Pound is wrong. The fire still burns: but Pound deliberately was interned in a psychiatric institution and called mad for his fascism.
Middle-Aged: A Study in an Emotion
A STUDY IN AN EMOTION
“‘Tis but a vague, invarious delight.
As gold that rains about some buried king.As the fine flakes,
When tourists frolicking
Stamp on his roof or in the glazing light
Try photographs, wolf down their ale and cakes
And start to inspect some further pyramid;As the fine dust, in the hid cell beneath
Their transitory step and merriment,
Drifts through the air, and the sarcophagus
Gains yet another crust
Of useless riches for the occupant,
So I, the fires that lit once dreams
Now over and spent,
Lie dead within four walls
And so now love
Rains down and so enriches some stiff case,
And strews a mind with precious metaphors,And so the space
Of my still consciousness
Is full of gilded snow,The which, no cat has eyes enough
To see the brightness of.”Ezra Pound.
The time calls for duty. Accepting of the burden. While we are alive, we struggle, For Pound is right. The reward we seek is glorious.
Does that say that at 45 I’m supposed to have run out of dreams and/or love? Poor Ezra.