Like a skein of loose silk blown against a wall
She walks by the railing of a path in Kensington Gardens,
And she is dying piece-meal
    of a sort of emotional anaemia.

And round about there is a rabble
Of the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor.
They shall inherit the earth.

In her is the end of breeding.
Her boredom is exquisite and excessive.
She would like some one to speak to her,
And is almost afraid that I
    will commit that indiscretion.

Many thanks to Kuldeep Amarnath for suggesting this poem, which I hadn’t read before:

Another lovely little Ezra Pound vignette - though not as moving as The River Merchant’s Wife, nor as elegant and concise as And The Days Are Not Full Enough
[1], it nevertheless captures Pound’s poetic ethos to a nicety.

What I find most interesting about this poem is the fact that while it’s clearly an imagist poem, there’s an almost complete absence of traditional poetic images in it. Indeed, after the (beautiful) first line, the words are matter-of-fact, direct, and not a little harsh [2]. And yet… the overall effect is delicate, clean, and wonderfully perceptive.

If The River Merchant’s Wife is a romantic [3] canvas, The Garden is a silhouette or a thumbnail sketch - a few vivid strokes of the artist’s brush/pen, and the portrait is complete.

— Thomas

[1] Both of which have been featured on this mailing list in the past - see
The Wondering Minstrels
[2] Over-eager critics (and there are always plenty of them around) may find hints of incipient Fascism in the second stanza; me, I think that’s reading too much into a line which (imho) merely serves as a contrasting backdrop for the central portrait.
[3] Once again, do note the absence of capitalization - the poem may be romantic, but Romantic it certainly is not.