Vague memories, nothing but memories, But in the grave all all shall be renewed. The certainty that I shall see that lady Leaning or standing or walking, In the first loveliness of womanhood And with the fervour of my youthful eyes, Has set me muttering like a fool. You were more beautiful than any one And yet your body had a flaw: Your small hands were not beautiful. I am afraid that you will run And paddle to the wrist In that mysterious, always brimming lake Where those that have obeyed the holy law Paddle and are perfect: leave unchanged The hands that I have kissed For old sake’s sake. The last stroke of midnight dies All day in the one chair From dream to dream and rhyme to rhyme I have ranged In rambling talk with an image of air: Vague memories, nothing but memories. November, 1915. In Memory Five and twenty years have gone Since old William Pollexfen Laid his strong bones in death By his wife Elizabeth In the grey stone tomb he made; And after twenty years they laid In that tomb, by him and her, His son George the astrologer And masons drove from miles away To scatter the acacia spray Upon a melancholy man Who had ended where his breath began. Many a son and daughter lies Far from the customary skies, The Mall, and Eadés Grammar School, In London or in Liverpool, But where is laid the sailor John That so many lands had known, Quiet lands or unquiet seas Where the Indians trade or Japanese; He never found his rest ashore Moping for one voyage more: Where have they laid the sailor John? And yesterday the youngest son, A humorous unambitious man, Was buried near the astrologer; And are we now in the tenth year? Since he who had been contented long, A nobody in a great throng, Decided he would journey home, Now that his fiftieth year had come, And “Mr. Alfred” be again Upon the lips of common men Who carried in their memory His childhood and his family. At all these deathbeds women heard A visionary white sea bird Lamenting that a man should die, And with that cry I have raised my cry. An Anachronism at Chinon Ezra Pound Behind them rose the hill with its grey octagonal castle, to the west a street with good houses, gardens occasionally enclosed and well to do, before them the slightly crooked lane, old worm-eaten fronts low and uneven, booths with their glass front-frames open, slid aside or hung back, the flaccid bottle-green of the panes reflecting odd lights from the provender and cheap crockery; a few peasant women with baskets of eggs and of fowls, while just before them an old peasant with one hen in his basket alternately stroked its head and then smacked it to make it go down under the strings.