Masks
Masks - meaning Summary
Souls in Borrowed Guises
Pound’s poem reflects on displaced or transformed souls who return to the world wearing different identities. It suggests these figures—singers, painters, poets, wizards—have lost some original skill or memory yet retain a distant longing for an earlier, grander state. The poem frames their condition as a melancholy hybridity: present among unfamiliar people and speech but haunted by recollections of past glories and a preceding home in the heavens.
Read Complete AnalysesThese tales of old disguisings, are they not Strange myths of souls that found themselves among Unwonted folk that spake an hostile tongue, Some soul from all the rest who'd not forgot The star-span acres of a former lot Where boundless mid the clouds his course he swung, Or carnate with his elder brothers sung Ere ballad-makers lisped of Camelot? Old singers half-forgetful of their tunes, Old painters color-blind come back once more, Old poets skill-less in the wind-heart runes, Old wizards lacking in their wonder-lore: All they that with strange sadness in their eyes Ponder in silence o'er earth's queynt devyse?
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