Blogging Pound’s The Cantos: Canto LXXVI

This is a series where I post what I think are slightly atypical readings of  the Cantos of Ezra Pound.

There’s also an (updated) index of all the Cantos (and related sources) I’ve discussed so far.

Today’s selection is one of the celebrated “Pisan Cantos,” Canto LXXVI.

Canto LXXVI

Here, we are back into the vortex. I was thinking, maybe because of the nature of the last Canto, or maybe for other reasons, about musical models for writing a poem, and trying to figure out which is most applicable to Pound’s approach. There’s an argument to be made that he engages in fugal writing: echoing motifs and counter-motifs intertwined are a huge thing in Pound’s style, after all, and one could squint and see the analogy between his rhyming of historical and mythical figures and the way Bach transposes the same motif into different keys as the fugue rounds the circle of fifths. 

However, in the end, the music that comes to mind when I read Canto LXXVI is not Bach, or rather, it is Bach, but as orchestrated by Webern. I’m speaking of Webern’s orchestration of Bach’s “Fuga (Ricercarta)” (from A Musical Offering). It’s a bewildering piece of music, one that at once sounds like Bach, and sounds like nothing before it. Webern splits the melodic lines across different instruments, so that there’s a constant shifting timbre imposed each melodic unity. There’s a constant shifting, so that it feels almost impossible to trace where the line will go next, which timbre it will take on, how what comes before precisely relates to what comes after, and yet at the same time there’s a powerful impression of unity running through it all. It really is worth a listen, if you haven’t heard it before, as the parallel is striking between this piece of music and Pound’s approach (in general, but for me especially in this canto). Maybe it shouldn’t surprise us, given the two were contemporary and both “modernists” in their way. 

One is drawn to use imagery from the poem to metaphorically describe how the poem works, or at least I am. The image that comes to mind is a crystal being turned and rotated in light, so that different colors and images spring forth from its many sides, shifting as it is rotated, flickering into and out of existence. With Pound, of course, the hues we see illuminate different elements of the world: the mystical, the literary, the architectural, the monetary and political, and the historical… as well, of course, as the personal. 

For me, it’s the personal that is the hardest to really get a bead on. Take, for example, the reference to (and ostensible quotation from) a letter from Pound’s daughter to him, about a hospitalized soldier:

“both eyes, (the loss of) and to find someone
   who talked his own dialect. We 
   talked of every boy and girl in the valley
   but when he came back from leave
he was sad because he had been able to feel
   all the ribs of his cow....”

It’s far from the first time Pound has slipped the personal into a canto, of course, and maybe I’m only sensitized to it because of the time off I had from the book, but it feels as if this sort of thing presents a fundamental puzzle to the reader: how is one to interpret this? This is not like the quotations from “great books” that Pound included in his work, where one could argue that Pound demanded from potential readers nothing less than erudition of the highest order—or, anyway, erudition when it came to things Pound found important. No, Pound knew very well that nobody but he and a few people in his immediate vicinity would catch the reference in all its implications: nobody could know what was “the great Ovid / bound in thick boards” mentioned toward the end of the canto: though Terrell tells us it’s a reference to one of Pound’s own volumes of Ovid, scarcely anyone could be expected to know it reading these lines, and surely Pound would have known nobody would get the reference.  

There’s also another moment in the poem—one pertinent to the state of the Cantos as a project during his imprisonment—where Pound returns to his own relative youth as a writer, to an earlier moment in the overarching literary project that became his life as a whole:

               under the two-winged cloud
               as of less and more than a day
by the soap-smooth stone posts where San Vio
meets with il Canal Grande
between Salviati and the house that was of Don Carlos
shd/I chuck the lot into the tide-water?
         le bozze “ A Lume Spento ”
                    and by the column of Todero
    shd/I shift to the other side
                    or wait 24 hours,

The moment is highly personal, as Terrell and others tell us: Pound found himself in despair, considering tossing the page proof sheets for his early collection “A Lume Spento” into a canal, a symbolic sort of surrender or resignation that one can’t help but feel symbolized for him the idea of giving up on writing poems altogether, or something similarly dramatic at least. In the end, Pound didn’t do it—of course, since we have “A Lume Spento,” after all. He didn’t give up on the book, or on his larger project as a poet and a writer more generally. Knowing this, knowing the way Pound was attracted to rhyming events and moments in history, even in his own history, one cannot help but imagine Pound at a similar crossroads, a similar moment of despair vis a vis his ongoing project of the Cantos. 

So what was he up to, with all the highly personal references? I’m left thinking that Pound’s view of ideograms: the belief that Chinese characters remained somehow hieroglyphic in nature, that the meaning of the word and of a whole literary thought or gesture could be contained in the “image” of a character or the image of a poem, somehow translated to these sorts of excerpts: that he could, with a small quotation, evoke a much larger picture, a deeper echoe of a whole sensibility or mood.  

What mood is it? Well, if we can speak of an is an overarching point to this canto, I think it is the contrast between mortal desolation and immortal brilliance. Yeah, that old Platonic philosophy of light thing that Pound’s been into for decades now. The mood is dominated by the desolation, but there’s flickerings of hope, it seems, that make themselves visible to us repeatedly in these pages. 

The poem seems built from the opposition of these two things: the mood of desolation, and the contrasting (and recurrent, momentary) sense of hope that opposes it. The references to Pound’s youth may not be immediately parseable to a reader—especially a reader without the benefit of other reference works, as Pound’s first readers were—but the sense of desolation, that does come through, at least some of the time. 

The poem brims with references to places, places that, we realize, stand or lie broken amid the wreckage of the Second World War, places the status of which Pound can only guess at from his cage. Then there are the places Pound knows are gone, places familiar to him and otherwise:

the huntress in broken plaster keeps watch no longer

tempora, tempora and as to mores

by Babylonian wall (memorat Cheever) 
    out of his bas relief, for that line
we recall him
    and who's dead, and who isn't
    and will the world ever take up its course again?

very confidentially I ask you: Will it?
      with Dieudonné dead and buried
not even a wall, or Mouquin, or Voisin or the cake shops
     in the Nevsky

         The Greif, yes, I suppose, and Schöners and perhaps
the Taverna and Robert’s
       but La Rupe no longer la Rupe, finito
     Pré Catalan, Armenonville, Bullier
     extinct as Willy and there are I suppose
no reprints

Teofile's bricabrac Cocteau's bricabrac
     seadrift snowin’ ‘em under
     every man to his junk-shop
houses shd/have been built in the ’80’s
(or ’60’s) for a’ that
     but Eileen's trick sunlight softens London's November
          progress, b . . . . . h yr/progress

Willy, apparently, was the pen-name of Henri Gauthier-Villars, a writer and music critic. That’s nothing new: Pound never missed a chance to work in a reference to a writer or literary figure he esteemed. But what is Willy doing here, amid mentions of defunct cake shops and French restaurants? Aside from the hunger pangs of a prison, it seems as if the defunct places—lost without a trace—and the defunct writers and artists of the world are sort of all part of one great tapestry, one that Pound has watched unravel before his eyes, leaving desolation and ruin at best, and at worst the loss of sacred places—”And in Mt Segur there is wind space and rain space/no more an altar to Mithras”—that are gone almost without a trace. The mention of bricabrac and that line about “every man to his junk-shop” is especially striking, as, what at The Cantos if not the junk shop of Pound’s mind? 

This feels, surely, like a reference to the Cantos as a project, which, after all, is a sort of bric-a-brac of Pound’s literary influences, the literary mind of Ezra Pound transformed into a junk shop of sorts, crammed with the “bricabrac” of Pound’s literary memory and literary aspirations. Where once Pound might have used Odysseus as a stand-in for himself in the sense of him being many-minded, of being a masculine adventurer on the literary seas, now one senses that perhaps he feels more kinship with Odysseus as a prisoner of sorts on Calypso’s Isle, or adrift after decades with no way home—for home has been bombed to oblivion, and even the most sacred places left beyond repair:

and the clouds over the Pisan meadows
            are indubitably as fine as any to be seen
from the peninsula
            οἰ βάρβαροι have not destroyed them
            as they have Sigismundo's Temple
   Divae Ixottae (and as to her effigy that was in Pisa?)
   Ladder at swing jump as for a descent from the cross
O white-chested martin, God damn it,
         as no one else will carry a message,
   say to La Cara: amo.

The clouds remain, but they float over the ruins not just of Sigismundo’s Temple, but also over the ruins of what Sigismundo’s Temple represented, for Pound seemed to think of the Tempio as a kind of symbol of the Renaissance itself, of the act of “making it new.” Love remains, beauty remains, but it is unreachable, “as no one else will carry a message,” to “say to La Cara: amo.”  Too much has been destroyed by “οἰ βάρβαροι,” the barbarians. Who are these barbarians? Pound’s own people, as so many of the snippets of conversation from the DTC suggest, who have—from Pound’s perspective—invaded and run roughshod over Europe, over European fascism but also European history and architecture and, in a very real way, European culture. 

(Pound didn’t, I think, realize that the Fascists also did these things—that they ran roughshod over European culture and history and art. That they banished a lot of the spirit of the renaissance in a bid to resurrect Caesar in the form of the strongman possessed of absolute power. I’m not sure Pound ever really came to grasp that European culture and civilization was being ground into the dirt even before the Brits and the Americans arrived to shatter its architecture along with it.) 

Desolation, then, and if paradise is not artificial, well then neither is hell:

Le Paradis n'est pas artificiel
     States of mind are inexplicable to us.
     δακρύων     δακρύων     δακρύων
L.       P.       gli onesti
                    J'ai eu pitié des autres
probablement pas assez, and at moments that suited my own con-
                                                       venience
             Le paradis n'est pas artificiel,
                      l'enfer non plus.

“δακρύων.    δακρύων.   δακρύων,” Terrell tells us, is “tears    tears       tears,” a line that is striking only because it is in Greek, because its linguistic occultation seems to me to suggest something inexpressible about the devastation that Pound is trying to give voice in this poem. To write “tears, tears, tears” would not have this effect, would be too direct and prosaic, where the Greek instead feels like a sacred utterance, of a sacred sort of sorrow. 

Where there is desolation, though, there is also consolation to be found. Pound makes his usual gestures to good economic policy, to the supposed wisdom of Kung, but it is the divine imagery, the light imagery, that seems to be the more convincing to him, as it recurs with greater frequency toward the end of the poem. In some of the earliest lines, it lurks, as in these:

But on the high cliff Alcmene,
     Dryas, Hamadryas ac Heliades
     flowered branch and sleeve moving
     Dirce et Ixotta e che fu chiamata Primavera
               in the timeless air

that they suddenly stand in my room here
between me and the olive tree
    or nel clivo ed al triedro?
    and answered: the sun in his great periplum
leads in his fleet here
           sotto le nostre scoglie
under our craggy cliffs
           alevel their mast-tops

It is striking that the feminine presence in this poem, in its first statement, is of mortal women, the wife of Lycus and Ixotta and Guido Cavalcanti’s Donna, who was called “Primavera.” As the poem proceeds, the references to the feminine increasingly are made to mythic or divine beings, at first Diana (“the huntress in the broken plaster”) and later to Aphrodite and the daughter of “dread Persephone, Athena and Arachne. 

Crystals and light, too, feature in this poem, especially in this representative passage that begins with such a desolate couplet where we cannot mistake the ant for anything else than what Pound suggests it is: “I, the writer.” 

              As a lone ant from a broken ant-hill
from the wreckage of Europe, ego scriptor.
     The rain has fallen, the wind coming down
     out of the mountain
     Lucca, Forti dei Marmi, Berchthold after the other one...
parts reassembled.
     ...and within the crystal, went up swift as Thetis
in colour rose-blue before sunset
and carmine and amber,

spiriti questi? personae?
                 tangibility by no means atasal
                 but the crystal can be weighed in the hand
formal and passing within the sphere: Thetis,
Maya, ’Αϕροδίτη,

“Atasal” is supposedly an Arabic word connoting union with the divine: tangibility might not be union with the divine, but it is still evidence of its reality and its immanence; that is, the immanence of the divine feminine, as embodied by Thetis (the sea nymph, once a goddess), and Maya (whom I think is a reference to the mother of Hermes, not to the Hindu philosophy concept of the same name), and Aphrodite (’Αϕροδίτη). The colors in the last lines of the earlier verse, “rose-blue before sunset / and carmine and amber,” call us back to the opening lines of the poem, in which the sun was high in the sky, and lit the cloudbank a saffron hue. 

Then there is this business of the butterfly and the smoke hole, the second reference of which appears near the end of the canto, beginning again with an evocation of tears:

lisciate con lagrime
       politis lachrymis ΔΑΚΡΥΩΝ

       bricks thought into being ex nihil
       suave in the cavity of the rock la concha
           ΠΟΙΚΙΛΟΘΡΟΝ’, ’ΑΘΑΝΑΤΑ
           that butterfly has gone out thru my smoke hole
’ΑΘΑΝΑΤΑ, saeva.

The image of the butterfly passing through the smoke hole—”my” smoke hole—feels powerfully suggestive of some kind of ascent of the spirit, escaping the body to be reunited with the divine light streaming down from above. Imagining Pound trapped in a cage, it’s a potent image: one must long to escape the prison of the body, and Pound even invokes Sappho’s hymn to Aphrodite. 

That line above continues directly on with the following:

Against buff the rose for the
background to Leonello, Petrus Pisani pinxit
    that a cameo should remain

in Arezzo an altar fragment (Cortona, Angelico)
                         po'eri di'aoli
po'eri di'aoli sent to the slaughter

      Knecht gegen Knecht
      to the sound of the bumm drum, to eat remnants
          for a usurer's holiday to change the
price of a currency
        ΜΕΤΑΘΕΜΕΝΩΝ.... 
              ΝΗΣΟΝ ‘ΑΜΥΜΟΝΑ
     woe to them that conquer with armies
           and whose only right is their power.

Small remnants of what matters remain—have always remained—and invocations of the goddesses of beauty might offer brief succor, but they contend with powerful, dark forces… predictably, among them, usura, because that’s Pound’s ultimate explanation for how everything in the world goes wrong, the fantasy of Jewish conspirators ruining the world for a buck. 

ΝΗΣΟΝ ‘ΑΜΥΜΟΝΑ, Terrell suggests, may be a reference to the Isle of the Cattle of the Sun, the place where Odysseus’ men doomed themselves by slaughtering and eating the flesh of the divine cattle there. It’s not hard to trace this to the “barbarians,” whom Pound decries earlier: his own countrymen chose folly, chose war, or that’s what Pound’s view is. I thought originally that it was a strange line to choose to place before the two that follow, which, again, seem to be a curse uttered at America, unwitting of the fact that Pound’s beloved Mussolini was as much of a monger of war as anyone, but of course from Pound’s perspective, the Fascists were just doing what Fascists do, and the Americans, Pound thought, should have kept out of the war. 

The dilemma, for Pound, is how to reconcile himself to this disjoint, this contradiction: that the divine exists, and that he crouches at the absolute nadir of everything that was once dear to him. I am curious to see how he works through it in the poems that follow. 

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