O God, O Venus, O Mercury, patron of thieves,
Give me in due time, I beseech you, a little tobacco-shop,
With the little bright boxes
piled up neatly upon the shelves
And the loose fragment cavendish
and the shag,
And the bright Virginia
loose under the bright glass cases,
And a pair of scales
not too greasy,
And the votailles dropping in for a word or two in passing,
For a flip word, and to tidy their hair a bit.

O God, O Venus, O Mercury, patron of thieves,
Lend me a little tobacco-shop,
or install me in any profession
Save this damn’d profession of writing,
where one needs one’s brains all the time.

Analysis, meaning and summary of Ezra Pound's poem The Lake Isle

2 Comments

  1. Francis M says:

    Its not a parody. Its building on the same sentiment, transposed. A parody would surely work by reworking the style to fit an exaggerated version of the content, rather than taking very similar content (authentic, we assume, in its place) and using a totally different style, while paying lip-service to the source in the title.

  2. kabo says:

    This poem is a simple parody of William Butler Yeats’s ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’.

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