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    Imagist Poetry: An Anthology: Pound, Lawrence, Joyce, Stevens and others
    Imagist Poetry: An Anthology: Pound, Lawrence, Joyce, Stevens and others
    Imagist Poetry: An Anthology: Pound, Lawrence, Joyce, Stevens and others
    Ebook330 pages2 hours

    Imagist Poetry: An Anthology: Pound, Lawrence, Joyce, Stevens and others

    By Dover Publications

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    About this ebook

    Many of the 20th century's most important and influential poets rallied under the banner of Imagism, a radical poetic movement that extended the frontiers of English literature. By following a strict set of principles — including direct treatment of the subject, minimal use of adjectives, precision of language, and the development of an individual rhythmic style — the Imagists created dazzling works of gemlike appeal.
    This volume contains over 180 well-chosen Imagist masterpieces by Erza Pound, D. H. Lawrence, H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), James Joyce, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and other masters. Its roster of lesser-known poets features Richard Aldington, Walter Conrad Arensberg, Skipworth Cannéll, Adelaide Crapsey, John Gould Fletcher, and many others.
    Several of these poems appeared first in books by the represented poets and in the very first Imagist anthologies; others were published in such journals as Poetry, The Dial, The Trend, and The Egoist. Carefully chosen for their individual poetic strengths as well as their characteristic illustration of Imagism, these verses represent the very best of thousands of "imagistic" verses published from 1913 to 1922.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDover Publications
    Release dateApr 30, 2012
    ISBN9780486153803
    Imagist Poetry: An Anthology: Pound, Lawrence, Joyce, Stevens and others

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      Book preview

      Imagist Poetry - Dover Publications

      RICHARD ALDINGTON

      (1892-1962)

      The Poplar

      Why do you always stand there shivering

      Between the white stream and the road?

      The people pass through the dust

      On bicycles, in carts, in motor-cars;

      The waggoners go by at dawn;

      The lovers walk on the grass path at night.

      Stir from your roots, walk, poplar!

      You are more beautiful than they are.

      I know that the white wind loves you,

      Is always kissing you and turning up

      The white lining of your green petticoat.

      The sky darts through you like blue rain,

      And the grey rain drips on your flanks

      And loves you.

      And I have seen the moon

      Slip his silver penny into your pocket

      As you straightened your hair;

      And the white mist curling and hesitating

      Like a bashful lover about your knees.

      I know you, poplar;

      I have watched you since I was ten.

      But if you had a little real love,

      A little strength,

      You would leave your nonchalant idle lovers

      And go walking down the white road

      Behind the waggoners.

      There are beautiful beeches down beyond the hill.

      Will you always stand there shivering?

      Summer

      A butterfly,

      Black and scarlet,

      Spotted with white,

      Fans its wings

      Over a privet flower.

      A thousand crimson foxgloves,

      Tall bloody pikes,

      Stand motionless in the gravel quarry;

      The wind runs over them.

      A rose film over a pale sky

      Fantastically cut by dark chimneys;

      Candles winking in the windows

      Across an old city-garden.

      Evening

      The chimneys, rank on rank,

      Cut the clear sky;

      The moon

      With a rag of gauze about her loins

      Poses among them, an awkward Venus—

      And here am I looking wantonly at her

      Over the kitchen sink.

      Choricos

      The ancient songs

      Pass deathward mournfully.

      Cold lips that sing no more, and withered wreaths,

      Regretful eyes, and drooping breasts and wings—

      Symbols of ancient songs

      Mournfully passing

      Down to the great white surges,

      Watched of none

      Save the frail sea-birds

      And the lithe pale girls,

      Daughters of Okeanus.

      And the songs pass

      From the green land

      Which lies upon the waves as a leaf

      On the flowers of hyacinth;

      And they pass from the waters,

      The manifold winds and the dim moon,

      And they come,

      Silently winging through soft Kimmerian dusk,

      To the quiet level lands

      That she keeps for us all,

      That she wrought for us all for sleep

      In the silver days of the earth’s dawning—

      Proserpina, daughter of Zeus.

      And we turn from the Kuprian’s breasts,

      And we turn from thee,

      Phoibos Apollon,

      And we turn from the music of old

      And the hills that we loved and the meads,

      And we turn from the fiery day,

      And the lips that were over sweet;

      For silently

      Brushing the fields with red-shod feet,

      With purple robe

      Searing the flowers as with a sudden flame,

      Death,

      Thou hast come upon us.

      And of all the ancient songs

      Passing to the swallow-blue halls

      By the dark streams of Persephone,

      This only remains:

      That we turn to thee,

      Death,

      That we turn to thee, singing

      One last song.

      O Death,

      Thou art an healing wind

      That blowest over white flowers

      A-tremble with dew;

      Thou art a wind flowing

      Over dark leagues of lonely sea;

      Thou art the dusk and the fragrance;

      Thou art the lips of love mournfully smiling;

      Thou art the pale peace of one

      Satiate with old desires;

      Thou art the silence of beauty,

      And we look no more for the morning

      We yearn no more for the sun,

      Since with thy white hands,

      Death,

      Thou crownest us with the pallid chaplets,

      The slim colourless poppies

      Which in thy garden alone

      Softly thou gatherest.

      And silently,

      And with slow feet approaching,

      And with bowed head and unlit eyes,

      We kneel before thee:

      And thou, leaning towards us,

      Caressingly layest upon us

      Flowers from thy thin cold hands,

      And, smiling as a chaste woman

      Knowing love in her heart,

      Thou sealest our eyes

      And the illimitable quietude

      Comes gently upon us.

      To a Greek Marble

      Π e9780486153803_img_8057.gif τνια, π e9780486153803_img_8057.gif τνια³

      White grave goddess,

      Pity my sadness,

      O silence of Paros.

      I am not of these about thy feet,

      These garments and decorum;

      I am thy brother,

      Thy lover of aforetime crying to thee,

      And thou hearest me not.

      I have whispered thee in thy solitudes

      Of our loves in Phrygia,

      The far ecstasy of burning noons

      When the fragile pipes

      Ceased in the cypress shade,

      And the brown fingers of the shepherd

      Moved over slim shoulders;

      And only the cicada sang.

      I have told thee of the hills

      And the lisp of reeds

      And the sun upon thy breasts,

      And thou hearest me not,

      Π e9780486153803_img_8057.gif τνια, π e9780486153803_img_8057.gif τνια

      Thou hearest me not.

      Au Vieux Jardin

      I have sat here happy in the gardens,

      Watching the still pool and the reeds

      And the dark clouds

      Which the wind of the upper air

      Tore like the green leafy boughs

      Of the divers-hued trees of late summer;

      But though I greatly delight

      In these and the water lilies,

      That which sets me nighest to weeping

      Is the rose and white colour of the smooth flag-stones,

      And the pale yellow grasses

      Among them.

      Lesbia

      Use no more speech now;

      Let the silence spread gold hair above us

      Fold on delicate fold;

      You had the ivory of my life to carve.

      Use no more speech.

      e9780486153803_i0003.jpg

      And Picus of Mirandola is dead;

      And all the gods they dreamed and fabled of,

      Hermes, and Thoth, and Christ, are rotten now,

      Rotten and dank.

      e9780486153803_i0004.jpg

      And through it all I see your pale Greek face;

      Tenderness makes me as eager as a little child

      To love you

      You morsel left half cold on Caesar’s plate.

      Beauty Thou Hast Hurt Me Overmuch

      The light is a wound to me.

      The soft notes

      Feed upon the wound.

      Where wert thou born

      O thou woe

      That consumest my life?

      Whither comest thou?

      Toothed wind of the seas,

      No man knows thy beginning.

      As a bird with strong claws

      Thou woundest me,

      O beautiful sorrow.

      Argyria

      O you,

      O you most fair,

      Swayer of reeds, whisperer

      Among the flowering rushes,

      You have hidden your hands

      Beneath the poplar leaves,

      You have given them to the white waters.

      Swallow-fleet,

      Sea-child cold from waves,

      Slight reed that sang so blithely in the wind,

      White cloud the white sun kissed into the air;

      Pan mourns for you.

      White limbs, white song,

      Pan mourns for you.

      In the Via Sestina

      O daughter of Isis,

      Thou standest beside the wet highway

      Of this decayed Rome,

      A manifest harlot.

      Straight and slim art thou

      As a marble phallus;

      Thy face is the face of Isis

      Carven

      As she is carven in basalt.

      And my heart stops with awe

      At the presence of the gods,

      There beside thee on the stall of images

      Is the head of Osiris

      Thy lord.

      The River

      I

      I drifted along the river

      Until I moored my boat

      By these crossed trunks.

      Here the mist moves

      Over fragile leaves and rushes,

      Colourless waters and brown fading hills.

      She has come from beneath the trees,

      Moving within the mist,

      A floating leaf.

      II

      O blue flower of the evening,

      You have touched my face

      With your leaves of silver.

      Love me for I must depart.

      Bromios

      The withered bonds are broken.

      The waxed reeds and the double pipe

      Clamour about me;

      The hot wind swirls

      Through the red pine trunks.

      Io! the fauns and the satyrs.

      The touch of their shagged curled fur

      And blunt horns!

      They have wine in heavy craters

      Painted black and red;

      Wine to splash on her white body.

      Io!

      She shrinks from the cold shower—

      Afraid, afraid!

      Let the Maenads break through the myrtles

      And the boughs of the rohododaphnai.

      Let them tear the quick deers’ flesh.

      Ah, the cruel, exquisite fingers!

      Io!

      I have brought you the brown clusters,

      The ivy-boughs and pine-cones.

      Your breasts are cold sea-ripples,

      But they smell of the warm grasses.

      Throw wide the chiton and the peplum,

      Maidens of the Dew.

      Beautiful are your bodies, O Maenads,

      Beautiful the sudden folds,

      The vanishing curves of the white linen

      About you.

      Io!

      Hear the rich laughter of the forest,

      The cymbals,

      The trampling of the panisks and the centaurs.

      To Atthis

      (After the Manuscript of Sappho now in Berlin)

      Atthis, far from me and dear Mnasidika,

      Dwells in Sardis;

      Many times she was near us

      So that we lived life well

      Like the far-famed goddess

      Whom above all things music delighted.

      And now she is first among the Lydian women

      As the mighty sun, the rose-fingered moon,

      Beside the great stars.

      And the light fades from the bitter sea

      And in like manner from the rich-blossoming earth;

      And the dew is shed upon the flowers,

      Rose and soft meadow-sweet

      And many-coloured melilote.

      Many things told are remembered of sterile Atthis.

      I yearn to behold thy delicate soul

      To satiate my desire....

      The Faun Sees

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