"Pink pigs blossoming upon the hillside";
or of the Post-Impressionists who beseech their ladies to let down slate-blue hair over their raspberry-coloured flanks.
Ardoise rimed richly—ah, richly and rarely rimed!—with framboise.
As for the future, Les Imagistes, the descendants of the forgotten school of 1909, have that in their keeping.
I refrain from publishing my proposed Historical Memoir of their forerunners, because Mr Hulme has threatened to print the original propaganda.
E.P.
[1] Mr Pound has grossly exaggerated my age.—T.E.H.
AUTUMN
A touch of cold in the Autumn night—
I walked abroad,
And saw the ruddy moon lean over a hedge
Like a red-faced farmer.
I did not stop to speak, but nodded,
And round about were the wistful stars
With white faces like town children.
MANA ABODA
Beauty is the marking-time, the stationary vibration,
the feigned ecstasy of an arrested impulse unable to
reach its natural end.
Mana Aboda, whose bent form
The sky in archèd circle is,
Seems ever for an unknown grief to mourn.
Yet on a day I heard her cry:
"I weary of the roses and the singing poets—
Josephs all, not tall enough to try."
ABOVE THE DOCK
Above the quiet dock in mid night,
Tangled in the tall mast's corded height,
Hangs the moon. What seemed so far away
Is but a child's balloon, forgotten after play.
THE EMBANKMENT
(The fantasia of a fallen gentleman
on a cold, bitter night.)
Once, in finesse of fiddles found I ecstasy,
In the flash of gold heels on the hard pavement.
Now see I
That warmth's the very stuff of poesy.
Oh, God, make small
The old star-eaten blanket of the sky,
That I may fold it round me and in comfort lie.
CONVERSION
Lighthearted I walked into the valley wood
In the time of hyacinths,
Till beauty like a scented cloth
Cast over, stifled me. I was bound
Motionless and faint of breath
By loveliness that is her own eunuch.
Now pass I to the final river
Ignominiously, in a sack, without sound,
As any peeping Turk to the Bosphorus.