Poems about Albas

I find so many of Pound's poems in Lustra vexing because they don't work like "Alba." They don't give us the naturalistic picture that "Alba" and other Imagist poems do. Many of them are the poet's addresses to his poems, or songs. Here's a brief example:

"Ite"
Go, my songs, seek your praise from the young and from the intolerant,
Move among the lovers of perfection alone.
Seek ever to stand in the hard Sophoclean light
And take your wounds from it gladly.

The difficulty in approaching these poems lies in the fact that they don't seem like poems; they implore poems to do things, and as such do not work like poems themselves. I've been considering these poems in light of (my conception of) Pound's theory of poetic images. My conception, again, is that the poetic image is a conflation or tension between two things that leads to a productive and meaningful burst of insight.

I would argue that there's an aspect of the image even in "Ite." The surface reading seems pretty straightforward: the poet requires that his songs be held to the highest of standards. But underneath that reading is the understanding that perfection is never possible. There is a tension between moving and standing. The poems are told to "Seek ever" toward the possibility of stasis, the ability to stand in one place. The poet wants the poem to stand "in the hard Sophoclean light," as if that is the great achievement of being, but the poem is inevitably wounded in the glare of that light. As Ruthven points out in "A Guide to Ezra Pound's Personae," Sophocles is invoked to refer to cutting through the dreaminess of the poetry of the 1890s. His essay "A Few Don'ts" encourages poets to eliminate unnecessary words, working toward greater concision. But the poem that seeks this light is ever wounded, suffering continual amputations toward perfection. Being, for the poem, is most fully realized by submitting to the ultimate concision that erases it from being. The tension of this paradox is the image.