Hilda Doolittle: End to Torment: A Memoir of Ezra Pound

37“she danced like a pink moth in the shrubbery.” From “Au Jardin,” Canzoni (1911); see Collected Early Poems , p. 174.

38Undine’s little book. Published in Milan; a small booklet of reproductions of paintings, with an introduction by Ezra Pound.

39Mrs. Shakespear’s death. Olivia Shakespear, Dorothy Pound’s mother, died in October 1938. The Fifth Decad of Cantos , London and New York, 1937.

40 The Children’s Crusade by Marcel Schwob, trans. H. C. Greene, Portland, Me., 1905. A book of prose-poems written from the viewpoint of various participants in the Children’s Crusade of 1212. (First published, Boston, 1898.)

41“The Goodly Fere.” “Ballad of the Goodly Fere,” Exultations , 1909; see Collected Early Poems , p. 112.

42“Tudor indeed is gone and every rose.” Canto 80.

43“Klages’ Cosmogonic Eros .” Ludwig Klages, Vom Kosmogonischen Eros , Jena, 1930.

44Margaret Snively [Pratt], A friend of H.D. and Pound in Wyncote.

45“some dull opiate to the brain, and Lethe-wards had sunk.” See Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale”: “Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains / One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk.”

46 Modern American Poetry , ed. Conrad Aiken, New York, 1927. See illustration, p. 59.

47José Vasquez Amaral. Friend of Pound and Undine; translator of the Cantos into Spanish.

48“Evadne.” In Selected Poems of H.D ., New York, 1957, p. 38.

49Denton Welch, A Voice Through a Cloud , London, 1951.

50 Confucius to Cummings . Ed. Ezra Pound and Marcella Spann, New York, 1964.

“Hilda’s Book” is a small (13.7 cm. × 10.5 cm.) book, hand-bound and sewn in vellum, of 57 leaves (first leaf handwritten on vellum), with vellum closures. Due to heat or water damage, the first (vellum) leaf has fused to the paper leaf behind it (partially obscuring the poem beginning, “I strove a little book,” which has been deciphered with the help of another manuscript in the Pound Archive of the C.A.L., Beinecke Library, Yale University). The last paper leaf has also fused to the back vellum. The title, “Hilda’s Book,” is handwritten in black ink, in ornamental script, on the front cover. It has partially faded with time.

All but two of the poems are typed, with a blue ribbon; the first poem (“Child of the grass”) is handwritten in black ink in ornamental script on the opening vellum leaf, and some of the final words have worn away with age. Another poem (“Sancta Patrona”) is handwritten on the verso of leaf 55 (following the second page of “The Wind”), perhaps as an afterthought.

Pound’s corrections to the poems are handwritten in black ink or red pencil, often obscure because of smudging or fading. Where possible I have followed Pound’s notations in establishing the texts of the poems, although some readings are uncertain because of multiple corrections or illegibility of the notes due to age. A few of the poems show extensive handwritten revision, but most are typed fair copies.

The poems in “Hilda’s Book” were composed during the first years of Pound’s friendship with Hilda Doolittle, 1905-07, the period recalled in her memoir, End to Torment . Four of the poems were later published, with some changes, in Pound’s early volumes: “La Donzella Beata,” “Li Bel Chasteus,” “Era Venuta” (as “Comraderie”), and “The Tree.” The poem entitled “To draw back into the soul of things. Pax” is included in another version (“Sonnet of the August Calm”) in the San Trovaso Notebook of 1908, as is “The Banners” (“Fratello Mio Zephyrus”). The poems from the San Trovaso Notebook are published in the Collected Early Poems of Ezra Pound (New York, 1976). Variant readings and publication histories of the early poems are given in the notes to that book. The poems of “Hilda’s Book,” and others in the San Trovaso Notebook, are among many other early poems addressed to Hilda (as “Is-hilda” or “Ysolt”) which remain unpublished, and are now in the Pound Archive at Yale.

M.K.

Child of the grass

The years pass Above us

Shadows of air All these shall Love us

Winds for our fellows

The browns and the yellows

Of autumn our colors

Now at our life’s morn. Be we well sworn

Ne’er to grow older

Our spirits be bolder At meeting

Than e’er before All the old lore

Of the forests & woodways

Shall aid us: Keep we the bond & seal

Ne’er shall we feel

Aught of sorrow

[…]

Let light [?] flow about thee

As […?] a cloak of air [?]

I strove a little book to make for her,

Quaint bound, as ’twere in parchment very old,

That all my dearest words of her should hold,

Wherein I speak of mystic wings that whirr

Above me when within my soul do stir

Strange holy longings

That may not be told

Wherein all autumn’s crimson and fine gold

And wold smells subtle as far-wandered myrrh

Should be as burden to my heart’s own song.

I pray thee love these wildered words of mine:

Tho I be weak, is beauty alway strong,

So be they cup-kiss to the mingled wine

That life shall pour for us life’s ways among.

Ecco il libro : for the book is thine.

Being alone where the way was full of dust, I said

“ Era mea

In qua terra

Dulce myrrtii floribus

Rosa amoris

Via erroris

Ad te coram veniam ”

And afterwards being come to a woodland place where the sun was warm amid the autumn, my lips, striving to speak for my heart, formed those words which here follow.

Soul

Caught in the rose hued mesh

Of o’er fair earthly flesh

Stooped you again to bear

This thing for me

And be rare light

For me, gold white

In the shadowy path I tread?

Surely a bolder maid art thou

Than one in tearful fearful longing

That would wait Lily-cinctured

Star-diademed at the gate

Of high heaven crying that I should come

To thee.

A wondrous holiness hath touched me

And I have felt the whirring of its wings

Above me, Lifting me above all terrene things

As her fingers fluttered into mine

Its wings whirring above me as it passed

I know no thing therelike, lest it be

A lapping wind among the pines

Half shadowed of a hidden moon

A wind that presseth close

and kisseth not

But whirreth, soft as light

Of twilit streams in hidden ways

This is base thereto and unhallowed …

Her fingers layed on mine in fluttering benediction

And above the whirring of all-holy wings.

Thou that art sweeter than all orchards’ breath

And clearer than the sun gleam after rain

Thou that savest my soul’s self from death

As scorpion’s is, of self-inflicted pain

Thou that dost ever make demand for the best I have to give

Gentle to utmost courteousy bidding only my pure-purged spirits live:

Thou that spellest ever gold from out my dross

Mage powerful and subtly sweet

Gathering fragments that there be no loss

Behold the brighter gains lie at thy feet.

If any flower mortescent lay in sun-withering dust

If any old forgotten sweetness of a former drink

Naught but stilt fragrance of autumnal flowers

Mnemonic of spring’s bloom and parody of powers

That make the spring the mistress of our earth—