RACHEL HADAS, EZRA POUND, AND ROSH HASHANAH

“In the Gloom, the Gold,” by the masterful Rachel Hadas, is a poem I find strangely appropriate for this particular Rosh Hashanah, in which we find gloom all around us and are desperate for gold to emerge from the clouds. We’re hungry to emerge from the “cells” that can stand for our various quarantines.

To be sure, Hadas’s truly incandescent poem derives, at least in part, from a Christian base. She references “The Ballad of the Goodly Fere” that great poem about the crucifixion by the famously anti-Semitic Ezra Pound. (Pound is my favorite poet, even though I’m Jewish.) But Pound’s chillingly resonant final lines about the resurrection of Christ, (rendered in Old English dialect)—”I ha' seen him eat o' the honey-comb/Sin' they nailed him to the tree”—also resonate, for me, with the honey and apples with which we Jews greet the New Year.

Also strangely appropriate is the fact that the poet's initials are the same as the holiday’s. Let us take it as a sign of better things to come. Happy New Year, everyone!

UPDATE: Rachel Hadas comments: “Question: I am delighted you wrote about my ‘In the Gloom, the Gold’ in your lovely blog.  But is the Pound passage I had in mind from ‘The Ballad of...’ etc?  I thought it was from [Canto XI]: ‘In the gloom, the gold/gathers the light against it,’ is I think the passage.  Anyway it is most certainly an autumnal poem, here in gold and gloomy cool  and beautiful Vermont.”