Ezra Pound: Poet

by A. David Moody

  Canto 44 carries the story on through the times of the Grand Dukes Pietro Leopoldo (reigned 1765–90), and his son Ferdinando III (reigned 1790–9, 1814–24)—the interruption in the latter’s reign being due to Napoleon’s conquest of Italy. The Monte dei Paschi is in the background now, and the attention is on the exemplary rule of the Grand Dukes in Tuscany, with Napoleon figuring as the anti-hero. The good deeds of Pietro Leopoldo frame the canto. At the beginning there is his shutting down grain imports in a year when the Grand Duchy had a ‘Heavy grain crop unsold’, and his setting a legal maximum on interest, 4 per cent in 1783. The closing passage is a retrospective celebration of a duke ‘that wished state debt brought to an end’, and ‘lightened mortmain that princes and church be under tax | as were others’—

  that ended the gaolings for debt;

  that said thou shalt not sell public offices;

  that suppressed so many gabelle [taxes];

  that freed the printers of surveillance

  and wiped out the crime of lèse majesty;

  that abolished death as a penalty and all tortures in prisons…

  He also ‘split common property among tillers’, and his actions extended to ‘roads, trees, and the wool trade, | the silk trade, and a set price, lower, for salt’. He was altogether a ruler who cared for the public good above private profit and glory. And his son Ferdinando III was of the same mould. The main episode in the first half of the canto is a great day of celebration in Siena in 1792 to mark Ferdinando’s relaxing a law imposed by Florence to restrict the sale of grain and to keep down its price at the expense of the growers. When he was driven out of Tuscany by the French armies in 1799 his people called him ‘il piu galantuomo del paese’, their best, their most honourable man.

  Things were very different under Napoleon—

  the citizen priest Fr Lenzini mounted the tribune

  to join the citizen Abrâm

  and in admiring calm sat there with them the citizen

  the Archbishop

  from 7,50 a bushel to 12

  by the 26th April

  This was a revolution that overthrew the established order in Tuscany, corrupted the clergy, unleashed violence against Jews—the ghetto sacked and ‘hebrews…burned with the liberty tree in the piazza’—and which undid the very meanings of words. In the name of ‘fraternité’ the ‘citoyen’ Monte dei Paschi was invited to ‘turn over all sums in your cash box’. Citizen Tuscany was absorbed into a new kingdom of Etruria, with a ‘King of Etruria, Primus, absolute, without constitution’, and this Louis levied new taxes, ‘so heavy they are thought to be more than | paid by subjects of Britain’. Citizen Napoleon—who had already crowned himself Emperor of France in 1804—had himself crowned King of Italy in 1805. He then deposed and dismissed ‘Madame ma sœur et cousine’, the widow of the first king of Etruria and Queen Regent to her infant son his successor, and installed his own sister, nicknamed ‘Semiramis of Lucca’, as Grande Duchesse of Tuscany. Napoleon is represented by a letter to the Queen Regent in which he shows no care at all for the will or the welfare of the people, and is concerned only for rank and majesty, especially his own, and for the extension of his empire. ‘I have given orders’, he writes, ‘that she’—the dismissed Queen Regent—‘be | received in my kingdom of Italy | and in my French States with honours that are due her’. Mention of Lisbon prompts the thought, ‘My troops shd have by now entered that capital | and taken possession of Portugal.’ He had made himself ‘Primus, absolute’; ‘I’ and ‘my’ rule in his sentences; and, as we know, he would fall. The line, ‘And “Semiramis” 1814 departed from Lucca’, marks his first fall, along with these other lines from the record, ‘and this day came Madame Letizia, | the ex-emperor’s mother, and on the 13th departed’—both sister and mother were sailing to join him in his exile on Elba.

  In this revisioning of history Napoleon figures as of less significance than the usually forgotten Grand Dukes of Tuscany. Yet the canto does briefly note the recognitions in the multi-volume history of the Monte dei Paschi that his ‘law code remains. | monumento di civile sapienza’; and that, moreover, his administration ‘dried swamps, grew cotton, brought in merinos’, improved the mortgage system. ‘“Thank god such men be but few”’, is the ambivalent conclusion. The canto turns back with relief to the good times under Pietro Leopoldo, and then to the restoration of Ferdinando III and his enlightened rule. It concludes with this summary affirmation of the Monte dei Paschi, ‘The foundation, Siena, has been to keep a bridle on usury’, a line to bind the first three cantos together, and to lead into canto 45.

  Thus far Pound has been rendering the fairly heavy prose of his sources into clearly phrased and measured verse for a flexible speaking voice, a voice inflected with humour or irony or enthusiasm, alert to the moral nuances and complexities of the story, but staying always close to the recorded facts and the implicit viewpoints of the time. He is not writing timeless lyric, but working at recovering what was done in that place at that time, and with a keen awareness that one must act in time. There is this single moment of lyric reflection,

  wave falls and the hand falls

  Thou shalt not always walk in the sun

  or see weed sprout over cornice

  Thy work in set space of years, not over an hundred.

  That might be the notary’s hand, or his own, and his reader’s. That ‘Thou’ is the all-inclusive singular which is addressing equally one’s own self and other selves, speaking to all individually and inwardly. Pound himself walked in the sun in Siena and saw ‘weed sprout over cornice’; and in his sense of the moment there is a timeless, impersonal, insight. It is a moment, a mood, which will be caught up into canto 47.

  Canto 45 distils a very different mood from the action of the preceding Siena cantos. This is, on the face of it, an Old Testament preacher’s or prophet’s passionate denunciation of usury. The word occurs twenty times in the fifty lines, and is linked throughout to insistent negatives, as in

  with usura

  seeth no man Gonzaga his heirs and his concubines

  no picture is made to endure nor to live with

  but is made to sell and sell quickly

  ‘Usura’ blurs ‘clear demarcation’, keeps the stone cutter from his stone, ‘blunteth the needle in the maid’s hand | and stoppeth the spinner’s cunning’. The remarkable thing about this canto though, more especially when one thinks of the wholly negative rage of Pound’s attacks on usury in his prose, is that here the fury of denunciation is accompanied by a strong opposite sense of the good things usury destroys. Devastation may be the dominant theme, yet the things that are loved, the productions of nature and craft and art, stand out very clearly as the counter-theme—

  With usura hath no man a house of good stone

  each block cut smooth and well fitting

  that design might cover their face

  What usury prevents is nevertheless made present to the mind there, and it is the same throughout the canto. The positive feelings for good bread made of mountain wheat stand against ‘with usura, sin against nature, | is thy bread…stale as paper’. A whole way of life, Siena’s as it might be, is evoked in the painted paradise on the church wall; in the wool that should come to market, and in the spinner’s cunning and the weaver’s loom; in the stone-cutter and his chisel; and in the artists, Duccio and others, who ‘came not by usura’. As the denunciation builds to its powerful climax so the images of what usury undoes grow more urgent and compelling—

  Usura rusteth the chisel

  It rusteth the craft and the craftsman

  It gnaweth the thread in the loom

  None learneth to weave gold in her pattern ;

  Azure hath a canker by usura; cramoisi is unbroidered

  Emerald findeth no Memling

  Usura slayeth the child in the womb

  It stayeth the young man’s courting

  It hath brought palsey to bed, lyeth

  between the young bride and h
er bridegroom

  CONTRA NATURAM

  That is so very different from Pound’s prose, and so much more effective. There is no incitement to immediate action, no association of usury with the Jewish race, and no flailing language. Rather there is precise definition and justice in the measured words—the canto practises what the poet is in love with—and thus while it allows the ill-effects of usury to appear dominant in time, it maintains in the mind a strong vision of a better, a properly natural order. 4

  There is an abrupt time-shift in canto 46 from ‘how it was under Duke Leopold’ to how it is now, in the present moment. Moreover the poet shifts his identity. He is no longer a searcher of archives, nor the preacher against usury. Now he is a contemporary investigator and prosecutor of crime. He has been on the case for seventeen years and longer, ever since he grasped what Douglas was going on about in the New Age office in 1918, that is, that the government can create credit and distribute purchasing power to its people. He can see the crime, has the evidence and a confession, but can he get a conviction?

  The criminal he wants to put away is the banking system which has usurped the power to create credit and which exercises it for private profit and against the public interest. The confession was made by William Paterson, one of the speculators who set up the Bank of England in 1694, in its prospectus or charter. The Bank, he wrote, ‘Hath benefit of interest on all the moneys which it, the bank, creates out of nothing’. 5 That is placed, underlined for emphasis, as the centre and pivot of the canto. It is followed by an observation said to have been made by Senator John Sherman of Ohio to Rothschilds in London during the American Civil War, and repeated by them in a letter to a New York firm. Sherman was at that time a member of the Senate Committee on Finance and an active proponent of the National Banking Act of 1863, the act which opened the way for US banks to gain control of the nation’s credit and to use it for private gain:

  Said Mr RothSchild, hell knows which Roth-schild

  1861, ’64 or there sometime, ‘Very few people

  ‘will understand this. Those who do will be occupied

  ‘getting profits. The general public will probably not

  ‘see it’s against their interest.’

  And because people don’t understand the banking system, and don’t see how it works against the public interest, the prosecutor despairs of getting a conviction. Three times he asks, ‘Will any jury convict?’, and implicitly answers, not while they can’t or won’t see the evidence that is all around them.

  The first half of the canto has been working up a general sense of the lack of clear-sighted discriminations and firm convictions in London as Pound knew it around the time of Orage’s New Age. Max Beerbohm’s un-genteel and politically pointed cartoons were suppressed. According to Orage other opinion shapers, Shaw and Chesterton and Wells, would not declare an opinion; while as for Pound, ‘trouble iz that you mean it, you will never be a journalist’. Then there was the amusing suburban garden party, at which he observed religious conviction dissolving into a polite drawing back from conversion or communion; and only the camel driver in the would-be Uniter’s story practises a faith not split off from his way of life. There too Mr Marmaduke remarked on the English government’s habit of not meaning what it said—he might have been talking about T. E. Lawrence’s Arabia—

  ‘They are mendacious, but if the tribe gets together

  ‘the tribal word will be kept, hence perpetual misunderstanding.

  ‘Englishman goes there, lives honest, word is reliable,

  ‘ten years, they believe him, then he signs terms for his government,

  ‘and, naturally, the treaty is broken. Mohammedans,

  ‘Nomads, will never understand how we do this.’

  All that, from genteel obfuscation of facts, through belief with no ground under it, up to governments not meaning their word, is what the prosecutor is up against in making his case.

  The latter part of the canto glances hastily, even despairingly, over manifestations of usuries and evasions through the ages, as if hurriedly turning over file upon file of a mountain of evidence. There is too much here to make a clear case—‘London houses, ground rents, foetid brick work’—Regius Professors appointed to spread lies—the Manchester slums—‘Bank creates it ex nihil’—‘Jefferson…Van Buren’—Antoninus, ‘usura and sea insurance’, Athens—‘TAXES to build St Peters’, that is, the Church selling its sacraments and disregarding Luther’s protest, and ‘Thereafter design went to hell, | Thereafter barocco, thereafter stone-cutting desisted’. At that point the poet himself breaks out, speaking as ‘narrator’ in the Church’s own Latin as if taking up its neglected duty to denounce usury, ‘Aurum est commune sepulchrum’, gold, the common grave, ‘Usura, commune sepulchrum’; then, with the epithets Aeschylus coined for Helen as cause of the Trojan war, he names it destroyer of men, of cities, and of governments, ‘helandros kai heleptolis kai helarxe’. He is heaping up denunciations from across the ages, building up to Geryon, the classical monster which Dante placed in the pit of hell as the figure of Fraud, of usury upon usury. That outburst of controlled rage having cleared his mind, there is at last a passage of simple direct evidence—

  FIVE million youths without jobs

  FOUR million adult illiterates

  15 million ‘vocational misfits’, that is with small chance for jobs

  NINE million persons annual, injured in preventable industrial accidents

  One hundred thousand violent crimes

  There, in the condition of the United States in 1935, was a ‘CASE for the prosecution’—only the Attorney General of the moment was wanting out, wanting the Postmaster’s job instead, according to ‘headline in current paper’. ‘England a worse case’, the canto concludes, ‘France under a foetor of regents’, meaning the Regents of the Bank of France. Altogether, the canto has been not so much about the iniquity of usury as about the difficulty, the apparent impossibility, of getting people to open their minds to the evil of it, and to stop tolerating it. The key word might be ‘conviction’, that is, the lack of conviction, and the consequent failure to convict.

  In his prose Pound would often be driven to baffled fury by that want of conviction. Here, though, in the following canto, instead of the further fulminations against the tolerance of usury that we might expect, he celebrates the profound, primal, vision that is needed to see clearly how usury goes against nature. Canto 47 enacts a rite to open the mind to the generative force of nature, and to dispose it to understand its world and to live in it with the conviction of that illumination.

  This rite affirming and renewing humanity’s unity with nature is conducted in the language of natural process and of the alert experience of nature; and it makes a powerful and rich music of its words to concentrate the mind and to bring it into accord with what is revealed in the experience. The vowels are ‘cut’, sharply defined, by the consonants; their tones are composed into quite complex harmonies and a natural melody; and the measure is controlled throughout by a steady though variable double-beat, like the heart-beat;—

  And the small stars now fall from the olive branch,

  Forked shadow falls dark on the terrace

  More black than the floating martin

  that has no care for your presence,

  His wing-print is black on the roof tiles

  And the print is gone with his cry.

  So light is thy weight on Tellus

  Thy notch no deeper indented

  Thy weight less than the shadow

  That particular passage is in the same mood as the lines noticed above in canto 42, ‘wave falls and the hand falls’, a mood in which one lapses out of one’s active self into an impersonal awareness of being simply in and of the living world. That is, strictly speaking, a religious awareness, religion being the binding together of the many that are also one.

  The canto is divided into two parts by a line-break (after l. 78), and, reading it as a rite, I take the first part
to be the preparation of the candidate for the sacramental act of the second. The preparation consists of three statements or challenges followed by the candidate’s responses. The composition, as Pearlman noticed, is in the manner of a fugue.

  The opening statement is Circe’s guidance to Odysseus, that he must sail after knowledge to blind Tiresias who, though in hell, sees the mystery of being that the living are too often blind to. The passage was given in the original Greek in canto 39, in which Odysseus was initiated into Circe’s mystery before being sent on his way. At the outset of the Cantos his voyage had led to his ‘“Facing the sunless dead and this joyless region”’, but to no revelation of Proserpine, the light of Tiresias’ seeing. Now the underworld is represented very differently, as ‘the bower of Ceres’ daughter Proserpine’; and it is Tiresias’ vision of and from Proserpine that he must seek.

  The response is indirect, not out of the Odyssey but out of the rites of Babylonian Tamuz and Greek Adonis, rites that were still observed in Pound’s Rapallo. One night at midsummer lights in small jars are set in the water to float seaward, so that ‘The sea is streaked red with Adonis.’ In the ancient rite of Adonis women called upon the god lamenting his death, as his lover Venus-Dione had wailed and wept for him. Yet by his dying ‘Wheat shoots rise new by the altar, | flower from the swift seed’. (Venus, according to Ovid, changed the dead god into a flower.) Adonis dies annually and is deathless, like the other divinities figuring the seasonal dying and self-renewing of nature. He is akin to Proserpine, who, in another version of his myth noted by Lemprière, ‘restored him to life, on condition he spend six months with her, and the rest of the year with Venus’. The response then is the way available to Pound in the 1930s of participating in Tiresias’ knowledge of the undying, perpetually self-renewing life-force.