While my hair was still cut straight
across my forehead
I played about the front gate, pulling flowers
You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse,
You walked about my seat,
playing with blue plums
And we went on living in the village of Chokan:
Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.
At fourteen I married My Lord you.
I never laughed, being bashful.
Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.
Called to, a thousand times,
I never looked back.
At fifteen I stopped scowling,
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours
Forever and forever, and forever.
Why should I climb the look out?
At sixteen you departed,
You went into far Ku-to-Yen,
by the river of swirling eddies,
And you have been gone five months.
The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.
You dragged your feet when you went out.
By the gate now, the moss is grown,
the different mosses,
Too deep to clear them away!
The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.
The paired butterflies are already
yellow with August
Over the grass in the West garden,
They hurt me.
I grow older,
If you are coming down through the
narrows of the river Kiang,
Please let me know beforehand,
And I will come out to meet you,
As far as Cho-fu-Sa.
"Too special to achieve permanence, too intellectual to become
popular, Pound's contribution to his age should not be underestimated.
He was a pioneer in the new forms; he fought dullness wherever he encountered it; under his leadership the
Imagists became not only a group but a protest; he helped to make many of the paths which a score of unconsciously influenced
poets tread with such ease and nonchalance. Much of his poetry gesticulates instead of speaking, a great portion of
his art is poetry in pantomime. And yet, without Pound, American poetry would scarcely have been the
many- voiced, multi- colored thing that it is." Modern
American Poetry (1921), Louis Untermeyer
