Ione, Dead the Long Year
Ione, Dead the Long Year - meaning Summary
Absence Felt in Landscape
Pound’s short lyric presents a landscape emptied by absence. Repetition of “empty” and imagery of heavy-headed flowers convey a country that mourns someone’s departure. The figure of Ione is invoked as once present but now absent, yet her recentness lingers—she "seems like a person just gone." The poem explores how grief and memory make a place feel stalled, where ordinary features register loss and the past presses on the present.
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