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EZRA POUND 159
salary of three hundred pounds per year, a result of his work
during the Irish Revolution, but now his health was poor, and he
had been advised to seek warmer climes. His political service
ended in 1928, and he came that summer to Italy.
In A Packet for Ezra Pound, he describes the little town where
Ezra spent much of his life: "Mountains that shelter the bay
from all but the strongest wind, bare brown branches of low
vines and of tall trees blurring their outline as though with a
soft mist; houses mirrored in an almost motionless sea; a verandahed
gable a couple of miles away bringing to mind some
Chinese painting. Rapallo's thin line of broken mother-of-pearl
along the water's edge. The little town described in An Ode on a
Grecian Urn. In what better place could I, forbidden Dublin winters,
and all excited crowded places, spend what winters yet remain?
"On the broad pavement by the sea pass Italian peasants or
working people, people out of the little shops, a famous German
dramatist, the barber's brother looking like an Oxford don, a
British retired skipper, an Italian prince descended from Charlemagne
and no richer than the rest of us, and a few tourists seeking
tranquillity. As there is no great harbour full of yachts, no
great yellow strand, no great ballroom, no great casino, the rich
carry elsewhere their strenuous life." 8
In the winter of 1929, Yeats took rooms on the Via Americhe
in Rapallo. On March 2, 1929, he wrote to Olivia Shakespear,
"Tonight we dine with Ezra, the first dinner-coated meal since
I got here—to meet Hauptmann who does not even know one word
of English but is fine to look at—after the fashion of William
Morris. Auntille—how do you spell him?—and his lady will be
there and probably a certain Basil Bunting, one of Ezra's more
savage disciples. He got into jail as a pacifist and then for assaulting
the police and carrying concealed weapons and he is now
writing up Antille's music." 9
Hauptmann was a yearly visitor to Rapallo, spending part of
each winter there. He had done well as Germany's leading dramatist,
and his income from his work allowed him to maintain a
magnificent place, "Der Weisenstein", near Dresden, as well as a