Since poetry and song are such kindred spirits, and because I love the Ezra Pound parody, I will post this little tidbit. It comes from
this page. There are footnotes numbered "3" and "4" in here, but I can't find where the notes themselves are located. --SRS


Ezra Pound - "Winter is icumen in"

Translation is by no means the only vehicle whereby literary minds can practice the art of derivative historicism. Ezra Pound's "Winter is icumen in" demonstrates what ingenious mischief this "objectionably modern" and "objectionably antiquarian" poet (in the sympathetic words of T. S. Eliot) could wring from an anonymous thirteenth-century rota. First, the text of "Sumer is icumen in" (c. 1260):

Sumer is icumen in, / Spring has come in,
Lhude sing, cuccu! / Loudly sing, cuckoo!
Groweth sed and bloweth med / Grows the seed and blooms the meadow
And springth the wude nu. / And the woods springs now.
Sing, cuccu! / Sing, cuckoo!               

Awe bleteth after lomb, / The ewe bleats after the lamb,
Lhouth after calve cu / The calf lows after the cow
Bulloc sterteth, bucke ferteth. / The bull leaps, the buck leaps, twisting.

Murie sing, cuccu! / Merrily sing, cuckoo!
Cuccu, cuccu, / Cuckoo, cuckoo,            
Wel singes thu, cuccu. / Well sing you, cuckoo.
Ne swik thu naver nu! / Nor cease you ever now!

Sing cuccu nu, sing cuccu! / Sing cuckoo now, sing cuckoo!
Sing cuccu nu, sing cuccu! / Sing cuckoo now, sing cuckoo!3


Pound's notorious parody goes thus:

Winter is icumen in,
Lhude sing Goddamm,
Raineth drop and staineth slop,
And how the wind doth ramm!
Sing: Goddamm.
Skiddeth bus and sloppeth us,
An ague hath my ham.
Freezeth river, turneth liver,
Damn you, sing: Goddamm.
Goddamm, Goddamm, 'tis why I am, Goddamm,

So 'gainst the winter's balm.
Sing goddamm, damm, sing Goddamm,
Sing goddamm, sing goddamm, DAMM.4


Perhaps even more than Eliot himself, Pound embodied the paradoxical essence of the "modern" artist, at once fiercely defiant of—and proudly devoted to—tradition. Pound's passion for history took the form of numerous adaptations of Provençal and early Italian poems, a version of The Seafarer (tenth century), and even translations of the Chinese author Li Po, which laid the foundation for the richly allusive language and culturally diverse imagery of the Cantos. Earlier in his career, he helped establish the Imagist school of poetry, whose emphasis on clarity, conciseness, stylistic economy, and the elimination of meter and rhyme was derived from his study of the classical poetry of Japan and China.5

T. S. Eliot credited Pound with having been "more responsible for the XXth century revolution in poetry than any other individual." That this revolution was founded on a profoundly learned historicism strangely contradicts the exaggeratedly iconoclastic pretensions of modernist theory and criticism.