The ant’s a centaur in his dragon world.
Pull down thy vanity, it is not man
Made courage, or made order, or made grace,
Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down.
Learn of the green world what can be thy place
In scaled invention or true artistry,
Pull down thy vanity,
Paquin pull down!
The green casque has outdone your elegance.

These lines come from Ezra Pound’s long modernist epic The Cantos, in the “Pisan Cantos,” written in 1945 while Pound was held by U.S. forces in a detention camp near Pisa after World War II. In this period of confinement and reckoning—after his fascist broadcasts and impending treason charges—Pound repeatedly turns to self-rebuke, memory, and the natural world around the camp. The repeated imperative “Pull down thy vanity” functions as a penitential refrain. The address to “Paquin” invokes the Paris fashion house (Jeanne Paquin), using haute couture as a symbol of human pretension set against the superior “elegance” of natural forms (“the green casque”).

Pound contrasts human self-importance with the intricate adequacy of nature. The ant, magnified within its own environment, becomes a “centaur” in a “dragon world,” suggesting that scale and perspective undo human claims to mastery. The refrain “Pull down thy vanity” reads as moral and aesthetic correction: courage, order, and grace are not manufactured by human will, and true “artistry” should learn from the “green world” rather than from social display. The jab at “Paquin” sharpens the critique—fashionable elegance is outdone by the organic “green casque,” implying that art and civilization become hollow when severed from humility, proportion, and the living patterns they imitate.