Olga Rudge & Ezra Pound: "What Thou Lovest Well..."

76 The Hidden Nest
meaning her adoptive family the Marchers, the good farmers of the Tyrol
who, after a hard day’s labor, gathered for knodl and speck, stories and
song. On December 20, Olga observed the colorful procession of St.
Sebastian, patron saint of the village: ‘‘We hung ’round in the snow for a
long time, then a very long trail of men, two-by-two, some with banners,
Herr Marcher holding a tassle.’’ Pound must have remembered Olga’s
description of the saint’s day when writing Canto 48:
and all the mountains were full of fires, and
we went around through the village . . .
2 men and 2 horses
and then the music and on all sides
children carrying torches and the
carroze with the priests . . .
. . . and the carroze were full of fine flowers.
Olga joined Ezra in Santa Margherita the week after Christmas, before
returning to Paris and her world of music. Katherine Ruth Heymann,
Ezra’s former protegée, and a group of friends were meeting at the Café
Voltaire to plan a forthcoming Alexander Scriabin concert. Olga wrote to
Pound: ‘‘They decided . . . a circus was [the] ideal place, with lights
reflected on a huge globe—twelve, high above for constellations, eight
below for planets, four for the elements—and K. Heymann somewhere in
the middle on a platform, some 2,000 francs needed for the experiment.’’
Olga was amusing herself with a young ‘‘disciple simpatico’’ who envisioned
her as ‘‘a dark night with stars,’’ she wrote, to arouse Ezra’s jealousy.
‘‘The young man had a lot to say about the twelve types of people
and twelve tones—listening for the tone and one’s own tone, etc., etc. . . .
He [would not] think of delicately flattering her with good old-fashioned
metaphors.’’
The poet rose to the challenge: ‘‘Elle est une princesse d’orient avecque
[sic] des astres occidentaux / avecque des dents de tigre or-i-ental /
diminué par des pèlerinages dans les forêts des cieux. / Elle est une aube
pré-aubale vaguant aux nuages slaviques pénétrés par des feux glacials aux
temps Hittites. / Piétinant le labyrinthe compliqué des sphères concentri-