"A Virginal," composed in 1912, is named for the diminutive keyboard instrument preferred by maidens during the late Renaissance. The poem reflects the early period of Pound's development and his skillful use of the fourteen-line Petrarchan sonnet. He rhymes the first eight lines abbaabba, closing with the rhyme scheme cdeecd. Opening with a burst of emotion, he introduces his rejection with two strong beats, "No, no!" Speaking in the guise of a lover rejecting a lady, he cloaks his commentary on poetry in dashing romanticism, brandishing the female image of the Latin vagina or scabbard, which he will not soil with a dull blade. His rejection of classicism turns on an amusing overstatement of departure from the arms that "have bound me straitly," a pun suggesting a straightjacket.
At the break between opening octave and concluding sestet, Pound returns to the original spondee and chops the line into three segments — another "No, no," a dismissal of his castoff love, and the beginning of his reason for abandoning the allure of traditional verse. Intent on experimentation, he prefers the green shoots that signal a new thrust through earth's crust. He alliterates the past as a "winter wound" and looks beyond to April's white-barked trees, a color symbolic of an emerging purity.
