Na Audiart - Analysis

A praise-poem that admits it is being written against resistance

The poem’s central claim is pointedly paradoxical: even if Audiart hates the speaker and wishes him harm, her beauty still obliges praise, and the praise itself becomes a kind of power. The refrain Audiart, Audiart keeps returning like a name insisted on in the face of refusal, and the opening line makes the situation blunt: Though thou well dost wish me ill. This isn’t love serenely requited; it’s admiration spoken where it’s not welcome. The speaker’s persistence feels both courtly and stubborn, as if the poem is less a confession than a performance meant to outlast the woman’s present hostility.

Clothing as a map of desire (and a way to control the gaze)

Pound’s speaker praises Audiart through clothing and contour, which lets him be erotic while claiming decorum. The bodice is described where its laces start, As ivy fingers clutching through crevices—a metaphor that turns fabric into a living grip, suggestive of touch while still technically talking about dress. He moves on to thy girdle's scope and How the stays ply back from it, keeping the attention on engineered shape and restraint. Even the most intimate compliment is phrased like craftsmanship: never a flaw was there / Where thy torse and limbs are met. The praise is precise, almost inventory-like, and that precision is part of the poem’s edge: by detailing her body as garment and join, the speaker claims the authority to define what is flawless—even when she “wishes him ill.”

“Here a word kiss”: the poem offers intimacy, then withdraws it

The tone is flirtatious but also defensive, full of little feints. He gives Here a word kiss! and immediately says Pass I on, as if to prove he isn’t begging. He even insists, I breath no hope, cutting off any romantic consequence: the compliment is presented as a closed transaction. Yet the very next breath returns to her: Just a word in thy praise, girl, Just for the swirl / Thy satins make upon the stair. The contradiction is the poem’s motor: he denies desire’s forward motion (no “hope,” no request), but he can’t stop narrating the evidence of desire—sound, movement, satin swirl, the imagined stairway she descends. The compliment is “just a word,” yet it keeps multiplying.

The praise is also a public song meant to circulate

Midway through, the poem widens from private address to public performance. The speaker imagines the moment when the minstrel, tale half told, / Shall burst to lilting at the repeated name, making the refrain something others will sing. The invocation of Bertrans, master of his lays (the troubadour figure explicitly named as Bertrans of Aultaforte) places the poem in a tradition where praise is social currency and reputation. This matters because it sharpens the threat buried in the gift: Audiart’s beauty is being made portable, reproducible, and independent of her will. Even if she hates him, her name will be carried by someone else’s mouth, lilting on cue. The phrase read it set / In rose and gold makes the compliment feel like inscription—beautiful, yes, but also fixed, and therefore harder to refuse.

The hinge: from satin and stairs to wrinkles and bitterness

The poem’s major turn comes when the speaker stops describing Audiart as she is and begins imagining her as she will be. After thy loveliness is here writ, the poem leaps into a future where she is bent and wrinkled, with no perfect limning, where the warm / Youth dew is cold / Upon thy hands. The language chills: what was once satin movement becomes bodily deterioration and emotional hardening. She is pictured Scorning a new, wry'd casement, Churlish and prickly, finding the earth as bitter / As now seems it sweet. This shift changes the whole poem: the praise is no longer only admiration; it becomes a time-locked document the speaker expects her to confront later, when sweetness has turned to bitterness and the world no longer mirrors her beauty.

Compliment as revenge: forgiveness offered on condition of her regret

What makes the future scene unsettling is that it contains a moral pressure. The speaker predicts she will soften someday, not necessarily from wisdom but from loss—Knowing, I know not how, / Thou wert once she for whom one forgave. The poem implies that her current cruelty is made possible by youth’s confidence; when youth is gone, she will finally be able to understand what she was given. This is where the tension tightens: the speaker’s “praise” is also a method of making her feel guilty later. Even the insistence that she hate me while the praise endures suggests a victory condition: he cannot win her love now, so he will win her future recognition. The refrain keeps its sweetness, but the logic beneath it hardens into something like, you will learn.

A sharp question the poem refuses to answer

If this praise is truly generous, why does it need the image of Audiart bent and wrinkled to complete itself? The poem seems to need her decline in order to make his words feel finally “right,” as if the compliment only lands fully when it can no longer be refused by a young body that still has choices.

The last refrain: devotion, fixation, and the sting in the Occitan tag

By the end, the repeated name has become both devotion and spell: Audiart, Audiart is said so often that it starts to sound like an incantation meant to keep her present. Yet the poem never lets go of the opening condition—she wishes him ill—and it closes with the untranslated tag Que be-m vols mal, returning to that hostility in the language of troubadour song. The final effect is double: Audiart is preserved in rose and gold, made into an object of lasting art, but also pinned there by a speaker who cannot accept her rejection without imagining a future in which she will finally read his words differently. The poem’s tenderness is real—Stately, tall and lovely tender—and so is its bitterness. In that mix, praise becomes not only admiration, but a way of staying in someone’s life after they’ve tried to push you out.