Further Instructions - Analysis

A poet who scolds his own art

In Further Instructions, Pound stages the speaker as a harried manager of his own poems, trying to discipline them into usefulness while admitting that the whole project is unstable. The central claim the poem makes—half as confession, half as comedy—is that the speaker’s songs are both his responsibility and his embarrassment: they won’t do their job (to say something morally serious), yet they’re the only workers he’s got. That’s why the opening command, Come, my songs, sounds brisk but quickly sours into anxiety and insult. The poem’s engine is this contradiction: the speaker wants his art to be purposeful and dignified, but he also wants it to voice petty feeling, even envy, and he can’t decide which demand is the real one.

“Baser passions” and the shame of ordinary security

The first instruction is deliberately unheroic: let us express our baser passions. Pound doesn’t start with transcendent inspiration; he starts with resentment—specifically envy of the man with a steady job, a figure of plain stability and no worry about the future. That envy is humiliating because it targets something the speaker implicitly lacks: predictability, social legitimacy, a life that doesn’t have to justify itself as art. So when he calls the songs very idle and imagines they’ll come to a bad end, it isn’t only moral censure; it’s fear that an idle, unproductive artistic life really will end badly in material terms.

Loitering poems, loitering self

The poem’s most vivid picture is the songs as urban vagrants: stand about the streets, loiter at the corners and bus-stops, doing next to nothing. This is funny, but it’s also pointed: the songs occupy public space without belonging to it, like the speaker himself. The scolding carries a moral vocabulary of work and idleness, as if poems should punch a clock. Yet the speaker’s attention keeps circling back to them, which suggests dependency. Even his wish that they would express inner nobilitys feels like an embarrassed afterthought—an attempt to claim that art has a high purpose, when the poem has already admitted it runs on envy and restlessness.

“I have gone half-cracked”: the mind slips

The poem turns sharply when the speaker stops blaming the songs and implicates himself: And I? I have gone half-cracked. The tone shifts from managerial irritation to near-hallucination. He has talked to you so much that he almost sees them around him—poems becoming intrusive presences rather than controlled products. Calling them Insolent little beasts, Shameless, and Devoid of clothing mixes disgust with reluctant affection: they are unruly, indecent, and oddly alive. The insult devoid of clothing also hints at aesthetic shame—these songs are exposed, underdressed, not properly “finished” or socially presentable.

Dress the newest song: taste as a kind of rescue

After all the threats of a very bad end, the speaker suddenly softens toward newest song of the lot: it hasn’t had time to cause trouble, so it can still be formed. The solution he offers is not moral reform but costume. He will get it a green coat out of China with dragons, and scarlet silk trousers taken from the statue of the infant Christ at Santa Maria Novella. These details are intentionally extravagant and slightly improper (robbing sacred clothing to dress a poem), and they expose another tension: the speaker pretends to want noble feeling, yet what he actually pursues is cultural prestige—exotic luxury, sacred art, inherited refinement. When he says, Lest they say we are lacking in taste, the poems become social representatives, dressed to avoid humiliation.

“Taste” versus “caste”: the poem’s final sting

The closing line—there is no caste in this family—sharpens the satire into something almost cruel. The speaker’s panic isn’t only that the songs are lazy; it’s that they might mark him as low-status, not the right “family.” So the elaborate clothes read as camouflage: a way to pass, to signal belonging, to make art look like pedigree. And the poem leaves us with an uncomfortable thought: if the songs’ job is to express what is true, why must they be dressed in dragons and stolen silk to be acceptable? The speaker wants art to be both honest about envy and elevated by “taste,” but the poem suggests those aims keep sabotaging each other.