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Tuesday, December 7, 2010

A CITY SUNSET, by T.E. Hulme

*

Alluring, Earth seducing, with high conceits
is the sunset that reigns
at the end of westward streets....
A sudden flaring sky
troubling strangely the passer by
with visions, alien to long streets, of Cytherea
or the smooth flesh of Lady Castlemaine....
A frolic of crimson
is the spreading glory of the sky,
heaven's jocund maid
flaunting a trailed red robe
along the fretted city roofs
about the time of homeward going crowds
--a vain maid, lingering, loth to go....

*

This poem, together with "Autumn," is considered the birth of Imagism.  It was published in 1909 with "Autumn" by The Poet's Club in London as part of a distributed Christmas booklet.  By some sources, it was put alongside "Autumn" in later editions of Pound's Ripostes.

7 comments:

  1. Interesting. I think I'm more used to shorter imagist poems, but maybe I just haven't read a wide enough selection.

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  2. Some of the imagist works are as long or even a little longer than this, but most of it remains on the short side. Hulme, I think, just did it better than anyone else. This one, to me, seems less efficient than his others. But take a look: if you were to delete 7 lines, it much more closely resembles his others. So why did he opt to keep the first half? Does it add so much? Or is this an example--as it is one of his first--of an immaturity?

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  3. I think you're right actually. The first 7 lines may not be useLESS, but I'm not sure they're all that useFUL.

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  4. Based on other poems, he doesn't exactly do stanzas. The closest he gets is in The Embankment with his subtitle, and then--if it's intended to refer only to the poem immediately under it, though I'm not sure that's the case--Mana Aboda has an introductory sentence. But this poem seems to have two stanzas, just not divided. There is the first 7, which are a pretty concrete image--different from anything else he's done--and there's the metaphor, which essentially repeats the first 7. It seems to be a two-part demonstration of the concept he discusses after The Red Dancer.

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  5. Interesting contrast between Cytherea and Lady Castlemain: Cytheria is another name for either Aphrodite or Mother Earth; Lady Castlemain was one of King Charles's II mistresses, labeled "curse of the nation," by one, and noted for promiscuity and grouchiness.

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  6. As I'm yet learning more about Hulme, it turns out he's been pigeon-holed. He has some poems that are imagistic (though I believe they all hold imagistic qualities), but they branch and reach into other areas. The man was Renaissance to be sure.

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  7. By TE HULME

    * "A melancholy spirit, the mind like the great desert lifeless, and the sound of march music in the street, passes like a wave over the desert, unifies it, but then goes."

    * "With a courtly bow the bent tree sighed,
    May I present you to my friend the sun."

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