Albas, Aubades, & stuff like that

I've always been a sucker for the "love recollected in wistfulness" business, which made Dowland such a marvellous composer and melancholy old sod, and John Donne, who could have taught Malcolm Muggeridge and the man from the Pru a few things ("too late, too late", the angels' cry...), and really I wanted tonight to do a serious post about mediaeval love poems .

So I opened my Ezra Pound, Complete Pomes of, to find that wonderful Alba, and I came across this instead (and I kicked myself, because I've had this book since 1965, and it's only just dawned on me). It's from Pound's "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (Life and Contacts)", his attack on his own earlier writings and the self-indulgent wallowings of literary masturbators:

Envoi, 1919 (Ezra Pound)

Go, dumb-born book,

Tell her that sang me once that song of Lawes:

Hadst thou but song

As thou hast subjects known,

Then there were cause in thee that should condone

Even my faults that heavy upon me lie,

And build her glories thy longevity.

Tell her that sheds

Such treasure in the air

Recking naught else but that her graces give

Life to the moment,

I would bid them live

As roses might, in magic amber laid,

Red overwrought with orange and all made

One substance and one colour

Braving time.

Tell her that goes

With song upon her lips

But sings not out the song, nor knows

The maker of it, some other mouth,

May be as fair as hers,

Might, in new ages, gain her worshippers,

When our two dusts with Waller's shall be laid,

Siftings on siftings in oblivion,

Till change hath broken down

All things save beauty alone.

(it's only just dawned on me, thick plank that I am, that it is a both a pastiche on, and a sly taunt at, Edmund Waller (1606–1687) 's "Go, lovely Rose", which I uncomprehendingly set to music 30 years ago for a friend, but which still, uncorrupted, reads:

SONG (Edmund Waller, 1606–1687)

Go, lovely rose -

Tell her that wastes her time and me,

That now she knows,

When I resemble her to thee,

How sweet and fair she seems to be.

Tell her that's young,

and shuns to have her graces spied,

That hadst thou sprung

In deserts where no men abide,

Thou must have uncommended died.

Small is the worth

Of beauty from the light retired:

Bid her come forth,

Suffer herself to be desired,

And not blush so to be admired.

Then die! - that she

The common fate of all things rare

May read in thee;

How small a part of time they share

That are so wondrous sweet and fair!

Oh well. We'll do the albas and the aubades tomorrow, as the sun rises.

Gladys Ponsonby - will you still be there for me?