The Garden
Ezra Pound
En robe de parade.
Samain.
Like a skein of loose silk blown against a wall
She walks by the railing of a path in Kensington Gardens,
And she is dying piece-meal
of a sort of emotional anæmia.
And round about there is a rabble
Of the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor.
They shall inherit the earth.
In her is the end of breeding.
Her boredom is exquisite and excessive.
She would like someone to speak to her,
And is almost afraid that I
will commit that indiscretion.
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound (1885-1972) was an American poet, critic, translator and publisher. He was one of the most important figures of the Modernist movement in the first half of the 20th century, and he exerted a large influence on writers active in that period.
From 1908 Pound made Europe his permanent home. After working briefly as
a guide in Gibraltar and publishing a book in Venice, he went to live
in London, where he worked as the London correspondent for Poetry Magazine and was among the first to review the work of Robert Frost and
D.H. Lawrence. In 1924 he moved to Italy. Pound became a controversial
figure because of his support of Mussolini in the 1930s and during the
war years. This is cited as the reason why he never won the Nobel Prize
in Literature.
Pound is well-known for his interest in Japanese and Chinese literature and culture. Cathay (1915) is a collection of classical Chinese poetry translated into modernist English poetry based on Ernest Fenollosa's notes that came into Pound's possession in 1913. Until Pound's time, English translations were made on rhyme, which forced the translators to divert much further than Pound did from the Chinese originals; after Pound, renderings in blank or free verse became the norm (and still are). Of course, there is a good reason why Imagist poets reworked Chinese and Japanese poetry: East Asian lyrical poetry is based on images and not on rhetoric or reasoning as is so much of Western poetry. Everyone knows Pound's Imagist haiku "In a Station of the Metro": The apparition of these faces in the crowd: Petals on a wet, black bough.
"The Garden" was written during WWI, a convulsion which would completely change Europe. It formed in every sense the true end of the 19th c. and brought immense social change - and that is what Pound ironically addresses in this poem. Kensington Gardens is the western extension of Hyde Park in the fashionable neighborhood of Kensington. Pound contrasts a wealthy and emotionally blocked woman from the dying upper-class, with the filthy but strong and vigorous children of the poor she sees playing in the park. He concludes that these children will own the future, not the bored upper-class which has ruled so far but which is bound by antiquated customs. The social change of the early 20th c. is made tangible in just 12 lines of poetry!
Source: From Lustra, 1916. Wikisource, Public Domain.
Photos:
Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons