Hell Grant Soon We Hear Again the Swords Clash
Ezra Pound - Sestina Altaforte
Sestina: Altaforte is a poem past Ezra Pound, first published in the English language Review, June 1909.[1]
Sestina: Altaforte [ ]
LOQUITUR: En Betrans de Born.
Dante Alighieri put this man in hell for that he was a stirrer-up of strife.
Eccovi!
Judge ye!
Accept I dug him upwardly once again?
The scene is his castle, Altaforte. "Papiols" is his jongleur. "The
Leopard," the device of Richard (Cœur de Lion).
Bertran de Born, 13th century. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
I
Damn information technology all! all this our South stinks peace.
Y'all whoreson domestic dog, Papiols, come! Let's to music!
I have no life save when the swords clash.
Just ah! when I encounter the standards gold, vair, regal, opposing
And the broad fields beneath them turn ruby,
And then howl I my heart nigh mad with rejoicing.
2
In hot summertime have I slap-up rejoicing
When the tempests kill the earth's foul peace,
And the light'nings from black heav'n flash ruddy,
And the fierce thunders roar me their music
And the winds shriek through the clouds mad, opposing,
And through all the riven skies God's swords clash.
III
Hell grant soon we hear again the swords clash!
And the shrill neighs of destriers in battle rejoicing,
Spiked breast to spiked breast opposing!
Meliorate i hr'southward stour than a twelvemonth's peace
With fat boards, bawds, wine and frail music!
Bah! at that place's no wine like the blood's crimson!
Iv
And I beloved to meet the lord's day rise claret-crimson.
And I sentinel his spears through the nighttime clash
And it fills all my heart with rejoicing
And prys wide my oral fissure with fast music
When I meet him so scorn and defy peace,
His lone might 'gainst all darkness opposing.
5
The man who fears war and squats opposing
My words for stour, hath no blood of crimson
Merely is fit only to rot in womanish peace
Far from where worth's won and the swords disharmonism
For the death of such sluts I go rejoicing;
Yea, I fill all the air with my music.
VI
Papiols, Papiols, to the music!
There'southward no audio similar to swords swords opposing,
No cry like the battle'south rejoicing
When our elbows and swords drip the crimson
And our charges 'gainst "The Leopard'south" rush clash.
May God damn for ever all who cry "Peace!"
Seven
And let the music of the swords make them carmine
Hell grant soon we hear again the swords clash!
Hell blot blackness for ever the thought "Peace"!
About the poem [ ]
past Sam Alexander [ii]
"Sestina: Altaforte" (1909) was first published in June, 1909. Pound had given a reading of the poem to the Poets' Club two months before, which was so emphatic that at the Soho eating place where the club met "a screen had to be placed around the gathering to prevent a public disturbance."[3] The violence of Pound's reading suggests his dramatic power to identify with the poem'southward speaker, the Gascon nobleman and war-loving troubadour Bertran de Born, who lived in the 2nd half of the 12th century. As Pound points out in his epigraph, Dante encounters this "stirrer upward of strife" in Canto XXVIII of the Inferno, in which he is presented conveying his own severed head (a punishment for parting the union of father and son by encouraging young Prince Henry's rebellion against Henry II).[four] Born is i of the personae, or "complete masks of the self," that Pound discusses in "Vorticism" (1914), and this verse form (like "Piere Vidal Old," which appeared in the aforementioned volume, Exultations) is 1 of Pound'south early on experiments in the dramatic monologue – a course that would become increasingly important to him as his career progressed (peculiarly in Hugh Selwyn Mauberly and Homage to Sextus Propertius).[v]
Set in Born'southward castle, Altaforte, the poem consists of the troubadour's complaint to his "jongleur" (singer), Papiols, that their home in the south of France "stinks peace"; his strong statement of preference for tumult (or "stour," a British dialect word that Pound uses twice) over such "womanish peace"; and his society-- given to Papiols at the starting time and end of the verse form-- to play the songs of war that lonely can bring him comfort ("to the music!"). The cyclicality of the poem is expressed not only in its content, but also in its form, which Pound chose, as he explains in "How I Began" (1913), for its "curious involution and recurrence."[half-dozen] The sestina consists of six 6-line stanzas and a three-line envoy. Instead of rhyming, information technology repeats throughout the six end-words of the first stanza, rearranging them such that the last end-discussion of each stanza becomes the outset of the next. This process results in a kind of metonymic linking that appears most clearly when the terminate-words are taken in isolation:
peace – music – clash – opposing – crimson – rejoicing [Stanza I]
rejoicing – peace – crimson – music – opposing – clash [Stanza 2]
clash – rejoicing – opposing – peace – music – crimson [Stanza 3]
blood-red – clash – rejoicing – music – peace – opposing [Stanza 4]
opposing – crimson – peace – disharmonism – rejoicing – music [Stanza V]
music – opposing – rejoicing – ruby – disharmonism – Peace [Stanza VI]
crimson – disharmonism – Peace [Envoi]
Christine Froula interprets the repetitive form of "Sestina" in terms of individual psychology, arguing that "the repetitions of end-words testify Bertran'south listen revolving tightly virtually his war theme" in an "obsessive" manner.[vii] More broadly, however, the "curious involution and recurrence" of the sestina also models Pound's own engagement, in this poem and throughout his career, with a by that is always coming back, always available for renewal; indeed, the wavelike move by which the poem folds back upon itself calls to listen the image of the "ocean flowing astern" in the first Canto, as Odysseus sails to the land of the Kimmerians to undertake the nekyia that is linked to the poet's own descent into literary tradition.[8] Information technology is to this kind of modernist recurrence that Pound seems to be referring in his epigraph, when he asks (in a line that may have inspired Eliot'southward similarly worded warning in the starting time section of The Waste Land), "Take I dug him up again?"[ix]
While characteristically eschewing rhyme, Pound displays his technical virtuosity in "Sestina: Altaforte" in a number of means. Foreshadowing the appropriation of Anglo-Saxon verse form in his translation of "The Seafarer," he makes elaborate use of ingemination throughout, and specially in the fifth stanza, where the initial consonants of "fears war" in the start line are emphasized in each of the side by side three:
The man who fears war and squats opposing
My words for stour, hath no blood of reddish
Just is fit only to rot in womanish peace
Far from where worth's won and the swords clash
For the death of such sluts I go rejoicing;
Yea, I fill up all the air with my music. (accent added)
Pound successfully evokes the voice of a man who delights in violence and mortality through cacophany ("rush clash" in stanza Vi) and the harsh b-ingemination that traverses the poem ("absorb black ... the thought of Peace!"). And in a technique Yeats would use to depict sexual violence in "Leda and the Swan" ("her helpless breast upon his breast"), Pound manipulates his syntax to mimic on the folio the collisions of battle: "Spiked breast to spiked breast opposing!"; "There'southward no sound like to swords swords opposing" [x]
It is unlikely that Pound would have written a poem then gleeful about war in the years after 1914, and already in 1913, he would write that while "[t]echnically it is i of my best ... a poem on such a theme could never be very important."[11]] Simply war, Pound'southward "theme" in this poem, is the traditional subject matter of epic. As Robert Hollander points out, Dante invokes Bertran de Born-- whom he called elsewhere "a poet of salus, or 'arms'"-- at a point in the Inferno at which he is considering "perhaps for the commencement time ... the epic resonance of his own poem."[12] By inhabiting the voice of Bertran, Pound besides may have been experimenting with the part of the epic poet that he would take on more fully in The Cantos.
Meet as well [ ]
- Other verse by Pound
References [ ]
- ↑ Ezra Pound, "Sestina: Altaforte," Poetry Foundation. Web, July 5, 2015.
- ↑ Sam Alexander, Sestina: Altaforte," Modernism Lab, Yale Academy. Licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND iii.0). Web, July iv, 2015.
- ↑ Ira B. Nadel, The Cambridge Introduction to Ezra Pound (Cambridge UP, 2007), pp. 42-43.
- ↑ I paraphrase the translation of Robert Pinsky: The Inferno of Dante (Farrar, Strauss and Girous, 1994), p. 301.
- ↑ "Vorticism," in Pound, Early on Writings: Poems and prose (Penguin, 2005), p. 282.
- ↑ Early Writings, p. 214.
- ↑ Froula, A Guide to Ezra Pound'southward Selected Poems (New Directions, 1983), p.25.
- ↑ Canto I, line xiii.
- ↑ cp. TWL, line 75.
- ↑ Pound, stanzas III, VI; Yeats, "Leda," line 4.
- ↑ In "How I Began (Early on Writings, 214).
- ↑ Hollander'due south commentary is available online at the Dartmouth Dante Project: http://dante.dartmouth.edu.
External links [ ]
- Text
- This article uses Creative Commons-licensed text from the Modernism Lab at Yale Academy
- About
- Sestina: Altaforte at eNotes.com
This poem is in the public domain
Source: https://pennyspoetry.fandom.com/wiki/Sestina:_Altaforte_/_Ezra_Pound
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