Excerpt from Canzoni of Ezra Pound Canzoni Canzon: The Yearly Slain (Written In Reply To Mannings "Kore.") "Et huiusmodi stantiae usus est fere in omnibus cantionibus suis Arnaldus Danielis et nos eum secuti sumus." Dante, De Vulgari Eloquio, II. 10. I Ah! red-leafed time hath driven out the rose And crimson dew is fallen on the leaf Ere ever yet the cold white wheat be sown That hideth all earth's green and sere and red; The Moon-flower's fallen and the branch is bare, Holding no honey for the starry bees; The Maiden turns to her dark lords demesne. II Fairer than Enna's field when Ceres sows The stars of hyacinth and puts off grief, Fairer than petals on May morning blown Through apple-orchards where the sun hath shed His brighter petals down to make them fair; Fairer than these the Poppy-crowned One flees, And Joy goes weeping in her scarlet train. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works."
Author
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet, critic and intellectual who was a major figure of the Modernist movement in early-to-mid 20th century poetry. Pound's The Cantos contains music and bears a title that could be translated as The Songs—although it never is. Pound's ear was tuned to the motz et sons of troubadour poetry where, as musicologist John Stevens has noted, "melody and poem existed in a state of the closest symbiosis, obeying the same laws and striving in their different media for the same sound-ideal - armonia." In his essays, Pound wrote of rhythm as "the hardest quality of a man's style to counterfeit." He challenged young poets to train their ear with translation work to learn how the choice of words and the movement of the words combined. But having translated texts from 10 different languages into English, Pound found that translation did not always serve the poetry: "The grand bogies for young men who want really to learn strophe writing are Catullus and François Villon. I personally have been reduced to setting them to music as I cannot translate them." While he habitually wrote out verse rhythms as musical lines, Pound did not set his own poetry to music.
