The two last poems of Ripostes, "The Return" and "The Alchemist," facing each other, offer a chance to watch Pound's genius quarrying out its resources. Both poems triumph in the skill with which they conjure up their particular moment; the return of the gods and the transformation of inferior—though lovely, alive—metals into gold. Both poems are miracles of equipoise. In "The Return" we must recognize the provisional, brilliant peace Pound has achieved between stone and wave. For the poem in its near Sapphic stanzas has a carved feeling indeed: cut out of a giant rock, broken off from a once mighty temple, vibrant as Valéry's notion of the dance. As with such great sculpture the poem is made wholly of movement: tentative waves, then swiftly hurtling breakers. In short, one element is composed of the other, rises out of the other: a permanent beauty out of the sea and the sea, its incessant flux, caught forever in that beauty. A frieze of a poem, it slowly thaws out and becomes frieze the more. It begins with a slow, accumulated series of waverings expressed in three-syllabled, hovering words: tentative, uncertain, wavering, half-awakened ("as half-" is echoed by the next lines "As if"), hesitant. In tune with this wavering, snow, a superb "natural" image of hesitant, late winter movement, hangs in air, murmurs, and half turns back. Then as the poem remembers what once these beings were, the mere thought of them discovers enough energy in itself to give us a moment of their powerful, ecstatic presence, not murmuring now but crying "Haie!" as they rush on "wingèd shoe" with swift hounds, sniffing not winter but blood. Then promptly, the past tense overtaking them, they dwindle again, from keen, swift "souls of blood" to leash-slow, "pallid" ghosts. Or no more than a frieze.
"The Alchemist," on the other hand, suggests a magnificent simultaneous expression of the love act, the moment of creation in the making of a poem, and actual alchemy, all done, since varyingly forbidden, at night. Beautiful mellifluous names of beautiful women, mythical as semi-goddesses and real, compose the chant, are the ritual words in a veritable catalogue of fair women. The attendant handmaids of beauty, each supplies, in her moving and her singing some basic ingredient or part …, almost metal already, yet alive (and perhaps already at their liveliest)…. And in the bringing, the women and their gifts not only begin the transformation but perform it until "the golden artifice of eternity" is completed as they quiet the metal. Rarely has a more sumptuous, formal, yet performing poem been composed, hard lines of verse, welded, not fused. The ingredients are properly brought at night when they are free from the office of light which imposes rigid shapes and duties on them, free in alchemy's alembic or the fragrant darkness of the imagination. One recalls one of Pound's most radiant lines, "In the gloom the gold gathers the light against it." Then the mind can enjoy the quiddity of things.
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