The Provençal canzon, like the Elizabethan lyric, was written
for music. Mr. Pound has more recently insisted, in a series of
articles on the work of Arnold Dolmetsch, in the "Egoist," on
the importance of a study of music for the poet.
* * * * *
Such a relation between poetry and music is very different from
what is called the "music" of Shelley or Swinburne, a music
often nearer to rhetoric (or the art of the orator) than to the
instrument. For poetry to approach the condition of music
(Pound quotes approvingly the dictum of Pater) it is not
necessary that poetry should be destitute of meaning. Instead of
slightly veiled and resonant abstractions, like
Time with a gift of tears,
Grief with a glass that ran--
of Swinburne, or the mossiness of Mallarmé, Pound's verse is
always definite and concrete, because he has always a definite
emotion behind it.
Though I've roamed through many places,
None there is that my heart troweth
Fair as that wherein fair groweth
One whose laud here interlaces
Tuneful words, that I've essayed.
Let this tune be gently played
Which my voice herward upraises.
At the end of this poem the author appends the note:
The form and measure are those of Piere Vidal's "_Ab
l'alen tir vas me l'aire_." The song is fit only to be
sung, and is not to be spoken.
There are, here and there, deliberate archaisms or oddities
(e.g., "herward"); there are deliberately arbitrary images,
having their place in the total effect of the poem:
Red leaf that art blown upward and out and over
The green sheaf of the world ...
The lotos that pours
Her fragrance into the purple cup ...