Here let thy clemency, Persephone, hold firm,
Do thou, Pluto, bring here no greater harshness.
So many thousand beauties are gone down to Avernus
Ye might let one remain above with us.

With you is Iope, with you the white-gleaming Tyro,
With you is Europa and the shameless Pasiphae,
And all the fair from Troy and all from Achaia,
From the sundered realms, of Thebes and of aged Priamus;
And all the maidens of Rome, as many as they were,
They died and the greed of your flame consumes them.

Here let thy clemency, Persephone, hold firm,
Do thou, Pluto, bring here no greater harshness.
So many thousand fair are gone down to Avernus,
Ye might let one remain above with us.

Ezra Pound, “Prayer for His Lady’s Life”

Another ode to Persephone from Pound’s Canzoni & Ripostes, this time ostensibly after Propertius. I’m still slowly digging my way through Canzoni & Ripostes, thus far the earliest Pound I’ve encountered. Seth from the W.A.S.T.E. Mailing List has been working through the Cantos himself, and his Instagram feed has been a trove of valuable insights into Pound and his, uh, contentious legacy. (Since I’m no longer on the platform I’m grateful Seth also posts regular screenshots from his X feed, where I’d otherwise be missing most of his updates.) Seth offered this word of encouragement to those looking to crack into Pound:

The disservice Pound has done to his own artist legacy (beyond his ugly political involvements was the overly rigorous, scholarly demands/expectations he places on his readers. The depth of his referentiality and assumption of prerequisite knowledge is such that he is often entirely alienating/inscrutable to the non-specialist reader (among which I include myself). The best advice I can say is unless you really want to make a big project of borrowing into his work, methods, and source texts, just try to grab onto the crystalline imagery when it presents itself (the radiant nodes, the luminous gists, as he called them).

Talk about prerequisites: Pound offers his “Prayer for His Lady’s Life” as “from Propertius, Elegiae, Lib. III, 26″ — but of course Book Three of the Elegiae only includes 25 poems. What it means, exactly… well, that’s another story. For now I’ll just stick with the “luminous gists” of “the white-gleaming Tyro” and “so many thousand beauties… gone down to Avernus.”