap s that m ay be the reason w hy Christine

Froula w r o te :

It is at once critical and self-critical, like Mauberley as a

whole. Its date and its placement here at the end of Part I
mark it as a transitional poem which embodies all the
• 91
contradictions of the poet's position in modern society.

91 Christine Froula, A G uide to E zra Pound's S elected Poem s.p.91.

 263

PART II

The last five poems constitute the second part of Hugh Selwyn

Mauberley. Originally it was subtitled T a rt 11/ 1920/(Mauberley)' and the

first poem was simply "I".92

The first poem of this part, entitled 'Mauberley (1920)' raises the

important question of who Mauberley is and what his relation to Pound is.

Only now, does Mauberley, the titular hero of the whole work emerge, and

his emergence is signalized by a new cross-heading, 'Mauberley (1920)'. The

poem from this point onward has to do specifically with Hugh Selwyn

Mauberley, who is Pound's antithetical self. He is the kind of poet that Pound

might have been, had he been content to dwindle into a pure aesthete,

unwilling to accept the crash demands of the ages, and not willing to

penetrate into its shams or to make any connection between his concern to

create sound art and the literary milieu of the period.

The epigraph is adapted from Ovid's Metamorphoses (Bk VII, line

786), which is translated as 'He bites at the empty air'. The reference is to

Cephalus's dog as he tries to bite the monster, that was ravaging Thebes. The

dog pursued the monster, and both were turned to stone. The line is an ironic

92Christine Froula, A G uide to E zra P ou n d’s S elected Poems, p.98.

 264

image of Mauberley, whom Pound here turns to stone in the poem, as it

were, capturing the futile gestures of his art.

This epigraph is substantiated in the epilogue at the end of poem II of

part II.

Mouths biting empty air

The still stone dogs,
Caught in metamorphosis, were
Left him as epilogues.

The image can also be contrasted to the 'erotic bites' of Milesian

tradition of poem XI in Part I.

“Conservatrix of Milesien”
Habits of mind and feeling,
Possibly.

According to Donald Davie, the biting mouths immobilized in stone are an

obviously apt metaphor for impotence which in partly but not exclusively

sexual'.93 In this regard Mauberley can be compared with Eliot's Prufrock,

whose inability to come to grips with the world for the sake of art is

symbolized in his inability to meet the sexual challenge and to 'force the

moment to its crisis'.

Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,

Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?

[The Love Song of J. Alferd Prufrock, 1917]

93 Donald Davie, ‘Ezra Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberley', Pelican Guide lo English Literature, p.327.
 265

Mauberley like Prufrock a llo w s the m o m en t of ch oice to drift by w ithout

recognising i t :

Drifted ... drifted precipitate,

Asking time to he rid o f ...
Of his bewilderment to designate
His new found Orchid ...

However, unlike Prufrock Mauberley appears to be a kind of aesthete who

has 'turned from' the ethical production of Pound's early pre-Raphaelite

aestheticism, but whose own engraver's art is but 'a soul-less

. • ,94
antiquarianism .

Turned from the ‘eau-forte’95

Par Jacquemart”
To the strait head
Of Messalina:

The engraving, instead of being a fine art has resulted into the 'Strait head' of

Messalina,96 the notoriously dissolute woman, an image of moral

degeneration and chaos where the aestheticism of Mauberley can never

prosper. Mauberley is like Pound in this respect. That is why his

(Mauberley's) "true Penelope" like E.P.'s 'was Flaubert'. But according to

Christine Froula, 'E.P. falls for the siren's lure, Mauberley becomes a lotus-

94A Guide to Ezra P ou n d’s S elected Poems, p.98.

95'eau-forte’ : French : acid and the reference is to an engraving etched with acid done by Jules Jacquemart of
Gautier, for the frontispiece o f the 1881 edition o f Einaux et Cconees.

%Valeria Messalina was the profligate wife of the Roman emperor Claudius, who had her murdered in 48 A.I).
Her image was engraved on Roman coins.
 266

eater'.97 John Espey has suggested that Mauberley is not Pound, but 'a mask

of what he feared to become as an artist by remaining in England'. Pound

himself remarked that "Mauberley buries E.P. in the first poem, gets rid of all

his troublesome energies'."Though Pound remarked, '... of course, I am no

more Mauberley than Eliot is Prufrock', it is probably true that he invented

Mauberley at least in part to exorcise this aspect of himself.

The next poem is a fable of Mauberley's uncomprehending response to

the urgings of Eros, which confuse his perceptions and interfere with his

artistic application. By the time he wakes up, both Eros and his Muse have

fled. Pound was much occupied with the theme of the connection between

sexual and creative power. The epigraph in French is translated as follows :

What do they know of love, and what can they

understand? If they do not understand poetry, if they do
not feel music, what can they know of that passion
beside which the rose is crude and the perfume of violets
a thunderbolt.100

This epigraph supposedly written by 'CAID ALT which is a Persian

pseudonym of Pound. It carries a sense of association of Fitzgerald's

97Christine Froula. A G uide to Ezra Pound's S elected Poems, p.98

98Christine Froula. A Guide to Ezra Pound's S elected Poems, p.98

99 Quoted in Christine Froula, A Guide to Ezra P ou n d ’s S elected Poems, p.98

l00Cleanth Brooks, R .W .B . Lew is, Robert Penn Warren. American Literature : The Makers and the Making
American Literature, p.2082.
Rubaiyat. The im p lica tio n s can b e ex ten d ed to the sim ilarities of indifference

to Omar K hayyam 's R ubaiyat (translated b y Fitzgerald) and Pound s ow n

works.

Like E.P., 'for three years out of key with his time', Mauberley too

faced 'diabolus' scale, which is known as the 'devil' in musical notations, 'the

augmented fourth scale'. It is a difficult interval for the musicians to manage

and this dissonant interval was forbidden to medieval composers.1 1 W.B.

Yeats made remarks on the 'devil's metres' of the Imagists, and Pound has

mentioned it in his essay, 'The Later Yeats'.

... he (Yeats) has written des Images as have many good

poets before him ; so that is nothing against him, and he
has nothing against them (Jes Imagists), at least so far as
102
I know — except what he calls "their devil's metres"

But it is characteristic of Mauberley that he should set himself just

such difficult problems.

For three years, diabolus in scale.

He drank ambrosia
AH passes, ANANGKE prevails
Came end, at last, to that Arcadia.103

101 Christine Froula cites the first two notes o f Leonard Bernstein's "M aria” in West Side Story as the example
of this note.

102 Ezra Pound. Literary Essays, p.378.

103 ANANGKE is G reek : fate or necessity; Arcadia is an image of earthly paradise in Greek. Roman and
Renaissance poetry.
 2fiK

He had moved amid her phantasmagoria,

Amid her galaxies
NUKTOS AGALMA.1(M

The motifs of the earlier sections are again reflected as the Mauberley persona

comes to the fore and the enigmatic stanzas mount from intensity to intensity.

Pound himself wrote about the over complication:

If — as in the case of Mauberley's own amorous

adventure. I compress Henry James' Novel into two
pages — even unsuccessfully — I have the right to some
of the attention that would have gone to the 298 pages
omitted.105

Hugh Kenner has pointed out that it is practically a precis of the flirtation

with passionate illusion of Lambert Stretcher in Henry James' novel, The

Ambassadors. 'O f course I move among miracles' said Sretcher, 'It was all

phantasmagoric'106 Pound adapted it to his own purposes. Writing in 1908,

he said :

Certain men move in phantasmagoria : The images of

their gods, whole countrysides, stretches of hill, land arid
107
forest, travel with them.

IIU NUSTIS AGALMA :Greek : night's jew el, from Bion’ s apostrophe to Hesperus, the evening star, in poem
IX.

1115 Quoted in Donal Davie, E zra Pound (New Y ork : The Viking Press, 1975) p .5l.

106 Hugh Kenner. The Poetry o f Ezra Pound.p. 176.

1117 Ezra Pound. S elected Prose, ed„ William Cookson (London : Faber and Faber, 1973) p.424.
 269

Such a conglomeration of diverse images which gives an account of the

complete pattern that Pound wanted to create or inject into the readers mind

in the form of verbal pictures is the ultimate Image of his Imagist poetics.

The third part contains the essential action and puts forward

Mauberley's fundamental passion.

This urge to convey the relation

Of eye-lid and cheek-bone
By verbal manifestation;

To present the series

Of curious heads in medallion,

Pound's image of Mauberley's sexuality is a sardonic comment on his

• 108
'phantasmagoria' and it is depicted in the Greek word, 'orchid'. A more

vivid erotic image is presented in the following stanza :

He has passed inconscient, full gaze.

The wide-banded irides
And botticellian sprays implied
In their diastasis.

Mauberley is 'inconscient' and doesn't see what is right before his eyes —

irides (the plural form in Greek of the word 'iris' referring primarily to the

coloured portion of the eye). The word can also refer to a kind of flower, a

complimentary symbolic flower to Mauberley's 'orchis'. The divided stance

of the eyes, or 'their dilation in erotic invitation' is also suggested with the

108Orchid : The Greek word “Orchis” means ‘testicle’

 270

word 'diastasis'.109 There is also an allusion to painter Borticelli's sublimely

erotic picture 'The Birth of Venus' in which Pound saw the eyes. Later Pound

made the same reference in the Cantos.

Saw but the eyes and stance between the eyes,

colour, diastasis,

(Canto LXXXI)

It is only a year after the end of his 'romance' that he realises that he has

missed his chance, his 'mandate of Eros'. He drifts and day dreams like

Prufrock of the South Seas, drops out of 'the world of letters' and produces a

medallion. The context for the missed opportunities is implied in a restropect.

Which anaesthesis, noted a year late,

And wished, revealed his great affect
(Orchid), mandate
Of Eros, a restropect.

Pound here uses a technical medical term 'anaesthesis' as Eliot used

'etherised' in Prufrock, to express a lack of feeling or sensibility. F.R, Leavis

^fcmmented:

It is a contemporary sensibility that expresses the futile

bitterness of this recognition in this air of scientific
detachment, of disinterested scrutiny.110

IINGreek word ‘Diastasis’ meaning distance. The meaning in which Pound uses it here is the distance between the
eyes— eyes set apart.

1111F.R. Leavis, New Bearings in English Poetry, p. 131.

 271

The next section of the poem, (IV) 'The Age Demanded' is a

continuation of the earlier section and it traces Mauberley's degeneration and

his gradual withdrawal into an ever more private world. Mauberley, like

'E.P.' is unaffected by the 'march of events'.

Pound's diction throughout the poem is latinate and

analytical distancing the speaker from the Mauberley he
dissects. But the minute interest in Mauberley's "case" be
speaks a certain identification.111

According to F.R. Leavis Mauberley has got "the penalty for absorption in

aesthetic contemplation, for too much concern with fineness of living ; the

unfitness for the survival of the artist in the modern world, the world of Lady

Valentine'.112 This contemplation is weighed against his strenuous efforts.

For this agility chance found

Him all men, unfit
As the red-beaked steeds of
The Cytheraen for a chain bit

The glow of porcelain

Brought no reforming sense
To his perception
Of the social inconsequence.

Thus, if her colour

Came against his gaze.
Tempered as if
It were through a perfect glaze

111 Christine Froula: A Guide to Ezra Pound's S elected /’oemv.p.lOl

U2New Bearings in English Poetry, p .l 30.

 272

Mauberley's interest in beauty and art is antiquarian. The image of the 'glow

of porcelain' gives a strong sense of Pound's own efforts to defend poetry

earlier. He wrote in his essay "The Serious Artist" :

... humanity is a species or genus of animals capable of a

variation that produce the desire for a Taj [Taj Mahal of
Agra] or a Victory [Victory Statue of Samothrace], and
moreover capable of effecting the Taj or Victory in stone.
We know from other testimony of the arts and from
ourselves that the desire often overshoots the power of
efficient presentation ... we even suppose that men have
desired to effect more beautiful things although few of
us are capable of forming any precise mental image of
things, in their particular way, more beautiful than this
statue or this building. ... Beauty in art reminds one
113
what is worth while.

In another essay "How to Read", Pound emphasised the importance of

words, language and literature :

... the individual cannot think and communicate his

thought, the governor and legislator cannot act
effectively or frame his laws, without words, and the
solidity and validity of these words is in care of the
damned and despised litterati}u

113 Ezra Pound : Literary Essays, p.45.

114 Ezra Pound : Literary Essays, p.2.

 273

Mauberley is contrasted in intention with the actively engaged Pound

p erson a of part I. But the reference to 'Porcelain', 'glaze' and 'beauty' assume

more weight. Correspondingly, the cluttered awkwardness of the social

situation puts this kind of serious effort or application in an unfavourable

light:

He made no immediate application

Of this to relation of the state
To the individual, the month was more temperate
Because this beauty had been.

The serious artist does not pretend to be receiving wisdom; we have heard

Pound dilating on his quasi-automatic social functions. It is the essence of the

artist's cruel dilemma that his just reaction against politicians' and journalists'

canons of usefulness drives him so perilously close to

... an Olympian apathein

In the presence of selected perceptions.115

The Greek image "Olympian apathein" suggests the god's indifference

towards humanity.

There is an elaborate subtlety in the technique of presenting the

diverse images to give the validity of Mauberley's perceptions which is

played off against the 'neo-Nietzschean clatter' and also the gradual fall of the

artist.

115 Hugh Kenner : The Poetry o f Ezra Pound, pp. 177-178.

 274

Mildness, amid the nco-Nictzschcan Clatter,

His sense of graduations.
Quite out of place amid
Resistance to current exacerbations,

Pound's interest in poetry, which he defined as 'the art of getting meaning

into words' was fundamentally opposed to Nietzsche's articulation of the

groundlessness of language. Then the tone shifts from the physical world of

sympathy towards the spiritual state of abstracted passivity, which is now

Mauberley's condition:

Invitation, mere invitation to perceptivity

Gradually led him to the isolation
Which these presents place
Under a more tolerant, perhaps examination.

The opening images like 'the glow of porcelain' and 'the red-beaked

steeds'116have been direct but they have been gradually overlaid by a

crescendo of abstractions with words like 'isolation', 'examination',

'elimination', 'consternation', 'undulation" and 'concentration' etc. in this

stanza and the following two stanzas.

Mauberley finds himself consciously withdrawing from his own

inadequacies and at the same time he tries to preserve a critical distance from

the irrelevantly active world of Mr. Nixon, Nietzsche and Bishop Bloughram.

According to Hugh Kenner, 'the realisation of an impersonality that extracts

n6In Greek legend the Goddess o f love Aphrodite was brought to the island o f Cynthera following her birth from
the sea. Her chariot was pictured as drawn by doves and swans.
 275

strength from b oth th e antithetical cadres of the first tw elv e poem , is the

major ach ievem en t o f these final p a g es of the p o em s '. 117 M auberley s

disappearance in to h is dream w o rld is not con sid ered im portant by the

society:

A pale gold, in the aforesaid pattern.

The unexpected poems
Destroying, certainly, the artist’s urge,
Left him delighted with the imaginary
Audition of the phantasmal sea-surge.

Ultimately Mauberley becom es:

Incapable of the least utterance or composition,

Emendation, conservation of the “better tradition”,
Refinement of medium, elimination of superfluities,
August attraction or concentration.

Pound keeps the phrase 'better tradition' within inverted commas and this

'better tradition' interjects the accent of a Buchanan or an Edmund Gosse.

The other literary canons are Flaubertian. Hugh Kenner in this regard wrote :

Mauberley is not simply a failure by Mr. Nixon's

standards of success, he is a failure tout court, he is the
man to whom that initial epitaph might with justice be
applied; the man for whom the writer of the epitaph has
mistaken 'E.P.'.118

117 Hugh Kenner: The P oetry o f Ezra Pound, p. 178.

118 Hugh Kenner: The P oetry o f Ezra Pound, p .179.

 276

Ultimately Mauberley sinks with a low soft sound, as of whispering or

muttering. It is the self-absorbed degeneration

Lifting the faint susurrus

Of his subjective hosannah.

The closing irony is a sharp focus to this condition, that guaranteed the

situation.

Non-esteem of self-styled “his betters”

Leading, as he well knew,
To his final
Exclusion from the world of letters.

The next section (Poem IV) portrays Mauberley's end as he drifts off to

oblivion, to his own interior paradise island, like the land of Homar's Lotus-

eaters in Odyssey (IX).

Scattered Moluccas
Not knowing, day to day,
The first day’s end, in the next noon ;
The placid water
Unbroken by the Simoon ;
Thick foliage
Placid beneath warm suns,
Tawn fore-shores
Washed in the cobalt of oblivions ;

The technique of distinguishing the motivations and the experiences of

insight solely by scrupulous groupings of notes on 'the connotative or

etymological keyboard' has never been brought to greater refinement. The

whole sequence is again brought back by this vignette of hedonistic drift

protracting the coral island imagery that had troubled Mauberley's reverie.
 277

The im age o f the sp ice g r o w in g isla n d s in the M alay A rchipelago, 'Scattered

Moluccas' an d the 'Sim on' rep resents the p h ysical w o r ld .119The p o em en d s

with an ep itap h scra w led o n an oar :

Then on an oar
Read this :
“I was
“And I no more exist;
“Here drifted
“An hedonist”.

It is a parody of Elpenor's fate in Homer's Odyssey (XI). In the Odyssey one

of Odysseus's ship-mates, Elpenor was killed by accident and was buried on

the sea-shore, and his oar was set in the sand to mark his grave, with a noble

inscription. Pound, however, rendered a version in Canto I in which

Odysseus met the spirit of Elpenor in the land of dead, who begged

Odysseus to set up his oar on the beach as a memorial to him and inscribe

on it, 'A man o f no fortune, and with a name to come'.

“But thou, O King, I bid remember me, unwept, unburied,

“Heap up mine arms, be tomb by sea-bord, and inscribed :
“A man o f no fortune, and with a name to come
“And set my oar up, that I swung mid fellows”.
[Canto I]

The contrast with Mauberley's epitaph is clear and damning, and

strikes a pathetic echo of the elaborate opening of 'Ode Pour L' Election de

son Sepulchre'.

119Simon is the hot, dry, sand-laden wind o f African and Asian deserts which does not, in fact, reach Mollucas.
 278

The final poem 'Medallion' is usually considered as a specimen of

Mauberley's art. As the first part has been concluded with an 'Envoi', this

'Medallion' is to be balanced against 'Envoi'. And its interpretation, like that

of the 'Envoi' has generated a certain amount of confusion due to the fact that

critics persist in projecting upon Pound the aestheticism to which the whole

poem, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley pays farewell. Christine Froula has said :

'Medallion' is unquestionably an accomplished poem;

but like the 'Envoi', it too is limited, in the larger terms
Mauberley sets up.

However a notable difference is that whereas the 'Envoi' represents the lyric

mode, 'Medallion' represents 'Imagist poetics', a visual or 'phanopoeic'

mode". Both 'lyricism' and 'Imagism' are 'departments' of poetry, which

Pound differentiated as follows :

There is a sort of poetry where music, sheer melody,

seems as if were just bursting into speech. [Lyric]

There is another sort of poetry where painting or

sculpture seems as if it were 'just coming over into
121
speech' [Imagist].

'Medallion' has the 'sculpture of rhyme' and sharply engraved imagery, but it

also parodies Mauberley's self-absorption both in its choice of subject and

120Christine Froula, A Guide to Ezra Pound's S elected Poem s, p. 101.

131 Ezra Pound, ‘Vorticism ’, Ezra Pound :A C ritical Anthology, p.47.

in its dispassionate tone. But Humphrey Carpenter has expressed his

reluctance to call 'Medallion' a parody :

...'M edallion', is perhaps meant to be Mauberley's own

work, a highly mannered porcelain portrait of the singer
(therefore, presumably, England herself) of the 'Envoi' of
Part I. Yet it is hard to believe there is meant to be
122
parody in its muted tones.

The question is, could the drifting, hedonist Mauberley really have created a

poem like 'Medallion', in the Imagist way. Donald Davie has provided an

answer to it :

It crops up again, however in respect of the last section of

the whole poem. Since we have learned that Mauberley,
at a relatively early stage of his disastrous career,
attempted in poetry something analogous to the severe
and limited art of the medallist, the title 'Medallion'
given to these last quatrains must mean that here again
Mauberley is speaking, that this is one of his poems,
closing the sequence, just as another of his poems opened
it.123

'Medallion' begins with the stanza :

Luini in porcelain!
The grand piano
Utters a profane
Protest with her dear Soprano

122 Humphrey Carpenter, A Serious Character, p.369.

123Donald Davie, ‘Ezra Pound’s Hugh Selwyn M auberley', Pelican Guide to English Literature, p.32<S’.
Bemado Luini was one of the pupils of Leonardo da Vinci. He painted in oils.

Reinach made the following comment about Luini's work :124

his elegance is superficial, his drawing uncertain and his

125
power of invention limited.

But Mauberley's productions are more brittle still; as if an artist like Luini

were working in Porcelain.

The tone, is objective in a way that detaches the 'Medallion' from the

claims of various worlds of perception projected in earlier parts of the poem.

There are witty echoes of those worlds in the 'profane protest' of 'The grand

piano'. The protest was not only against the 'clear Soprano' but the world of

'professional letters' also. Hugh Kenner compared this 'profane protest' to 'as
126
the young horse whining against the tubas' of (Canto LXXIX).

The next stanza describing the singer reads :

The sleek head emerges

From the gold-yellow frock
As Anadyomene in the opening
Pages of Reinach.

124 Solomon Reinach (1 8 5 8 -1 9 3 2 ), French archaeologist and art historian and author o f Apollo ( 1904), a hook on
ancient sculpture.

125 Christine Frau Ia, A Guide to Ezra Pound's S elected Poems, p. 104.

126 Hugh Kenner: The Poetry o f Ezra Pound, p. 126.

 2X1

A nadyom ene is a Greek epithet m e a n in g 'risin g from sea'. The epithet is

associated with Aphrodite's birth. Regarding this image of Aphrodite or

Venus, Donald Davie has w ritten:

Venus Anadyomene, the mythological expression of how

sexual and other vitality is renewed, hardens under
Mauberley's hand into the glazed frontispiece to a book
127
on frontispiece comparative Religion.

This image is contrasted 'to the Strait head/ Of Messalina ...'i n the opening

poem of Part II. It is to be noted here that the head is rising Venus-like from

the sea, for Mauberley ; but not the breast or the loins from the 'gold-yellow

frock'. There appears no reason to doubt that the woman here described is

the same figure whose challenge earlier, Mauberley could only evade.

Everything that is hard, metallic, and ominous in Mauberley's description of

her as an image in a poem symbolises his fear of her as a person, and his

inability to meet her with any sort of human response.

Honey-red, closing the face oval,

A basket-work of braids which seemed as if they were
Spun in King Mino’s hall
From metal or intractable amber.

King Minos was the ancient king of Crete after whom the high civilization of

the 'Minoan period' is named. This stanza strikes the tone of the poem, T he

Age Demanded'

1Z7 ‘Ezra Pound’s Hugh Selwyn M auberley'. P elican Guide to English Literature, p.329
 A Minoan undulation
Seen, wc admit, amid ambrosial circumstances.

And 'Amber' in v ite s a d a m n in g co m p a riso n w ith the 'm agic amber' of the

'Envoi' metal. It is symptomatic of Mauberley's degeneration. Mauberley's

deficiencies as a writer are identical with his deficiencies as a human being.

Pound used the word 'amber' to describe the writings of fellow modernists
128
like James Joyce and Wyndham Lewis.

The closing stanza of the poem, according to Hugh Kenner, 'is pitched

to a key a quasi-scientific meticulousness that delivers with Flaubertian

inscrutability'.129It is a verdict of the inadequacy of all the squinting of

Mauberley. Donald Davie has also commented :

It shows too how Pound was aware of just these dangers

in a too unqualified acceptance of the Flaubertian
doctrine of 'le m ot juste', as also in the programmes of
the Imagists.130

It is the real fate of art and the artists in a culture characterised by

commercialism and false values, as the English culture was during the early

decades of the century. 'Medallion' closes with the following stanza :

The face-oval beneath the glaze,

Bright in its suave bounding-line, as,
Beneath half-watt rays.
The eyes turn topaz.

128 The New Age, 29 January, 1920. Quoted in Christine Froula, A Guide to Ezra P ound’s Selected Poems, p. 104.

129 Hugh Kenner, The Poetry o f Ezra Pound, p.1 8 1 .

130 ‘Ezra Pound’s Hugh Selwyn M auberley' , p .328.
Regarding these lin e s Hugh Kenner sim p ly w rote :

Beauty ? Irony? Geometrical and optical fact ?131

This is the final irony of 'To present the series/ Of curious heads in

medallion (Poem 2, Part II), which was Mauberley's ambition and this

sample 'Medallion' in its very scrupulousness exemplifies his sterility. His

imagination falls back upon precedent writings and experiences ; his visual

images comes out of an art-gallery and his Venus Anadyomene, out of a

book. However, the poem is not without distinction; it shows exactness of

observation, clarity of order and compact economy in the phrasing.

Mauberley, certainly has got the poetic ability. Like Pound's his true

Penelope was also Flaubert. The only difference is that Pound's 'Envoi'

moves with 'authority of another order' whereas Mauberley moves with fear

before the 'age's demands'. Hugh Kenner has said that Mauberley wrote one

poem and collapsed :

Pound with sardonic compliance presents the age with

its desiderated 'image' (poems 3-12); then proves he was
. right from the start by offering an indisputable climax,
the 'sculpture of rhyme' and 'sublime in the old sense'
which the epitaph-writer had dismissed as a foolish

131 Hugh Kenner, The P oetry o f Ezra Pound, p. 181.

132 Hugh Kenner, The P oetry o f Ezra Pound, p. 181.

 2X4

By adding a sy m p a th etic ob itu a ry an d h is o w n ep ita p h for h is a lte r e g o

Pound im p lies that n o E n glish w riter is lik ely to d o any better than

Mauberley d id .

The final impression that Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, for all its apparent

scheme and its frequent concern with the literary world that Pound knew,

gives in the end, is chiefly an abstract work, which takes care of the sounds in

the hope that the sense will take care of itself. It is a game with language,

rhythm and metre. Perhaps that is why Micheal Alexander has said :

M auberley is indeed extraordinarily concentrated and

complex — a more disciplined poem, more unified in its
imagery, than The Waste L a n d ; and with the sharpest
133
and wittiest use of rhyme.

Eliot also admitted it when he said, 'this seems to me a great poem'; and he

added quickly, 'I only pretend to know as much about versifying as my

carpenter knows about wood work, or my painter knows about

distemper'.134 But Ezra Pound, 'The better Craftsman' wrote :

In verse only one can take any damn constant one likes,
one can alliterate, or assone, or rhyme, or quant, or
135
smack, only one MUST leave other elements irregular.

133 Micheal Alexander : T he P oetic A chievem ent o f Ezra Pound, p. 121

IUJ,P. Sullivan, ed.. Ezra P o u n d : A C ritical Anthology, p.109.

135Quoted in Humphrey Carpenter, A Serious C h aracter.p .310.

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This is the principle on which Mauberley is constructed. But specifically

about the Mauberley style of verse Pound wrote :

There are not any rules. Thing is to cut a shape in time.

Sounds that stop the flow, and durations either of
syllables, or implied between them.136

The poem is much more than an Imagist's exploration of language and

Images, but definitely an Imagist experiment on sophistication and

compactness, which according to Eliot, by 'a man who knows his way about'.

136Humphrey Carpenter, A S eriou s C lu iracter.p.37 1.