Welcome back to the Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.

I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Wednesday, December 11th, 2004.

Today's poem is by Ezra Pound, and it's called The White Stag.

I'll read it once, offer a few comments, and then read it one more time.

The White Stag.

I have seen them

mid the clouds on the heather.

Lo, they pause not for love

nor for sorrow.

Yet their eyes are as the eyes

of a maid to her lover

when the white heart breaks his cover

and the white wind breaks the morn.

Tis the white stag, fame we're hunting, bid the world's hounds come to horn.

Ezra Pound is the undisputed father of 20th century poetry and really maybe modern English poetry,

generally speaking. The poet Donald Hall said about Pound that Ezra Pound is the poet who

a thousand times more than any other man has made modern poetry possible in English.

And I'd say that that has to do in part with the influence that Pound exercised over other

notable modern poets, particularly the likes of T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yates, William Carlos Williams,

and others, also the development and experimentation that

was happening within Pound's own work. And what that often means is that his poems are very

difficult and sometimes frustrating to read. This is not one of those times. Like so many of the early modernist poets and novelists, there's a

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