Sonnet Analysis: Ezra Pound

It has been a while since I did one of these, hasn't it? Today I take a look at "A Virginal" by Ezra Pound (text from The Making of a Sonnet: A Norton Anthology, ed. Edward Hirsch and Eavan Boland).

No, no! Go from me. I have left her lately.

I will not spoil my sheath with lesser brightness,

For my surrounding air hath a new lightness;

Slight are her arms, yet they have bound me straitly

And left me cloaked as with a gauze of aether;

As with sweet leaves; as with a subtle clearness.

Oh, I have picked up magic in her nearness

To sheathe me half in half the things that sheathe her.

No, no! Go from me. I have still the flavour,

Soft as spring wind that's come from birchen bowers.

Green as the shoots, aye April in the branches,

As winter's wound with her sleight hand she staunches,

Hath of the trees a likeness of the savour:

As white their bark, so white this lady's hours.

Triumphs:

I want to focus here on three particular elements of this poem that drew me to it when I decided to analyze it. All three are technical in nature (as befits a blog about writing sonnets). One is Pound's choice of rhymes: not so much the rhyme scheme although that is interesting in and of itself--I'll talk more about it in the Imperfections section because I'm not sure it works--as the complicated nature of the actual rhyme-words themselves. They tend towards feminine endings (lately, brightness, sheathe her, branches). This, along with the archaic style of the poem (archaic even for the time it was written--see Pound's other much more famous poems) creates a sense of the poem being almost overstuffed or overfull, whether of thought or emotion or what-have-you. 

This effect is heightened in the first and ninth lines (the start and the start of what would be a traditional volta) by the two strong caesuras in the line, which is related to the second element I want to emphasize: those two mirrored lines. I cait two caesuras (after the second no and the me) but it could even be three: no, no! has a strong spondaic rhythm that almost asks for a pause between the words. The effect of the pauses, I think, is again to make the line and thus the poem feel longer and more full than it actually is. The effect of the repetition, both within the line (no, no) and across the two lines is both to pull all parts of the poem together (across the volta) and to mark the strong sense of rejection that this poem gives off. This is not a traditional love poem, because the persona addressed does not seem to be the object of the romantic love in the poem--it is left extremely open exactly who is addressed, but it is emphatically not the her or this lady of the key lines here. 

The third technical element I want to draw attention to is the use of similar sounds and especially consonance across the poem, including variant forms of the same words: "sheath" in line 2 becoming "sheathe" in line 8, "no, no" in lines 1 and 9, "half in half" in line 8, the repeated "white" in the final line, but also more generally all the s-sounds, all the b-sounds, all the h-sounds (and also all the long a-sounds). This, in my opinion, makes the poem glide: it sounds like a coherent whole because the sounds of it are so consistent. This is powerful when combined with the overfullness and ambiguity noted above: somehow this sonnet feels like a single, unified idea despite at the same time feeling like it contains too much and reveals too little. It's a strong effect.

Imperfections:

I don't have a lot of imperfections to point out here: some things that might feel like weaknesses in a slightly different poem are here folded into the emotional impacts noted above, especially in terms of ambiguity. I might object in other cases to the ending of the sonnet, which I don't find especially compelling--but the very ambiguity of the value of "white" in the final lines works, I think, because of the rest of the poem's effects (or perhaps I've just read too many romance novels about rakes recently and "white" is not intended ambiguously--but I think, in this poem, I prefer it so). 

The major imperfection I want to draw attention to is, as with the triumphs, technical. As noted above, I'm not entirely sure I find this rhyme scheme works for me. It's a little hard to categorize: "brightness" and "lightness" should rhyme with "nearness" and "clearness" but they don't quite because of where the emphases fall in the feminine endings; similarly "savour" and "hours" look at first like they are trying to rhyme but don't. On the flip side, "aether" and "sheathe her" don't rhyme in my pronunciation of English, and yet they do here. This can, viewed one way, contribute to the ambiguity of the poem, but for me it feels more awkward than effective. I'm also just generally not a huge fan of Italianate sonnets (which this definitely is--a hard end-stopped turn at line 9, and a complex rhyme scheme [EFGGEF] in the volta) that don't embrace the power of the AB rhymes in the octave fully. Nor am I that fond of the volta's rhyme scheme itself, since the visual connection of the -our[s] rhymes, for me, flattens it out into almost a series of rhymed couplets. From my angle, then, while the word-work of the poem is strong (see Triumphs), the structural work makes poor use of it. Still, it is fascinating, from my perspective, to read a traditionally-shaped sonnet from Pound, a poet so known for eschewing traditional forms.