“The+Bath-Tub”+-+Ezra+Pound

= “The Bath-Tub” - Ezra Pound =

As a bathtub lined with white porcelain , > When the hot water gives out or goes tepid , > So is the slow cooling of our chivalrous passion, > O my much praised but-not-altogether-satisfactory lady.

“The Bath-Tub”, when compared to Pounds other works, asks the reader to consider quite a different use of the “single-image” poem. Here, the image is given as the presentation of a psychological state, rather than a that fuses a feeling for the powers of simile with intricate sensations, then places the whole in a wonderfully ironic context.

Pound seems to beg that the audience attempt, in this work, to separate several difficult and complex ideas from this poem: the irony, from the pity, from the admiration, from the disappointment, all in the intricate and nuanced attitude assumed by the single sentence of “The Bath-Tub.” The speaker’s admiration that the passion cools so slowly seems inseparable from his resentment, and disappointment, that the lady would allow the passion to cool at all. Here, irony is not used in the sense of appearing to say one thing while meaning another. Irony is a matter of attitude, a matter of disposing the conscious “will” of the poem by adjusting the tone in which a person is regarded. The “will” is specific to the poem – not an expression of character traits so much as it is an adjustment to what the language allows for in the situation.