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Middle-Aged

By Ezra Pound 1885–1972 Ezra Pound

A STUDY IN AN EMOTION

"'Tis but a vague, invarious delight.

As gold that rains about some buried king.

As the fine flakes,

When tourists frolicking

Stamp on his roof or in the glazing light

Try photographs, wolf down their ale and cakes

And start to inspect some further pyramid;

As the fine dust, in the hid cell beneath

Their transitory step and merriment,

Drifts through the air, and the sarcophagus

Gains yet another crust

Of useless riches for the occupant,

So I, the fires that lit once dreams

Now over and spent,

Lie dead within four walls

And so now love

Rains down and so enriches some stiff case,

And strews a mind with precious metaphors,

And so the space

Of my still consciousness

Is full of gilded snow,

The which, no cat has eyes enough

To see the brightness of."

Source: Poetry (October 1912).

Biography

Of all the major literary figures in the twentieth century, Ezra Pound has been one of the most controversial; he has also been one of modern poetry's most important contributors. In an introduction to the Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot declared that Pound "is more responsible for the twentieth-century revolution in poetry than is any other individual." Four decades later, Donald Hall reaffirmed in remarks collected . . .

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