Can someone provide an analysis of "The Plunge," one of Ezra Pound's most famous poems?

Ezra Pound’s poem “The Plunge” has been the subject of
commentary by a number of analysts. Michael Alexander, for instance, in his book The
Poetic Achievement of Ezra Pound, argues that the poem reflects Pound’s own eager
yearning for new experiences (p. 79).

K. K. Ruthven, in A
Guide to Ezra Pound’s Personae, also thinks the poem reflects an important aspect of
Pound’s own life. He identifies the “this” of line 6 as the “London literary world,” and
he identifies the “you” of line 9 as perhaps Dorothy Shakespear, Pound’s future wife. He
suggests that lines 11-13 refer to winter in London, and he notes, concerning the
passage beginning at line 16, that Pound waited until 1921 before taking advantage of
the better weather of Paris (p. 197).

The poem itself
begins with its own plunge in medias res (into the midst of
things):

I
would bathe myself in strangeness:

These comforts heaped
upon me, smother me!

The word
“bathe” implies total immersion, cleansing, a kind of baptism into “strangeness.”
Ironically, familiar “comforts” seem stifling, almost life-threatening in the sense that
they may kill the speaker’s spirit. While most people seek “comforts,” especially of the
material sort, this speaker finds them smothering, and the fact that the first sentence
of the poem ends with an exclamation marks already suggests the depth of this speaker’s
passions.

The next line continues to emphasize a sense of
the paradoxical.  Just as the comforts were smothering, so now “the new” is associated
with burning and scalding feelings in the speaker, but these feelings are associated not
with pain but with intensity and deep desire. The water imagery of line 1 is
counterpointed with the fire imagery of line 3.  The key word “new” is doubly emphasized
in lines 3-4, while the word “Places” in line 5 is strongly emphasized by its isolation
and by yet another exclamation mark.  This poem shows the Romantic side of Pound – the
side that can create a speaker who seems full of passion and enthusiasm and who presents
that speaker without irony or implied sarcasm.

In the
second stanza, the speaker addresses another person – an unnamed “you” – but that
person, presumably a woman, is imagined mainly in relation to the speaker. Her sudden
presence in the poem is stressed by the brevity of the line (9) in which she first
appears (and also by the way that “you” echoes “new”). Lines 11-13 suggest that the
speaker has grown to hate the life of large cities in particular, with their
combinations of unattractive solidity (“walls . . . stones”) and lack of cleanness and
clarity (“mire, mist, . . . fog”). (Note how “mire” contrasts with the opening image of
being cleansed.)

The speaker claims that he loves and
desires the “you” more, even, than newness, but he suggests that he cannot properly
enjoy or appreciate her in their current environment.  He wants her to flow over him
like water (14), thus echoing the opening line, just as lines 17-18 remind us of the
earlier references to intense fire. He wants a new life associated with the beauties of
nature (16), and the poem ends with a characteristic paradox: he seeks appealingly
“Alien people” (20) because he is now thoroughly alienated from his present life and
present location. The freedom the speaker desires is symbolized by the free structure
and rhythms and unregimented rhymes of the poem.