The Rest (1)
O helpless few in my country, (2)
O remnant (3) enslaved (4)! (5)
Artists broken against her (6), (7)
A-stray (8), lost in the villages (9), (10)
Mistrusted, spoken-against,
Lovers of beauty (11), starved (12),
Thwarted (13) with systems, (14)
Helpless against the control; (15)
You (16) who cannot wear yourselves out (17)
By persisting to (18) successes, (19)
You who can only speak,
Who cannot steel (20) yourselves into reiteration (21); (22)
You of the finer sense,
Broken against false knowledge,
You who can know at first hand, (23)
Hated, shut in (24), mistrusted:
Take thought: (25)
I have weathered the storm (26),
I have beaten out (27) my exile (28).
(1) A state or period of refreshing freedom from exertion.
(2) Ezra Pound says directly to whom he is talking. He talks to those few helpless
people who are living in his country, America.
(3) A small isolated group of people surviving from a particular culture or group.
(4) People who have a dominating influence on their shoulder. This influence
takes away their freedom.
(5) Pound gives the characteristic of those people to his reader in this line.
(6) 'Her' refers to America, or the American system. Pound depicts his patriotic
ideas by referring to America as her instead of it since he would like to go back to
his country, America, from which he was exiled.
(7) Pound directly says that those people are artists.
(8) Away from the right path.
(9) Pound refers to the villages of America.
(10) Pound talks about some of those artists who had gone to the villages.
(11) You, artists, are the true lovers of beauty.
(12) You feel deprived of something, as the following lines depict this something is
their freedom. You need that.
(13) Disillusioned.
(14) The system prevents your plans from becoming successful.
(15) You are helpless people, who cannot exert control.
(16) They, or those people.
(17) 'Wear out' means to try so hard.
(18) 'Persist to' is an expression, which indicates the time.
(19) These two lines mean that no matter how hard you try, you are not going to
be successful.
(20) To try to do something that is very unpleasant for you.
(21) To do or say something repeatedly, sometimes in a tiresome way.
(22) You can speak, and actually, your speaking is about true knowledge, but you
cannot repeat what they are saying.
(23) You do not need the second hand, false, knowledge since you know the true
knowledge yourself.
(24) Confided.
(25) Think about the idea that I am going to tell you. I am a good example for you.
(26) 'Weather the storm' is an expression, which means I have endured, or
survived, throughout a difficult situation.
(27) Managed.
(28) Staying away from your country, either for personal or political reasons.
Analysis
In 'The Rest', Pound has fallen into two traps. The first is his language, which is
different from his other poems, and the next is propaganda. These two make this
poem weak from a structural point of view. It is also the embodiment of Pound's
fascist ideas as it is full of direct references.
The fascist ideas had in effect affected him so. As he wanted to talk about his
political ideas, with political reasons, he had to talk about them openly. Therefore,
he wrote a poem in simple language to make it easy for everybody to understand.
Unfortunately, he sacrificed his language, which is simple but strong, to reach
those political aims.
Producing propaganda was his ultimate aim; therefore, he referred directly to
artists, and told them what he wanted to tell them openly with the use of the
adjectives. The last three lines of this poem depict his real reason for writing such
a poem. They are his propaganda, which are addressed to the artists.
As a whole, this poem can be very helpful to Marxist critics, but formalist and
structural critics would be helpless when analyzing it.
Maryam Javaherinia