“The Dawn” of Ezra Pound: a draft discovered
by A. David Moody
In August 1908 Ezra Pound travelled from Venice to London determined to make it there as a poet. In Venice he had self-published A Lume Spento, a collection of poems he had brought with him from America. In London he quickly arranged for the publication of A Quinzaine For This Yule / Being selected from a Venetian sketch-book – “San Trovaso”—that appeared in December. He had had his father send over some of his “mss.”[1], and in December he told him, “As for the other songs you are sending.– perhaps I can make out of them a book that will suit you better [than “the ‘15'”].– they need an awful lot of finishing tho before they’ll do to print”.[2] Then in early January he reported that “‘The Portal’ my next opus is coming on, should like it to appear in April or May”.[3] “The Portal” evidently became “The Dawn”, which he read “at the Shakespears, after lunch” in February, and which he declared “finished” on the 22nd.[4] “The ‘Dawn’ is a sequence of prose and verse”, he explained, “The poems being from the last lot I had you send over to me.”[5]
Elkin Mathews published Pound’s Personae in April, but would not “begin to print the ‘Dawn’ until ‘Personae’ has paid for itself”.[6] Pound was now hoping “to strike a double blow with two volumns published simultaneously about September (or before)”.[7] However, Mathews published Exultations on its own in October, and Pound was then thinking that “The Dawn” would come out from Dent, possibly in the following spring along with The Spirit of Romance.[8] In the event Mathews agreed in April 1910 to publish both “The Dawn” and Canzoni “as his fall exposition of yrs. truly”.[9]
News of that agreement reached Pound in Sirmione in May, and his first thought was that he should “see that matter through” while in London in June—he would be there briefly for about ten days before sailing for New York on the 18th. But then he began to have second thoughts about “The Dawn”, as he confessed to Margaret Cravens:
I’ve consented to have published a certain prose & verse sequence which I did some time ago. Of course its full of faults and au contraire it has “something or other” or sometimes I think it has.
??????—and a lot more of ’em. Is it sanity or merely an unworthy cynicism that remarks to me on the habits of those literati who having gotten under sail dump their earlier work on a defenceless public—oh well any way, I’m printing a few canzoni with it, & my present howl is because I want to write something better than anything I’ve yet done to serve as an excuse for a questionable proceeding.[10]
In his next letter to her, a few days later, he wrote: “I have withdrawn my permission for the exposition of my earlier poetic attempts & look forth on Garda with a clearer conscience”.[11] While Pound was back in London Mathews mailed the manuscript of “The Dawn” to his temporary address in Hammersmith, and it appears to have been lost in the post. Pound protested to Mathews, “‘The Dawn’ has not been heard of at this end of the line, and it seems to me to have been about the acme of carelessness to have sent it unregistered”.[12] Nothing more was seen or heard of that “prose and verse sequence” in Pound’s lifetime, and it was put down as a lost work.
Some extracts from it came to light in 1984 as an appendix to the collection of Ezra Pound’s and Dorothy Shakespear’s early letters. Dorothy had written out ten of the poems in a manuscript headed
Extracts from a set of M.S.S. verses entitled “‘The Dawn’, For it is a little book of her praises” /--by Ezra Pound Feb. 1909.[13]
It seems likely that these extracts were what Pound read after lunch at the Shakespear’s. They gave some notion of the kind of work “The Dawn” would have been—four of the poems came from the “Hilda’s Book”, put together about 1906-7[14], and the rest were in the same vein. But there was no indication of the prose element of the sequence. About that, and about the sequence as a whole, one could only speculate.
Almost exactly one hundred years after “The Dawn” was lost in the post “a poem entitled ‘The Dawn’” was discovered among the papers of Douglass Paige, the editor of The Letters of Ezra Pound. 1907-1941 (1951).[15] Presumably it had come into his possession while he was gathering material for that edition in Rapallo in 1948. It was “typed on watermarked paper that appears to be a hundred years old”.[16] Internal evidence suggests that this is the sequence as Pound drafted it in January and February 1909.
There are 25 sheets, the first a title-page, “The Dawn / of / Ezra Pound”, and the last sheet blank except for “Scripsit. / Ezra Pound”. The “dedication page” (thus indicated) reads as in Dorothy’s “Extracts”, “The Dawn / For it is a little book of her praises”, but adds “It is for Ysolt”, and the year “Anno Beatudine Nostro / One thousand Nine Hundred Nine”, which might be rendered as “In the Year of Our Beatitude / 1909”. Facing the dedication is a poem to be set in italic, “And all who read these lines shall love her then”—in fact the first eight lines of “To La Contessa Bianzifior (Cent. XIV)” which had appeared in A Quinzaine. Overleaf there is a prose sentence addressed to the reader. Then on “P.5.” the prose and verse sequence proper gets under way with “Pars Prima”, and a “Prologue” dated “Jan. 1909”. There are fifteen poems in this first part, eleven of them carried over from “Hilda’s Book”, which makes this part a condensed version of that then unpublished work, with the one significant addition of “I can not bow to woo thee”. In “Pars II” there are only five poems, all new—two of these were included in Dorothy’s “Extracts. “Pars III” has just two poems, both associated with Venice—“When I behold the dawn’s reflection”, a variant version of “Aube of the West Dawn. Venetian June”, included in A Quinzaine ; and “Roundel” from the San Trovaso Notebook—both are included in Dorothy’s “Extracts”. The final line of “this little book of her praises” is “LAUS DEO”, “praise be to God”, the closing words of Rossetti’s version of La Vita Nuova.[17]
It is apparent that “The Dawn” is a vita nuova which begins in but then goes beyond “Hilda’s Book” in its “tale of Love the revealer, of Love the door and way into the intelligence, of Love infinite ‘That moves the sun and all the other stars’.”[18] In the prose narrative of “The Dawn” we are told that among the “excellencies” of his lady were “the strange harmony or kinship . . . between her and the forest” (Pars I,VII), as set forth in two poems carried over from “Hilda’s Book”, “Rendez-vous” (“She hath some tree-born spirit of the wood”), and “The Tree” (“I stood still and was a tree amid the wood”). A second “excellency” was that “she brought unto me a certain power of dreaming”, as in “Li Bel Chasteus”, a dream of their dwelling at Tintagoel. Such dreaming out of Bédier’s version of the romance of Tristan and Iseult,[19] with the understanding of Dryad’s kinship with nature, are as far as love had led the poet in “Hilda’s Book”. He had aspired, as in the poem beginning “A wondrous holiness hath touched me”, to be “lifted”, as Dante was by Beatrice, “above all terrene things”; but Hilda would keep to her role as “Dryad”, and in “The Dawn” that line becomes the less definite “Luring my spirit from all terrene things”. There is also this new recognition, “And then the power passed”.
No “power” was invoked in “Hilda’s Book”, but it is invoked now in the new poem in the first part of “The Dawn”, “I can not bow to woo thee”.[20] The first stanza in effect sums up and dismisses “Hilda’s Book”:-
I can not bow to woo thee
With leaves of words and kisses of the flowers,
Nor may I scatter dew upon the fragrant grass
Of old sweet love tales of the days foredone,
Nor in the murmurous twilight on the tower stair
May I bend down and kneel beside thee worshipping
With whispers that as far heard bells ring tremulous.
All these have I known once, and passed,
And they are now as shadows mid the curtains of the wind.
And the reason he can not seek her in that past fashion is this:--
For, ever as I am swept upward to the centre of all truth,
Rapt, as in that great involving flame,
Thee must I bear ever with me,
Calling ever from the midst thereof, “Follow!”, “Follow!”
And in the glory of our meeting shall the power be reborn,
And together in the midst of this power
Must we, each outstriving each, cry eternally:
“I come. Go thou yet further!”
. . . . . .
This is the kind of uplifting power associated with the musician Katherine Ruth Heyman, as in “Scriptor Ignotus”—“she ’twas that played him power at life’s morn”. In “Orbi Cantum Primum”, an unfinished draft towards a long poem after Dante’s Divine Comedy written about 1907, she figures as “The Spirit of Power . . . bidding me be strong to go forward”.[21] There is reference to her “calling in THE meeting of the Winds”, known only in a page of rough drafting, in which “Two great winds met, strong-blowing, rejoicing . and they blew each other free of earth-dust and mounted to the stars. . . . . to the Gates of God”.[22] Against the vision of “The Spirit of Power” are set these lines, expressing disillusion with the love celebrated in “Hilda’s Book”:
The illusion .
The Beatrice face .
The illusion . the passionate kissing
and return of dustiness of the way .
Later in the draft there is this distinction, “Between the false dawn of my youth and the true / Dawn of high self consciousness”.[23] That could well stand as an epigraph to “The Dawn”.
That the “Hilda’s Book” poems now tell of what is past is made explicit in the “Prologue” to the first part of “The Dawn”:
Now, that I am in a far land and aweary with the dust of many ways, these fragments of my youth’s dear book are sent to me. And I, in turn, because they come to me as cool wind when the brow is hot or as water when the throat begins to parch, give them again to you others, who have perhaps forgotten, even more than I, the roses of yester-year. And as the refreshed memory has been gracious unto me; so may the memories that these songs stir within you be gracious,
O fratelli miei. / Jan. 1909.
Throughout the first part the prose has that distancing effect, presenting the poems as recovered from sometimes dim memories.
The poems in “Pars II” confirm the distance from “Hilda’s Book”. “The Mist” begins, “‘I can not seem to see your face at all.”, and ends, “Which minds me of a song thy heart hath sung / And shows thee kin of all the elfin-kind.” “Egaré”, i.e. “distracted”, speaks of that song, but he “can not seem to hold it here”, and hears but what his memory of her words now sings—
“An angel and a cup of wonderment,
And flowers that you dreamed and brought me, sweet
As dreams may find spring rain.” These things were blent
In child-sweet words as skill can not attain,
And through it all I knew your heart did greet
Some wandered heart not then to yours made plain.
There is an ambiguity in that last line—is the “wandered heart” his or another’s?—but either way the distance and the difference remain.
The prose introduction to “Pars III” locates it in his recent time in Venice, and effectively leaves behind “Hilda’s Book” and the Hilda/Ysolt complex. It moves rather into that ethereal realm evoked in the second part of “I can not bow to woo thee”, the realm in which he may meet the Spirit of his powers and with her be blown free of earth-dust and mount to the stars, “to the Gates of God”:-
And of her coming let this be known: that I being in a far land where truth and dream are merged and where beauty is grown so still that prayer alone is left to us, even in this land, high dwelling above all discord, in a place where many a time the winds had so held me in the power of their arms that I lost consciousness of earth most utterly and seemed only to float upon them, even as shadows do upon the waters in that city of mirage:
Even in this land she came unto me, not as a woman of clay might come, but even in that manner most befitting her. Even as the wraith of that eternal beauty whereof she is, as it were, the symbol or embodiment. So she came unto me. In token whereof have I written the vers here following.
When I behold the Dawn’s reflection
Rise in the West and stretch her arms toward me,
Making herself one splendid gueredon,
Witholding naught but giving utterly,
All that she is becomes my halido[m].
Behold I take her clear virginity.
When I have clasped the Dawn’s reflection
Unto my heart, I ask God’s benison,
That I remain her lover steadfastly
So naught can set aside this unity
That she and I have set our bond upon.
’Tis why I serve the Dawn’s reflection.[24]
And when she had again faded from me, leaving me naught but the truth of all these things and a perfect joy born out of it; as it were bidding me to follow her even into that realm of all the images . . . .
In the Spirit of Romance, Pound would insist
That the Vita Nuova is the idealization of a real woman can be doubted by no one who has, even in the least degree, that sort of intelligence whereby it was written, or who has known in any degree the passion whereof it treats.[25]
One does not doubt that “Hilda’s Book” is the idealization of a real young woman; and that in “Scriptor Ignotus”, and possibly in “I can not bow to woo thee”, Katherine Ruth Heyman was being idealized. But there is no sense of any real person embodied, if that is the word, in this reflection of the Dawn.
In the San Trovaso notebook there is a note of the experience formulated in “Aube of the West Dawn. Venetian June”, and this removes it altogether from any personal relationship:
All art begins in the physical discontent (or torture) of loneliness and partiality.
It is <was> to fill this lack that man first spun shapes out of the void. And with the intensity <intensifying> of this longing gradually came unto him power, power over the essences of the dawn, over the filaments of light and the warp of melody.
And I?
Of the dawn’s reflexion as you see here, feeling the flow of the essences of beauty
[here color chiefly, as I remember] until they gradually grouped themselves into form.
Of such perceptions rise the ancient myths of the origin of demi-gods. Even as the ancient myths of metamorphosis rise out of flashes of cosmic consciousness. . . .
Perhaps some will dispute my term “form” as used above. Perception of form is not perception of matter but of space matter does or might fill. But I will not dispute nor claim that I use the word in the ordinary sense.
Certainly the beauty of the morning of which I write took unto itself a personality.
Perhaps of the spirit of beauty . . . [26]
Here we are in the realm indicated by an odd note of Pound’s tucked into his 1903 Temple Classics edition of Dante’s Purgatorio, and apparently commenting upon “Amor che muove il sol e l’altre stele”. A sentence on the soul from Plato’s Phaedrus is followed by this: “For Aegupton:- the soul or animate being has the care of the inanimate & traverses the whole of heaven in diverse forms appearing”.[27] In “Aegupton” in A Lume Spento the speaker is one “who knoweth the roads / Thru the sky and the wind thereof is my body”, and who has beheld “the Lady of Life . . . Green and grey is her raiment”. These then, and likewise the winds, the imagined woman, and the dawn’s reflection in “The Dawn”, are to be read as manifestations of “the soul or animate being”, to Dante “the Love which moves the sun and the other stars”, and to Pound in his exaltation “the spirit of beauty”.[28] Also relevant would be this statement of October 1907: “I am interested in art and ecstasy, ecstasy which I would define as the sensation of the soul in ascent, art as the expression and sole means of transmuting, of passing on that ecstasy to others.”[29]
The final poem, spoken as he rises up to follow his vision into the “realm of all the images”, addresses her as “Soul of my soul”, and “the soul of beauty”:-
I come unto thee through the hidden ways,
Soul of my soul, whose beauty quivereth
Within her eyes, to whom my former days
As wined libation poured I, while my breath
Strove to her homage in unskilful lays
And bade my heart make his high vaunt ’gainst death.
I come unto thee through the hidden ways
Who art the soul of beauty and whose praise
Or colour, or song, or form championeth
And of whom Time, as but an heral[d], saith
‘Trust though thou sense not, spite of my delays
Her whom I bring thee through the hidden ways.[30]
There is a definite reference back to “Scriptor Ignotus”, but now the musician he would glorify is quite etherealised and he must follow her. She has become what Beatrice is said to have become for Dante in that poem, “that lady dwelling in his inmost soul”, and so the very “soul of his soul”.
Somewhere behind all this is Rossetti’s prose story “Hand and Soul”. “D.G.R Hand and Soul and Vita Nuova basic in E.P.’s paideuma”, he would tell Olivia Rossetti Agresti when writing to her from St Elizabeths in 1955.[31] A direct connection between the close of “The Dawn” and Rossetti’s version of Dante’s La Vita Nuova is noted above; and it is safe to assume the influence of that version throughout both “Hilda’s Book” and “The Dawn”. As for the prose story “Hand and Soul”, a telling phrase from it, “inglesi matti sul misticismo”, “the English [are] mad about mysticism”, had stayed permanently in his mind; but it was apparently the “finale” that had particularly impressed itself on Pound in his youth.[32] The story concerns Chiaro, an early Italian painter, and how he came to produce a certain compelling portrait of a woman. He had pursued fame, won it, and found it hollow; and faith too had failed him. One night, as he is thinking that his work has perhaps done more harm than good, suddenly he found awe within him, and held his head bowed without stirring. The warmth of the air was not shaken; but there seemed a pulse in the light, and a living freshness, like rain. The silence was a painful music, that made the blood ache in his temples; and he lifted his face and his deep eyes.
A woman was present in his room, clad to the hands and feet with a green and grey raiment, fashioned to that time. It seemed that the first thoughts he had ever known were given him as at first from her eyes, and he knew her hair to be the golden veil through which he beheld his dreams. . . . As the woman stood, her speech was with Chiaro: not, as it were from her mouth or in his ears; but distinctly between them. “I am an image, Chiaro, of thine own soul within thee. . . .”[33]
And so the finale unfolds. The image of the artist’s soul bids him paint her as he sees her, and he does that, and signs the portrait “Manus Animam pinxit”, “The Hand painted the Soul”. Pound quoted that “motto”, as he called it in his February 1956 letter to O.R.A, in “Aegupton”, and borrowed “Green and grey is her raiment” for his “Lady of Life”.
One can see why Pound in 1910 might think that his “Dawn” sequence had “something or other”—after all he had been mad about that sort of mysticism for much of his former days. But in London he had come under new influences, perhaps strongest among them Ford Madox Hueffer’s, and he may well have become uncomfortably aware of its faults. For one striking instance, “soul of my soul . . . to whom my former days / As wined libation poured I”, might well be termed “nobody language”, not natural speech.[34] As he would confess, in writing about his versions of Cavalcanti, “I hadn’t in 1910 made a language, I don’t mean a language to use, but even a language to think in.” He had been “bogged in Dante Gabriel and in Algernon”, in the sediment of “dead English” present in my own available vocabulary”.[35] And Hueffer, Pound would testify, “sent me back to my own proper effort, namely toward using the living tongue”.[36] The full force of Hueffer’s criticism might not have hit him until it was expressed in his mockery of Canzoni in 1911, but it was very likely having its effect already in 1910 when he concluded that “The Dawn” should not be published.
FOOTNOTES
[1]. See EP to his father (HLP), c.23 Sept. and 21 Oct. 1908, Ezra Pound to his Parents. Letters 1895-1929, ed. Mary de Rachewiltz, A. David Moody and Joanna Moody (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 135, 140. (Hereafter EP/Parents.)
[2]. EP to HLP, Dec. 23 [1908], EP/Parents 149.
[3]. EP to HLP, 3 Jan. 1909, EP/Parents 150.
[4]. EP to HLP, 21 and 22 Feb. 1909, EP/Parents 160, 161.
[5] EP to HLP, [?24 March 1909], EP/Parents 164.
[6] EP to HLP, [after 27 May 1909], EP/Parents 171.
[7] EP to HLP, April 30 [1909], EP/Parents 170.
[8] EP to IWP, Oct. 11[1909], EP/Parents 194.
[9] EP to HLP, 8 May [1910], EP/Parents 234.
[10] EP to Margaret Cravens, [9 May 1910], Ezra Pound and Margaret Cravens. A Tragic Friendship. 1910-1912, ed. Omar Pound and Robert Spoo (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1988), 33-34. (Hereafter EP/MC.)
[11] EP to Margaret Cravens, [14 May 1910], EP/MC 35.
[12] EP to Elkin Mathews, [1910], as cited in James G. Nelson, Elkin Mathews. Publisher to Yeats, Joyce, Pound (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 276. Nelson seems to have been unaware that EP had withdrawn “The Dawn” before returning to London from Italy and consequently makes one or two false assumptions.
[13] This set of Extracts was first published as Appendix II in Ezra Pound and Dorothy Shakespear. Their Letters: 1909-1914 (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), 361-68.
[14] “Hilda’s Book” first published with H.D.’s End to Torment. A memoir of Ezra Pound, ed. Norman Holmes Pearson and Michael King (New York: New Directions, 1979), 67-84.
[15] Carver Blanchard, a close friend of Paula Paige, widow of D. D. Paige, wrote to John Gery about the discovery in late fall of 2010.
[16] Carver Blanchard to David Moody, March 28, 2011, enclosing a photocopy of the typescript.
[17] “Dante and his Circle:The New Life”, The Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ed. William M. Rossetti (London: Ellis, 1911), 346. Reproduced by Pound in The Spirit of Romance (London: Peter Owen, 1952), 125.
[18] Ezra Pound on Dante’s Vita Nuova in 1910, The Spirit of Romance (1952),120.
[19] H.D. wrote in End to Torment, “He brought me the Portland, Maine, Thomas Mosher reprint of the Iseult and Tristram story. He called me Is-hilda and wrote a sonnet a day; he bound them in a parchment folder” (23). The Mosher reprint of The Romance of Tristan and Iseult, retold by J. Bédier, translated into English by H. Belloc, was published in 1904.
[20] The version copied by Dorothy varies in a few minor details from that in “The Dawn” typescript. Collected Early Poems (London: Faber & Faber, 1977) gives a much revised version from the Pound Archive, with the title “The Summons” and marked “Finale” by Pound (CEP 262-3, 323n.).
[21] “Orbi Cantum Primum”, printed in A. David Moody, “Dante as the Young Pound’s Virgil . . . Some Early Drafts and Fragments”, Agenda 34.3 (1997) 75-81—the passage cited is on p.77. For a fuller discussion of the Hilda/K.R.H. complex see A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet. vol.I: The Young Genius 1885-1920 (Oxford: OUP, 2007), 34 ff. In the brief note on p.85 re Dorothy’s copy of extracts from “The Dawn” it is stated in error that “The Summons” was in “Hilda’s Book”.
[22] “The Meeting of the Winds”, typescript among “College Notes”, Ezra Pound Papers YCal MSS 43, 3770, Beinecke.
[23] “Orbi Cantum Primum”, Agenda 34.3 (1997) 79.
[24] This is a radically altered version of “Aube of the West Dawn. Venetian June” which Pound had included in A Quinzaine . . . selected from a Venetian sketch-book, a collection dedicated “To / The Aube of the West Dawn”. That version had this headnote: “From the tale ‘How Malrin chose for his Lady the reflection of the Dawn and was thereafter true to her’.” There was also this note: “I think from such perceptions as this arose the ancient myths of the demi-gods”. In fact the prose tale “Malrin”, in A Lume Spento, placed him as the wise fool dreaming in a heaven that seems a medley of images out of Pound’s medieval reading.
[25] The Spirit of Romance (1952), 126.
[26] I give the note as in Collected Early Poems 322.
[27] The note, in red ink on a sheet from a small notepad, is folded into Pound’s copy of the Purgatorio, acquired in 1904, and now in the Ezra Pound Library, Humanities Research Center, the University of Texas at Austin. The passages noted are Phaedrus 245c. 246b-e, and 259.
[28] On “Aegupton” and this matter in general see Hugh Witemeyer, “The Phantastikon of 1908”, The Poetry of Ezra Pound. Forms and Renewal, 1908-1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969, 1981), 44-59. See also Boris de Rachewiltz, “Pagan and Magic Elements in Ezra Pound’s Works”, New Approaches to Ezra Pound ed. Eva Hesse (London: Faber & Faber, 1969), 178-9.
[29] E.P. to Viola Baxter Jordan, [Oct. 24, 1907], “Letters to Viola Baxter Jordan”, Paideuma I.1 (1972) 109.
[30] In the San Trovaso Notebook “I come unto thee trough the hidden ways” has the title “Roundel after Joachim du Bellay”, and the attribution “[Cino]”.
[31] E.P. to O.R.A, 6 January 1955,“I Cease Not to Yowl”. Ezra Pound’s Letters to Olivia Rossetti Agresti, edited by Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos and Leon Surette (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 174.
[32] See E.P. to O.R.A, 13 January 1956,“I Cease Not to Yowl” 225.
[33] D. G. Rossetti, “Hand and Soul”, The Bibelot. Volume I (Portland, Maine: Thomas B. Mosher, 1895), 242-3.
[34] For “nobody language”, a term Pound applied to Yeats’s The King of the Great Clock Tower in 1934, see Richard Ellmann, Eminent Domain: Yeats among Wilde, Joyce, Pound . . . (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), 81.
[35] “Cavalcanti—1910/1931”, Make It New (London: Faber & Faber, 1934), 399-400.
[36] E.P., “Ford Madox (Hueffer) Ford: Obit” (1939), Selected Prose 1909-1965, edited by William Cookson (London: Faber & Faber, 1973), 432.
[Reprinted from Agenda 53.4 (Spring/Summer 2020): 31-40. For a full transcript of “The Dawn of Ezra Pound” see Agenda 53.4 (Spring/Summer 2020): 15-30.
All quotations from “The Dawn of Ezra Pound” Copyright © Mary de Rachewiltz and the Estate of Omar S. Pound. Used by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp., agents.]