Ezra Pound

The Plunge

The Plunge - meaning Summary

Desire for Newness

The poem expresses urgent longing for novelty and escape. The speaker rejects familiar comforts, feeling smothered, and craves new friends, places, and sunlight. Desire for a beloved is entwined with the wish to be carried away like water, away from walls, streets, fog, and routine. The voice imagines solitary freedom among alien people and open fields, prioritizing the exhilaration of the new over past attachments.

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I would bathe myself in strangeness: These comforts heaped upon me, smother me! I burn, I scald so for the new, New friends, new faces, Places! Oh to be out of this, This that is all I wanted - save the new. And you, Love, you the much, the more desired! Do I not loathe all walls, streets, stones, All mire, mist, all fog, All ways of traffic? You, I wold have flow over me like water, Oh, but far out of this! Grass, and low fields, and hills, And sun, Oh, sun enough! Out, and alone, among some Alien people!

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