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,