What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross
What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee
What thou lov’st well is thy true heritage
Whose world, or mine or theirs or is it of none?
First came the seen, then thus the palpable
Elysium, though it were in the halls of hell.
What thou lovest well is thy true heritage.

These lines come from Ezra Pound’s late sequence The Cantos, written after decades of modernist experimentation and personal upheaval. Pound composed the later cantos in the aftermath of World War II, following his pro-fascist broadcasts, arrest, and confinement (including years at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C.). In the “Rock-Drill” and “Thrones” sections, and especially in the final fragments, Pound turns from grand historical montage toward compressed, aphoristic statements about value, memory, and what endures. The repeated refrain “What thou lovest well…” reads as a hard-won summation: a late-life attempt to salvage meaning—ethical and aesthetic—out of a life marked by ambition, error, and belated self-scrutiny.

The refrain asserts that what one genuinely loves is what lasts and constitutes one’s “true heritage,” while everything else is “dross”—waste or impurity. Pound frames love not as sentiment but as a principle of valuation: attention and devotion determine what is real and enduring in a life. The questions about “Whose world” and the movement from “the seen” to “the palpable” suggest a shift from abstract claims to lived, felt reality. The paradox “Elysium… in the halls of hell” implies that even amid ruin, disgrace, or suffering, the beloved—art, craft, persons, or ideals—can create a kind of paradise. As a late-canto distillation, it functions like a personal credo and a minimalist ethics of what to keep.