This poem, as well as the last poem,
makes reference to the fact that Pound,
who was charged with treason during World War II,
spent a number of years after the war in a mental institution
in Washington DC.
OK, this is the final poem I'll read from the collection.
It's "Chinese Silence Number 99,"
and it's after one of Pound's most famous poems,
"The River Merchant's Wife, a Letter."
When my verse was still laid out in straight pentameters,
I played about with Provencal, growling ballads.
You whispered in cribbed notes, saying "horse."
You drew about my feet the ideogram for "plum,"
and we started writing in the style of imagism,
three small rules without ornament or description.
In '15, I published my Li Po.
I tried to speak, and out came silence.
Lowering my head, I rammed the Great Wall.
Corrected 1,000 times, I never looked back.
In '17, I said, hang it all.
I desired my poems to be garbed and yours forever, and forever,
and forever.
Why should I be held to account?
In '45, I departed.
I went far into Washington, by the river of cold forgetting,
and you have not come to visit.
The critics make self-righteous noise at the door.
You bound my feet when you went out.
By my book now, the glosses grow the different glosses, too many
to clear them away.
The leaves fall, and I try to keep them from falling.
The manuscript pages are turning yellow with peril
under the covers of the West's sick bed.
They desert me.
I grow silent.
If you are coming down through the narrows of the Potomac,
please call me your Confucius, and I
will come out to meet you as far as Arlington.