La Constitución como norma fundamental

Selecting a marginal situation and feeling the images as themselves was the way Pound chose to delete the narrator. The poet no longer took the central role in the work, told readers the story in his personal way and prompted them to think what he thought. In my view, Pound refused to be this kind of author, even though it was a useful means of contributing to the structure of poetry, political views, ideology, education and morality. It was no longer a poem if the author deprived the audience of the right to feel and experience, put the natural images into the refrigerator, froze and turned them into a kind of fast food for thoughts. I also think that Pound chose the way that haiku poets had pursued, which was to write images naturally and poetically about eternity, the joy of life, loneliness and fragility.

To achieve that, haiku poetry and the haiku poems of Ezra Pound normally used opposing mechanisms. In this approach, the opposing forces did not cancel or trample each other; they supported each other to create all aspects of life, like the concept of ‘yin yang’78 _{in the East. There were many parallel pairs of characteristic} images in Haiku poetry (e.g. static and dynamic; concrete and abstract; metaphorical and analytical; the nature of the universe and the inner human; the small world (people) and the huge world (nature); the present and the past; ephemeral, tiny and eternal, immense). These pairs connected with each other both invisibly and dialectically. There were also nature and human images in Pound’s poems, which both opposed and complemented each other:

As cool as the pale wet leaves of lily-of-the-valley

She lay beside me in the dawn 79

77 _{Cor van den Heuvel, The Haiku Anthology: Haiku and Senryu in English, 3rd edn., (London: W.W.}

Norton, 1999), p. xv.

78 _{See Cosima Bruno, Between the Lines: Yang Lian's Poetry Through Translation (Leiden: Brill,}

2012), pp. 86-87

The pairs of images here include:

- The stillness of flowers and the action of humans: ‘lay beside me’; - The coolness of ‘pale wet leaves’ and the clarity of ‘dawn’;

- ‘Pale wet leaves’, ‘lily-of-the-valley’, ‘she’ and ‘dawn’ seem to merge together, belong and accompany each other.

The girl who appears in the last verse has both the beauty of the morning and the fragility of the ‘lily-of-the-valley’. The beauty described here is real, as she ‘lay beside me’, but is also far away as the ‘pale wet leaves’. In my view, on one hand, she exists; on the other hand, she is as short-lived as a flower’s life. It was accepted that haiku could contain this duality, the idea that ‘life is virtual’ – which was one of the main ideologies of religion in general and ‘Zen’ in particular.

Similar to Basho, Pound often used images like ‘petal’, ‘leaf’, ‘grass-blade’, ‘frost’ and ‘dust’… Firstly, they were symbols of beauty. It might be that from these images, Pound could create many feelings and emotions about nature immediately without adding metaphors or descriptive words. Secondly, however strange it might seem, they could be understood as fragile beauty, early blooming or early fading, which strayed far from Pound’s first perceptions of them. However, it suited the aims of Imagist poetry that images created meanings themselves and the work of poets was to create links between them. This brought Pound close to the ancient Haiku poets accidently.

I thought of a way to analyse one of his poems according to the Haiku spirit: The petals fall in the fountain,

The orange-coloured rose-leaves, Their ochre clings to the stone. 80

The journey of the ‘petals’, ‘rose-leaves’ and ‘ochre’ here are placed in contrast to the fountain and stone to survive. One side is fragile beauty; the other is a permanent and tough challenge. However, in any circumstances, despite falling in the fountain, the beauty is still brilliant on the grey of the stone, in cold water. It desires to survive. While on the one hand, this shows a desire to live, on the other,

the situation of 'clinging' seems too hard for weakness to exist. However, the more readers find the finiteness of time, the more they appreciate the life. This is also

reproduced in other poems by Pound:

The rustling of silk is discontinued, Dust drifts over the courtyard, (…)

A wet leaf that clings to the threshold 81

The use of opposing mechanisms exists as an immutable principle of haiku. These are some similar examples in poetry of Basho:

Chrysanthemums in bloom Between the stones

At a stonecutter’s shop82 ***

From all directions Cherry petals blown in - Waves of Lake Nio. 83

One thing that both poets, in two different literary periods and two different cultures, focused on was the beauty and purity of nature. However, in my view, while the Western concept tended to explain everything in concrete terms, the Oriental consciousness would hide them. Therefore, Oriental poets described purity through images of ‘girls’, ‘petals’, ‘peach-blossom’, ‘autumn moon’, ‘breeze’ and similar things. They might have brought many different characteristics and feelings, but primarily, they were purity, the beauty that had not been touched by humans. They appeared in front of our eyes and disappeared in a moment. Humans could never keep them. Poets as well as readers could dream of them, but could not own them. They came from nothingness and would return to that nothingness at any time. That was why the images were always tiny and fragile. In my view, it was the hidden charm of purity.

This is a poem written about a fan-piece by Ezra Pound: O fan of white silk

81 _{Pound, ‘Liu Ch’e’, Selected Poems, p. 112.}

82 _{Takafumi Saito, Wiliam R. Nelson, 1020 Haiku in translation: the heart of Basho, Buson and Issa}

(North Charleston, South Carolina: BookSurge, 2006), p. 144.

Clear as frost on the grass-blade You also are laid aside. 84

I consider the flexibility in the opening and closing of the fan as a symbol for the hidden charm of the girl. Moreover, the beauty of frost on a ‘grass-blade’ with the softness of ‘silk’ contains feelings from many senses, which Pound used to give the impression of a fan beyond its usual beauty.

The fan was also one of the symbols of Japanese culture: Wind from Mt. Fuji

Carrying it in my fan

A souvenir for those in Edo. 85

Mt. Fuji is the highest mountain in Japan. It has been the inspiration for Japanese artists since ancient times because of its beauty. The top of this mountain is covered in snow for the whole year and holding its foothills are five expansive lakes. Seeing Mt. Fuji in spring (when the cherry trees blossom) was regarded as the most precious time in Japan. The pink colour of cherry blossom on the white snow of Fuji, the elegance and fragility on the powerful, imposing mountain, symbolised harmony in life for the Japanese. Mt. Fuji, therefore, used to be called the wonder of Asia. Besides Mt. Fuji, Edo was also considered to be a source of pride for the Japanese because of its sense of tradition. Edo used to be the first kingdom and centre of Japan, with traditional architecture and an agricultural lifestyle. In this poem, the fan as viewed by Basho is not only beautiful in itself, but also contains the majestic beauty and power of Mountain Fuji, the sediment (the matter which has subsided into the bottom of the land) of Edo culture.

Additionally, in another form of poetry, Pound also used opposing mechanisms and an evocative pen when describing the footsteps of the girl in ‘The Garden’. He wrote: 'Like a skein of loose silk blown against a wall'. Here, the impression of softness, flexibility and gracefulness is clearly portrayed in the relationship with the rigidity of 'the wall'.

84 _{Pound, ‘Fan-Piece for Her Imperial Lord’, Selected Poems, p. 113.}

85 _{MatsuoBasho, Basho's Haiku Selected poems of Matsuo Basho, trans. David Landis Barnhill (New}

Thus, through the use of Eastern minimised poetry form like Haiku (usually 17 syllables), few verbs or adjectives, predominant use of natural character sketches and outlining of real images, I suppose that Pound paved a different way in approaching Imagism. He seemed to bring contrasts into the use of metaphor from Symbolist poetry, thus, he created more beautiful and expressive images. These contracts were like underground circuits which made associations and connections between things and images in the poem through metaphor. From that perspective, like Haiku poetry, he tended to see withering in freshness, sadness in happiness and tradition in modernity. He regretted faded beauty but always kept mental equanimity, considering the turning of the universe by seizing its rules. It was similar to the hope of early life which was never extinguished in Basho’s poetry:

Spring rain -

Sprouting in twin leaves Egg plant seeds. 86

In Cathay, a translation collection, Pound showed appreciation of the appearance of ancient Chinese poetry in general and traditional kinds of Eastern poetry. He wrote in the foreword:

Rihaku flourished in the eighth century of our era. The Anglo-Saxon Seafarer is of about this period. The other poems from the Chinese are earlier. 87

Throughout this book, Pound did not give any analysis or evaluation even though he considered the poems as one of the earliest human poetic collections. He explained:

If I give them, with the necessary breaks for explanation, and a tedium of notes, it is quite certain that the personal hatred in which I am held by many, and the invidia which is directed against me because I have dared openly to declare my belief in certain young artists, will be brought to bear first on the flaws of such translation, and will then be merged into depreciation of the whole book of translations. Therefore I give only these unquestionable poems. 88

86 _{Saito, Nelson, p. 17.}

87 _{Ezra Pound, Cathay (London: Chiswick Press, 1915), p. 4.} 88 _{Pound, Cathay, p. 32.}

Furthermore, the way Pound refused to translate the meaning of these poems into his own words was the way he brought their purity to readers’ minds. In this book, there were many short poems appeared like the form of Japanese Haiku:

Light rain is on the light dust The willow of the inn-yard

Will be going greener and greener

But you, sir, had better take wine ere your departure,

For you will have no friend about you When you come to the gates of Go. 89

The image of ‘light rain’ on the ‘light dust’, the fragility of ‘willow’, the loneliness of ‘sir’ on his own journey and the ‘gates of Go’ symbolise the life that humans have to enter. To my understanding, Eastern poets usually wrote about rain and dust as the premonition of sadness and coldness.

Ezra Pound brought a new breath to Western modern poetry and one of the main contributions to his achievement was his experimentation with Haiku poetry. However, it should be pointed out that Ezra Pound did not make Haiku poetry with the same form and meaning as Japanese poets did, because the philosophy of Zen culture was basically different and alien to Western thinking. In my own perspective, the Haiku genre and other Oriental forms that appeared in Pound’s poems helped him to overcome Romanticism and create a new way of using metaphors, but the effects that came from Pound’s Haiku poems were far from his initial thoughts. He not only brought a new form to modern poetry and restored a genre of Classicism, but also transferred the Haiku spirit into his own poetry through the effectiveness of evoked images of purity which were close to the mechanisms of Imagism.

As a consequence, it could be said that the concrete form of Haiku and other kinds of short Japanese and Chinese poetry seemed to attract Imagist poets. Such kind of poetry was suited to the aims of creating an Imagist poem:

89 _{John Minford and Joseph S. M. Lau, eds., An anthology of translation Classical Chinese Literature,} volume 1 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), p. 717.

It is the presentation of such a ‘complex’ instantaneously, which gives that sense of sudden liberation; that sense of freedom from time limits and space limits; that sense of sudden growth, which we experience in the presence of the greatest works of art.90

Along with this, the goal of images expressed in both Imagist and Haiku poetry seemed to be similar; both reminded readers of the nature of mankind. Pound kept the original intensity of image symbols:

I believe that the proper and perfect symbol is the natural object, that if a man use ‘symbols’ he must so use them that their symbolic function does not obtrude; so that a sense, and the poetic quality of the passage, is not lost to those who do not understand the symbol as such, to whom, for instance, a hawk is a hawk. 91

Haiku poets protected the fresh feelings of images by depicting them in poems: Haiku helps us to experience the everyday things around us vividly and directly, so we see them as they really are, as bright and fresh as they were when we first saw them as children. Haiku is basically about living with intense awareness, about having openness to the existence around us – a kind of openness that involves seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and touching. 92