End to Torment: A Memoir of Ezra Pound Page 7

  8 Klinik Hirslanden. The clinic in Zürich at which H.D. received treatment for a broken hip.

  9 Frances Gregg [Josepha]. A childhood friend of Hilda from Philadelphia. They traveled to Europe together in 1911.

  10 Richard Aldington. British poet, essayist, and translator. H.D. and Aldington were married in 1913, separated in 1919, and divorced in 1938. With Pound and H.D., Aldington was an original member of the “imagist” group of poets.

  11 Bryher. Pen name (later legalized) of Winifred Ellerman, British novelist, and friend of H.D.

  12 May Sinclair. British novelist, 1870-1946. The Divine Fire, London, 1904.

  13 Séraphita. A mystical novella by Balzac, first published in 1835, whose protagonist is an androgynous figure variously called Séraphita or Séraphitus. Much of the book is devoted to an explication of Swedenborg’s doctrines of theosophy.

  14 10ème Jour lunaire. This prayer is quoted from Le Kabbale pratique by Robert Ambelain, Paris, 1951, p. 220.

  15 Merkur, January 1958. The article by Peter Demetz, entitled “Marginalien: Ezra Pounds Pisaner Gesänge,” appeared in Merkur, January 1958, v. 12, pp. 97-100. It intersperses commentary on the Pisan Cantos with a report on a visit by Demetz with Pound, at St. Elizabeth’s. He describes Pound’s profile as that of a Raubkatze (predatory cat), and refers to him as “den heimlichen Kaiser der amerikanischen Dichtung”: the hidden emperor of American poetry.

  16 15ème Jour lunaire. From Le Kabbale pratique by Robert Ambelain, p. 222.

  17 “They asked him to leave.” Pound was an assistant professor of Romance languages at Wabash College, Crawfordsville, Indiana in 1907-1908. He did not fit in well at the small Indiana college (he later wrote that they considered him too much “the Latin quarter type”: see Noel Stock, The Life of Ezra Pound, New York, 1970, p. 43). He was asked to resign his position after a landlady discovered a woman in his rooms.

  18 “Maenad, bassarid.” “Maelid and bassarid among lynxes,” from the “lynx-hymn” of Canto 79.

  19 “strange spells of old deity.” From “Cino,” A Lume Spento, 1908. See the Collected Early Poems of Ezra Pound, New York, 1976, p. 10.

  20 Dorothy Shakespear. Pound met Dorothy Shakespear in 1909; they were married April 20, 1914.

  21 “There is a stir of dust from old leaves …” Canto 79.

  22 Mosher reprint. The Romance of Tristram and Iseult, retold by J. Bedier, tr. by H. Belloc, Portland, Me., Thomas Bird Mosher, 1907.

  23 The Gadfly, New York, 1897. A historical novel by Ethel Voynich (1864-1960), set in mid-19th-century Italy. It is strongly anticlerical; the hero, the illegitimate son of an Italian prelate, is involved in revolutionary activities, and also publishes political verse-lampoons for the Republican movement under the pseudonym “The Gadfly.” His signature is the sketch of a gadfly with spread wings; he is slightly crippled, and as a youth spent some time as a “zany” in a traveling circus. He is eventually captured, court-martialed, and executed.

  24 Ezra Pound, Dichtung und Prosa. Trans. Eva Hesse, Zürich, Im Verlag der Arche, 1953.

  25 “pig stye.” In 1954 Pound had written to H.D. concerning her interest in Freud: “You got into the wrong pig stye, ma chére. But not too late to climb out.” Quoted in Pearson’s foreword to Tribute to Freud, Boston, 1974.

  26 Motive and Method in the Cantos of Ezra Pound, ed. Lewis Leary, New York, 1954.

  27 Frobenius. Leo Viktor Frobenius (1873-1938), German cultural anthropologist and archaeologist. Guy Davenport, “Pound and Frobenius,” in Leary, pp. 33-59.

  28 An Examination of Ezra Pound, ed. Peter Russell, New York, 1950. In response to Peter Russell’s request for an article in honor of Pound’s 65th birthday, H.D. wrote a letter which contained a brief memoir of Pound, the seed of End to Torment. The letter was never published, and was eventually sold to H. Alan Clodd and then to Norman Holmes Pearson. It is now in the Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Library, Yale University.

  29 “San Cristoforo …’’ Canto 93.

  30 Undine. American painter who became a friend of Pound during the St. Elizabeth’s years.

  31 Poetry. “An Exchange on Ezra Pound,” Poetry, XCI, 3 (December 1957), pp. 209-11. The correspondence concerns the poor quality of the F.B.I. transcripts of Pound’s broadcasts on Rome Radio and the consequent merits of the treason charge placed against him.

  32 “Helen and Achilles.” Helen in Egypt, New York, 1961.

  33 “Pomona, Pomona. Christo Re, Dio Sole.” Cantos 79 and 82.

  34 “Arche Verlag.” Dichtung und Prosa, ed. Eva Hesse, Zürich, 1953.

  35 A Lume Spento, 1908-1958, Milan, 1958. A selection from Pound’s earliest published poems, with a few poems from the San Trovaso Notebook of 1908.

  36 “Venetian Night Litany.” In A Quinzaine for this Yule (1908); see the Collected Early Poems of Ezra Pound, p. 60: “Night Litany.” The autograph manuscript, to which H.D. refers, was published in facsimile in A Lume Spento, 1908-1958.

  37 “she danced like a pink moth in the shrubbery.” From “Au Jardin,” Canzoni (1911); see Collected Early Poems, p. 174.

  38 Undine’s little book. Published in Milan; a small booklet of reproductions of paintings, with an introduction by Ezra Pound.

  39 Mrs. Shakespear’s death. Olivia Shakespear, Dorothy Pound’s mother, died in October 1938. The Fifth Decad of Cantos, London and New York, 1937.

  40 The Children’s Crusade by Marcel Schwob, trans. H. C. Greene, Portland, Me., 1905. A book of prose-poems written from the viewpoint of various participants in the Children’s Crusade of 1212. (First published, Boston, 1898.)

  41 “The Goodly Fere.” “Ballad of the Goodly Fere,” Exultations, 1909; see Collected Early Poems, p. 112.

  42 “Tudor indeed is gone and every rose.” Canto 80.

  43 “Klages’ Cosmogonic Eros.” Ludwig Klages, Vom Kosmogonischen Eros, Jena, 1930.

  44 Margaret Snively [Pratt], A friend of H.D. and Pound in Wyncote.

  45 “some dull opiate to the brain, and Lethe-wards had sunk.” See Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale”: “Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains / One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk.”

  46 Modern American Poetry, ed. Conrad Aiken, New York, 1927. See illustration, p. 59.

  47 José Vasquez Amaral. Friend of Pound and Undine; translator of the Cantos into Spanish.

  48 “Evadne.” In Selected Poems of H.D., New York, 1957, p. 38.

  49 Denton Welch, A Voice Through a Cloud, London, 1951.

  50 Confucius to Cummings. Ed. Ezra Pound and Marcella Spann, New York, 1964.

  “HILDA’S BOOK”

  “Hilda’s Book” is a small (13.7 cm. × 10.5 cm.) book, hand-bound and sewn in vellum, of 57 leaves (first leaf handwritten on vellum), with vellum closures. Due to heat or water damage, the first (vellum) leaf has fused to the paper leaf behind it (partially obscuring the poem beginning, “I strove a little book,” which has been deciphered with the help of another manuscript in the Pound Archive of the C.A.L., Beinecke Library, Yale University). The last paper leaf has also fused to the back vellum. The title, “Hilda’s Book,” is handwritten in black ink, in ornamental script, on the front cover. It has partially faded with time.

  All but two of the poems are typed, with a blue ribbon; the first poem (“Child of the grass”) is handwritten in black ink in ornamental script on the opening vellum leaf, and some of the final words have worn away with age. Another poem (“Sancta Patrona”) is handwritten on the verso of leaf 55 (following the second page of “The Wind”), perhaps as an afterthought.

  Pound’s corrections to the poems are handwritten in black ink or red pencil, often obscure because of smudging or fading. Where possible I have followed Pound’s notations in establishing the texts of the poems, although some readings are uncertain because of multiple corrections or illegibility of the notes due to age. A few of the poems show extensive handwritten revision, but most are typed fair copies.

  The poems in “Hilda’s
Book” were composed during the first years of Pound’s friendship with Hilda Doolittle, 1905-07, the period recalled in her memoir, End to Torment. Four of the poems were later published, with some changes, in Pound’s early volumes: “La Donzella Beata,” “Li Bel Chasteus,” “Era Venuta” (as “Comraderie”), and “The Tree.” The poem entitled “To draw back into the soul of things. Pax” is included in another version (“Sonnet of the August Calm”) in the San Trovaso Notebook of 1908, as is “The Banners” (“Fratello Mio Zephyrus”). The poems from the San Trovaso Notebook are published in the Collected Early Poems of Ezra Pound (New York, 1976). Variant readings and publication histories of the early poems are given in the notes to that book. The poems of “Hilda’s Book,” and others in the San Trovaso Notebook, are among many other early poems addressed to Hilda (as “Is-hilda” or “Ysolt”) which remain unpublished, and are now in the Pound Archive at Yale.

  M.K.

  Child of the grass

  The years pass Above us

  Shadows of air All these shall Love us

  Winds for our fellows

  The browns and the yellows

  Of autumn our colors

  Now at our life’s morn. Be we well sworn

  Ne’er to grow older

  Our spirits be bolder At meeting

  Than e’er before All the old lore

  Of the forests & woodways

  Shall aid us: Keep we the bond & seal

  Ne’er shall we feel

  Aught of sorrow

  [ … ]

  Let light [?] flow about thee

  As […?] a cloak of air [?]

  I strove a little book to make for her,

  Quaint bound, as ’twere in parchment very old,

  That all my dearest words of her should hold,

  Wherein I speak of mystic wings that whirr

  Above me when within my soul do stir

  Strange holy longings

  That may not be told

  Wherein all autumn’s crimson and fine gold

  And wold smells subtle as far-wandered myrrh

  Should be as burden to my heart’s own song.

  I pray thee love these wildered words of mine:

  Tho I be weak, is beauty alway strong,

  So be they cup-kiss to the mingled wine

  That life shall pour for us life’s ways among.

  Ecco il libro: for the book is thine.

  Being alone where the way was full of dust, I said

  “Era mea

  In qua terra

  Dulce myrrtii floribus

  Rosa amoris

  Via erroris

  Ad te coram veniam”

  And afterwards being come to a woodland place where the sun was warm amid the autumn, my lips, striving to speak for my heart, formed those words which here follow.

  La Donzella Beata

  Soul

  Caught in the rose hued mesh

  Of o’er fair earthly flesh

  Stooped you again to bear

  This thing for me

  And be rare light

  For me, gold white

  In the shadowy path I tread?

  Surely a bolder maid art thou

  Than one in tearful fearful longing

  That would wait Lily-cinctured

  Star-diademed at the gate

  Of high heaven crying that I should come

  To thee.

  The Wings

  A wondrous holiness hath touched me

  And I have felt the whirring of its wings

  Above me, Lifting me above all terrene things

  As her fingers fluttered into mine

  Its wings whirring above me as it passed

  I know no thing therelike, lest it be

  A lapping wind among the pines

  Half shadowed of a hidden moon

  A wind that presseth close

  and kisseth not

  But whirreth, soft as light

  Of twilit streams in hidden ways

  This is base thereto and unhallowed …

  Her fingers layed on mine in fluttering benediction

  And above the whirring of all-holy wings.

  Ver Novum

  Thou that art sweeter than all orchards’ breath

  And clearer than the sun gleam after rain

  Thou that savest my soul’s self from death

  As scorpion’s is, of self-inflicted pain

  Thou that dost ever make demand for the best I have to give

  Gentle to utmost courteousy bidding only my pure-purged spirits live:

  Thou that spellest ever gold from out my dross

  Mage powerful and subtly sweet

  Gathering fragments that there be no loss

  Behold the brighter gains lie at thy feet.

  If any flower mortescent lay in sun-withering dust

  If any old forgotten sweetness of a former drink

  Naught but stilt fragrance of autumnal flowers

  Mnemonic of spring’s bloom and parody of powers

  That make the spring the mistress of our earth—

  If such a perfume of a dulled rebirth

  Lingered, obliviate with o’er mistrust,

  Marcescent, fading on the dolorous brink

  That border is to that marasmic sea

  Where all desire’s harmony

  Tendeth and endeth in sea monotone

  Blendeth wave and wind and rocks most drear

  Into dull sub-harmonies of light; out grown

  From man’s compass of intelligence,

  Where love and fear meet

  Having ceased to be:

  All this, and such disconsolate finery

  As doth remain in this gaunt castle of my heart

  Thou gatherest of thy clemency

  Sifting the fair and foul apart,

  Thou weavest for thy self a sun-gold bower

  By subtily incanted raed

  Every unfavorable and ill-happed hour

  Turneth blind and potently is stayed

  Before the threshold of thy dwelling place

  Holy, as beneath all-holy wings

  Some sacred covenant had passed thereby

  Wondrous as wind murmurings

  That night thy fingers laid on mine their benediction

  When thru the interfoliate strings

  Joy sang among God’s earthly trees

  Yea in this house of thine that I have found at last

  Meseemeth a high heaven’s antepast

  And thou thyself art unto me

  Both as the glory head and sun

  Casting thine own anthelion

  Thru this dull mist

  My soul was wont to be.

  To One That Journeyeth with Me

  “Naethless, whither thou goest I will go”

  Let, Dear, this sweet thing be, if be it may

  But hear this truth for truth,

  Let hence and alway whither soe’er I wander there I know

  Thy presence, if the waning wind move slow

  Thru woodlands where the sun’s last vassals stray

  Or if the dawn with shimmering array

  Doth spy the land where eastward peaks bend low.

  Yea all day long as one not wholly seen

  Nor ever wholly lost unto my sight

  Thou mak’st me company for love’s sweet sake

  Wherefor this praising from my heart I make

  To one that brav’st the way with me for night

  Or day, and drinks with me the soft wind and the keen.

  Domina

  My Lady is tall and fair to see

  She swayeth as a poplar tree

  When the wind bloweth merrily

  Her eyes are grey as the grey of the sea

  Not clouded much to trouble me

  When the wind bloweth merrily

  My Lady’s glance is fair and straight

  My Lady’s smile is changed of late

  Tho the wind bloweth merrily

  Some new soul in her eyes I
see

  Not as year-syne she greeteth me

  When the wind bloweth merrily