Famam Librosque Cano - Analysis

Two kinds of song-life

Pound’s central move is blunt: he splits poetry into two destinies, then chooses the lonelier one. The opening question, Your songs? is not admiration but appraisal, as if the speaker is weighing what kind of afterlife another poet’s work will get. That work will be absorbed into ordinary, affectionate routines: little mothers singing in the twilight, children (little rabbit folk) laughing verses while Pulling on their shoes for the day's business. In other words, one kind of poetry becomes a social habit—easy to remember, easy to share, almost folk material. The poem doesn’t deny this is a form of life; it calls it a tale, a story people tell each other until it thins out.

Then comes the hard turn: Mine? The speaker stops talking about the other poet and stages his own future reader with almost cruel specificity. The poem becomes a portrait of readership as fate.

The warm cruelty of the nursery scene

The first audience is drawn with tenderness that is also a little dismissive. The mothers sing in the twilight, and the dawn that arrives is a paradox: it loves and kills. That line quietly frames the whole poem: art is sung inside cycles that both cherish and erase. Even the children’s world is described as earnest but fleeting—Serious child business that the adult world Laughs at, and then grows stale. The speaker seems to envy the intimacy of this audience while suspecting it is doomed to be outgrown, like shoes or games. So the “popular” song-life is vivid and human, but it is also made to feel temporary, something that fades as soon as the day properly begins.

Meeting the future reader in a mirror

When the poem shifts to Some score years hence, it doesn’t imagine a grand monument; it imagines a body. The future reader is Scrawny, be-spectacled, out at heels: the stereotype of the impoverished intellectual, rendered without mercy. Pound stacks details that make the reader socially repellent—tobacco ashes on the coat, a throat that shows razor's unfamiliarity, three days' beard. This isn’t only caricature; it’s an argument. The poet’s true audience, he claims, will be the person the world already wants to exclude, the one it feels a sort of curse against its guzzling and red greed.

Yet the description is not pure praise. This reader is also someone who will turn aside to sneer, who has No coin and no will to chase the Mammon of respectable success. The tension is sharp: Pound casts the reader as morally resistant to greed, but also as prickly, withholding, and socially failed. The poet aligns himself with an outsider while admitting the outsider can be unpleasant.

Rarity as a substitute for fame

The poem’s most revealing moment arrives at the bookstall: the reader picks a ragged / Backless copy, Too cheap for cataloguing. Pound’s imagined immortality lives not in libraries or curricula but in discarded paper, rescued by accident. The reader mutters, the strange rare name, and measures value by scarcity: He must be rare if even 7 have not. This is a bleak joke about literary prestige—fame reduced to the arithmetic of collectors. Pound is mocking a culture that confuses importance with being hard to get, but he’s also admitting he wants precisely that kind of attention: the thrill of being a secret.

The last twist: How I 'scaped immortality

The ending lands on an odd, almost self-sabotaging boast. The reader is lost mid-page and begins to analyse form and thought—not to be moved, or soothed, or made companionable, but to determine How I 'scaped immortality. The phrase holds the poem’s deepest contradiction. Pound both wants a long afterlife (he sets the scene decades ahead) and claims to have escaped it, as if immortality were a trap: the flattening of a living voice into a public statue, or the domestication of a poem into something the little mothers can hum. In this light, the shabby connoisseur becomes the only reader who can keep the work alive by keeping it difficult, private, and arguable.

A sharper question the poem leaves open

If the first audience is too forgetful and the second is too bitter, what kind of recognition is left that doesn’t corrupt the song? Pound’s portrait suggests that every audience is a bargain: either your lines get worn smooth by use, or they survive as a rare object admired for being rare. The poem ends not with confidence but with that uneasy word 'scaped, as though the highest hope is not to be loved by many or understood by a few, but to avoid being safely possessed by anyone.