On Finding a Lost Ezra Pound Poem in a Castle

The Schloss Brunnenburg, where Ezra Pound once lived.

Hast thou 2 loaves of bread
Sell one + with the dole
Buy straightaway some hyacinths
To feed thy soul. —Ezra Pound

I found this short poem by Ezra Pound as I was researching a book about Pound’s years in Saint Elizabeths Hospital. It appears for the and . Finding a previously unpublished poem by Ezra Pound sounds both adventurous and grittily archival, but really, this was neither. It was waiting in an obvious place: in the Schloss Brunnenburg, in the Tyrol, in Northern Italy, which is the fairy-tale castle where Pound lived late in his life, and where his daughter still lives today. The poem wasn’t lost, it just hadn’t been found; and perhaps this is because it doesn’t look quite right. It is too tender, too small. It isn’t hugely complicated. Everyone knows that Pound was the archetypal impossible modernist, austere and difficult. Yet here was a little poem, written on the back of an envelope, about flowers. It lacks, for better and for worse, the grandeur we expect.