The End of Breeding

I am not an Ezra Pound expert by any means – he is too allusive and classical for my learning, and my ears have never attuned themselves to his music. Despite that, I am teaching a few of his poems, rather poorly, as part of a unit on Modernism, which I am also teaching rather poorly.

The poem we covered today is “The Garden,” which goes as follows:

En robe de parade.
– Albert Samain

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 anemia.

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 someone to speak to her,
And is almost afraid that I
will commit that indiscretion.

It is not a bad poem, and has some resonance for the modern world. The most important line in the poem, I think, is: “In her is the end of breeding.” It seems clear to me that “end” has both a teleological and a prosaic meaning here: First, like a work of art, she is the perfection of breeding. The simile of a “skein of silk” implies her quality of rare and fine beauty; she is an object of wealth and labor. Her contrast with the surrounding “rabble / Of the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor” who do not speak to her is obvious. Whether Pound was a eugenicist, I do not know, but I believe he was an anti-Semite and I know that he broadcast on Italian radio during the Second World War. These lines bespeak a kind of tragic eugenic sensibility, the belief that there is a perfected race, but that it is going to be surpassed, that it will not “inherit the earth.”

This of course brings us to the prosaic meaning of “end”: she is the end because she is the last. We know that does not have any children because she is bored and because she “would like someone to speak to her” – in other words, she has nothing to do (no children to care for), and no one who loves her. That “rabble / Of the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor” emphasizes her infertility. The mention of an “indiscretion” implies the scandal of the presumably male speaker approaching her; she seems to have been without man.

Her boredom is “exquisite.” Perhaps the emptiness of wealth has something to do with the resentment of quality that Spengler mentions in the article I linked to below. Perhaps we have so long been wealthy in the West, have so long avoided great suffering, that we have nothing to fight for anymore. We have been denuded of our religion, and with it the spiritual battles that give concern and color to our lives, and our bodies have been secured by the comfort granted us by prosperity and guaranteed us by the state, and the safety guarded by our technologically powerful military. The success of capitalism and the long slow decay of socialism have together done us in, and we Westerners, who see ourselves as perfected in the cultural sense (even those who believe the West irredeemably flawed believe themselves to have come out of it with true wisdom), have become bored, have failed to see the point in it all, have wandered through the gardens of these wealthy states surrounded by the children of the poor. We blame ourselves for their state, we shake our heads sadly at their savagery, we distrust our ourselves, and unstiffened by any iron in our blood, we allow ourselves to die. We are not so unlike that lady in Kensington Gardens.