Our Contemporaries - Analysis

A tiny satire of what counts as contemporary

Pound’s poem makes a sharp, almost tossed-off claim: what one person lives as heat, risk, and instant reaction becomes, for another person, material to be converted into culture. The title, Our Contemporaries, sounds like a friendly label for people who share a time; the poem undercuts it by showing two figures who occupy the same moment on the same island yet seem to inhabit incompatible realities. One reacts with a body; the other responds with an archive.

The princess’s urgency versus his decision

The first sentence hinges on a strange asymmetry: the Taihaitian princess doesn’t act because of love or danger explicitly, but because he had decided. The poem doesn’t tell us what he decided, and that omission matters: his will is treated as self-explanatory, while her response has to be performed in spectacle. She rushed out into the sunlight and swarmed up a cocoanut palm tree—an image that’s vivid and slightly comic, like a sudden flare of motion against a postcard background. Even the verb swarmed makes her feel less like an individual and more like a burst of instinct, which hints at an uncomfortable exoticizing gaze.

The turn: from sunlight to sonnets

The poem pivots hard on But. After the bright, physical scene, we’re told simply: he returned to this island and wrote ninety Petrarchan sonnets. That second action is both impressive and absurdly mismatched to what preceded it. A Petrarchan sonnet is a highly inherited European love-form; planting ninety of them on the same island where someone just climbed a palm tree turns the moment into a critique of how passion gets processed into convention. The tone cools: the sunlight becomes paperwork.

A contradiction the poem refuses to settle

Is the princess’s gesture a real, daring response to abandonment, or is it being reduced to scenery for he—the one whose decisions and writing matter? Pound leaves that tension unresolved. The poem can be read as mocking the poet who substitutes quantity (ninety) and tradition (Petrarchan) for actual encounter; it can also be read as exposing the poem’s own complicity in turning the princess into a quick, exotic image. Either way, the final line lands like a dry punchline: what survives of the shared present is not her climb into the sunlight, but his sonnets.