Ezra Pound: Poet

by A. David Moody

  It is not clear who speaks the second statement. Pearlman suggests Tiresias; I incline to Circe as the speaker, the Circe to whom the witless sailors were creatures of blind instinct. In any case there is no doubt about what is being said, that the life-force in woman, in the shoot of a plant, in moth, bull, and man, is blind, unconscious, driving irresistibly to its end. ‘To the cave art thou called, Odysseus’, she declares; yet she recognizes that he does not go blindly, ‘By Molü art thou freed from the one bed | that thou may’st return to another.’ The response is again indirect, in part out of Hesiod’s Works and Days, and in part out of what Pound could see in the hills and olive groves around Rapallo. ‘Begin thy plowing | When the Pleiades go down to their rest’, that is in November; and ‘When the cranes fly high’, in October, ‘think of plowing’. That came from acquired knowledge of the seasons and birds, and shows both intelligence beyond blind subjection to nature, and an established tradition of working in harmony with nature. The persistence of that tradition is noted in Pound’s own observations, which are very like Hesiod’s, ‘Two oxen are yoked for plowing | Or six in the hill field | White bulk under olives, a score for drawing down stone’—that might be stone for ‘a good house’. The response thus modifies the statement by adding the specifically human component, the conscious determination of what must be done. It does this without setting man apart from or above nature. ‘By this gate art thou measured’, it insists, repeating that line from the first response, ‘Thy day is between a door and a door’—as between birth and death, and between the plowing for sowing and the harvest. ‘Thus was it in time’, this passage concludes, implicitly endorsing the natural scope of human life and work.

  The third statement was cited above—‘And the small stars now fall.’ This goes on from ‘Thus was it in time,’ only shifting from rural activities into recognitions of our transience and insignificance. The voice here I take to be humanity’s own inner voice informed by traditional wisdom. The response also is out of experience, but now the inner voice counters the humbling or elegiac intimations of mortality by asserting an active part in the process. First there is the turn upon ‘Yet’—‘Yet hast thou gnawed through the mountain’—as it might be in the tunnelling for the railway and for roads all along the mountainous Ligurian coast. There is a further turn then, back to Circe and her ingle, and back also to Adonis—

  Hast thou found a nest softer than cunnus

  Or hast thou found better rest

  Hast’ou a deeper planting, doth thy death year

  Bring swifter shoot?

  Hast thou entered more deeply the mountain?

  Those are affirmative questions, leading into the sacrament and mystery of coitus—and here, at the climax of the canto, the initiate speaks in his own person, finding his identity in the act:

  By prong have I entered these hills:

  That the grass grow from my body,

  That I hear the roots speaking together,

  The air is new on my leaf…

  —the almond bough will put forth its flame, and ‘Fruit cometh after’. This rite is a celebration not so much of the union of persons as of an intense awareness of being caught up in the process of nature and of existing at the very quick of it, a celebration enacting the life-principle itself in full consciousness of being for the moment what Adonis represents. That knowledge, that illumination, if it outlasts the act and is constant and deep enough, can become a power to perceive and to live in accord with our constructive and creative part in the universe. And it would confer ‘the power over wild beasts’, making us see at once that usury comes not from love of what we can know and do but from rapacious greed.

  Critics tend to pass over canto 48 and to move directly from canto 47 to canto 49, which also closes upon ‘the power over wild beasts’. The serene ‘stillness’ of the idyll of ancient China in 49 appears to accord well with the ‘healing’ rite of Eleusis, and 48 can seem an unnecessary and unwelcome breaking of the celebratory mood. For George Kearns, one of the most perceptive of Pound’s readers, it comes as an ‘annoying interruption’ and seems simply ‘a miscellany into which the poet has crammed scraps of anecdotes, documents and historical bits—a modern babel among which we discern familiar themes’. The change of mood is certainly abrupt and harsh, as jarring as dropping out of rapt contemplation into a brainstorming session. Yet what is in question is still knowledge and the transmission of intelligence, only now we are no longer in the lyrical ideal but in the problematic real world, and here the poet is thrown back upon his method of gathering together and heaping up all sorts of scraps of information and anecdotes bearing upon his central preoccupations: how is vital intelligence to be passed on so that it goes into action? and what obstructs and prevents the communication of it?

  The first part of the canto, lines 1–35—already beyond the first stage of tackling its problem, that of simply writing down more at less at random whatever comes to mind—has arrived at a pattern of discriminations. The passage is in fact ring-composed into a sort of vortex around its central anecdote:

  a Jefferson’s neglected rhetorical question, who should pay rent on money, ‘Some fellow who has it on rent day, | or some bloke who has not?’

  b the death of the last Ottoman sultan, the end of his line and its ways

  c the deployment of ‘80 loudspeakers’ to broadcast a Vatican beatification

  d a spy whose information helped save Vienna from the Turks, opened the first Viennese coffee-house where people meet and talk

  e Herr Von Unruh miming the sergeant at Verdun who ‘jammed down the cadavers…with his boots | to get the place smooth for the Kaiser’

  d 2 Charles Francis Adams reported that he had found no good conversation in London

  c 2 the non-publication of Van Buren’s autobiography in which he had written of the U.S. bank war

  b 2 Marx’s observation that the children whose health was ruined in England’s mills would ‘become fathers of the next generation’ and so pass on their tuberculosis

  a 2 a Rothschild’s remark that ‘nations were fools to pay rent for their credit’.

  Herr Von Unruh had been a German officer in the late war, and was, when Pound knew him in Rapallo, an Expressionist writer in exile from Nazi Germany. His account of ‘the sergeant tramping down the corpses to get the place tidy for William’ appealed to Pound as effectively communicating an insight into ‘The meaning of capitalism’ or ‘what capitalist mentality leads to’. The same might be said of the several items following the anecdote. Indeed the more one considers the whole passage the further from random it becomes.

  The middle passage of the canto is also ring-composed, only this time the main elements—a letter addressed apparently to Queen Victoria, and another from Pound’s own Maria—enclose the lesser items. These latter concern mainly the acquisition and proving of navigational skills by voyagers, and the passing on of those skills—

  They say, that is the Norse engineer told me, that out past Hawaii

  they spread threads from gun’ale to gun’ale

  in a certain fashion

  and plot a course of 3000 sea miles

  lying under the web, watching the stars

  The letter to ‘Your Highness’ is reassuring about the good pedigree and breeding of ‘yr cairn puppy’. (Details of how a US Secretary of State was appointed without his pedigree being looked into are inserted in counterpoint.) There is a subdued sense of high nonsense about that episode. The other letter is distinguished rather by the simplicity and directness of its description of a ‘bella festa’ in Maria’s mountain village, and by an intelligence that shows her to be her father’s daughter—an intelligence that is in the genes, as one might say. Altogether, this letter off-rhymes quite richly and humourously with the one concerning the Queen’s ‘little dog [that] is doing…very well at Mr McLocherty’s’.

  The final third of the canto observes two or three instances of the genetically transmitted intelligence of insects, which
Pound had read about in Remy de Gourmont’s Physique de l’amour and had referred to in his discussion of volition in Jefferson and/or Mussolini. The instinctive martial behaviour which ensures the survival of their species is set against the broken Cathar fortress of Mt Segur, where the light from Eleusis was put out, and against the buried Roman city six feet down near San Bertrand de Comminges in the same region of southern France. The insect intelligence outlasts civilizations. Yet there is still the wheat field, and ‘an ox in smith’s sling hoisted for shoeing’; and still an eye for the way ‘sun cuts light against evening…shaves grass into emerald’.

  After that demanding and unsettling re-encounter with the modern situation canto 49, known as ‘the Seven Lakes’ canto, seems to offer relief and rest in a natural paradise created and recreated over the centuries in paintings and poems by generations of Chinese artists, and made new again in Pound’s limpid verse. That is, many readers find here ‘The still centre of the Cantos [where] the images speak with quiet power, expressing the repose and harmony with the universe of Pound’s Confucianism’. One could be tempted to fall in with that sentiment.

  There was in Pound’s family a Japanese ‘screen book’, consisting of eight ink paintings, each accompanied by a poem in Chinese and another in Japanese, representing eight classic views about the shores of the Xiao and Xiang rivers in central South China. In 1928 Pound met in Rapallo a scholar and teacher from that region, a Miss Tseng, and had her translate at sight the eight Chinese poems. His version, in lines 1–30, is not a translation, however, but a free composition of images suggested by both poems and paintings. Zhaoming Qian, in his expert account of this background, notes that the ‘Seven Lakes’ tradition goes back to the time of ‘The eighth Song emperor, Huizong (reigned 1101–25)’, who

  turned government over to his ministers in order to spend more time on artistic activities. His neglect of state affairs eventually led to his capture by the invading troops of the Jin, and the loss of half China.

  It was an era, in Qian’s words, of artistic vigour and political impotence. The Confucian historians, seeking always models of good government, put Huizong down as a Taoist and a bad example. Pound, following them, will say of him in canto 55, ‘HOEÏ went taozer, an’ I suppose | Tsaï ran to state usury’; his dynasty ‘died of taxes and gimcracks’.

  Pound’s version of ‘the Seven Lakes’ is unmistakeably Taoist, not Confucian—the Confucian riposte will come in the final third of the canto. The scene is contemplated in a mood of quietist detachment, autumnal, in twilight, or in the evening at sunset. While there is an attentive sympathy with natural phenomena, and some finely observed images, the human presence is distanced and rendered inert. There are few strong verbs; none at all for human action until, ‘on the north sky line’, ‘the young boys prod stones for shrimps’. A passive, mildly melancholy, peacefulness reigns.

  Autumn moon; hills rise about lakes

  against sunset

  Evening is like a curtain of cloud,

  a blurr above ripples; and through it

  sharp long spikes of the cinnamon,

  a cold tune amid reeds.

  Behind hill the monk’s bell

  borne on the wind.

  Sail passed here in April; may return in October

  Boat fades in silver; slowly;

  Sun blaze alone on the river.

  The vowel music is pleasing, the rhythm slow-paced, reflective; and the images have a restful clarity. This is the poetry of withdrawal from the troubling world into rural retreats. It refines a state of mind that has its place, its function, in the human economy; but it should not be confused with the Confucian ethos of communal responsibility, nor with Pound’s volitionist ethic. The will to order, to civilize, to act in harmony with others and with the universe, is precisely what it does not express. Further, its way of communing with nature is so very far from the rites celebrated in cantos 39 and 47. To seek repose in nature, harmonizing as that may be for the solitary mind, is not at all the same as responsibly enacting our part in the universe, or in society.

  The turn when it comes breaks the quietist mood, asserting, as if in protest, the preoccupation that mood would soothe away—

  State by creating riches shd. thereby get into debt?

  This is infamy; this is Geryon.

  This canal still goes to TenShi

  though the old king built it for pleasure

  That return to the realm of constructive action, and to what would undo it, is followed by a block of four lines of four syllables which can be pronounced but which few will understand. This, we are told, is a verse composed by the legendary emperor Shun and regarded as the hymn of an ideal society, a hymn, apparently, for the imperial transmission of the mandate of heaven throughout the empire. In 1958 Pound translated it thus:

  Gate, gate of gleaming, [clouds]

  knotting, dispersing,

  flower of sun, flower of moon [rays]

  day’s dawn after day’s dawn new fire

  Here, however, Pound presents it in a (not altogether accurate) representation of how it would sound in the Japanese pronunciation of the Chinese characters, that being closer than modern Mandarin (so Fenollosa had suggested) to the archaic Chinese pronunciation. In that form, according to Achilles Fang, it would not be especially meaningful to Japanese readers, and would be unrecognizable to Chinese readers. Indeed, for most readers of canto 49 the block of syllables can only represent something not immediately available to us. Their portentous sounds communicate not Shun’s vision so much as its inoperancy. Already in the twilight scenes of the Taoists of the Seven Lakes that ancient tradition of all-energizing light was quite lost.

  The imperial hymn is followed by an even earlier folk song, said to express the contentment of the peasants under the rule of the legendary good emperor Yao. In Pound’s version their simple life is bound up with nature and is all strong verbs—

  Sun up; work

  sundown; to rest

  dig well and drink of the water

  dig field; eat of the grain

  Imperial power is? and to us what is it?

  The naive questions are read as showing that the people are not oppressed by imperial taxes and exactions; and the simple order of their lives shows that the state is well ordered. The folk are behind the abundance of nature; and the emperor, it is to be understood, is making new the total light process of sun and moon day after day. There, rather than in the Seven Lakes verses, was the Confucian idea of the good life.

  The canto closes upon a chord: ‘The fourth; the dimension of stillness. | And the power over wild beasts.’ That last line takes us back to canto 47, then to canto 39, and still further back to Dionysos in canto 2. It doesn’t so much arise out of canto 49 as add to it a reminder of what is not there. ‘Kung and Eleusis’, Pound will write later, meaning that each needs the other. ‘The fourth: the dimension of stillness’, is more teasing. One is tempted to connect it with the passive repose the Taoist contemplative is after; but that would make a discord with ‘the power over wild beasts’, and with the active order of imperial power. It connects rather with the stillness of the all-creating Light of Cavalcanti’s philosophy in canto 36—‘He himself moveth not, drawing all to his stillness’. This is the paradoxical stillness of the unmoved mover of everything that moves, the stillness of light. Its action is implicit, though hidden, in the emperor’s hymn; and shines through in the peasants’ song. That light, properly understood, is one with the light of Eleusis, so that the two lines are a natural chord. The active intelligence of love, the illumination in coitus, and the properly functioning state, all grow from the one root, ‘consciousness of the unity with nature’.

  The last two cantos of the decad resume the matter of usury. Canto 50 deals, in a manner close to Pound’s prose polemic, with the defeat by the forces of usury of the attempts at reform and revolution in Tuscany. Most of the canto is drawn from Antonio Zobi’s five-volume history of the Tuscan state up to the failed revo
lution of 1848, Storia civile della Toscana (1850–2). Zobi saluted the American Revolution as a precedent for Italy’s efforts to free itself from foreign domination, especially from that of Austria. And because Napoleon wrested Italy from Austria and brought in something of the spirit and laws of the French republican revolution he is named here as ‘First Consul’ rather than as emperor, and figures as a righteous opponent of the usurious monarchies of Austria and England.

  There is first a keynote ‘rhyme’ of the American Revolution and Pietro Leopoldo’s reforms in Tuscany, both having occurred about the same time. A telling difference, however, is that the one, as John Adams said, ‘took place in the minds of the people’, whereas the other doesn’t appear to involve the people in the same way at all. It is the Grand Duke who sets about clearing the state debt left by the Medici—‘its interest ate up all the best income’—and it is he who cuts down the taxes. These were enlightened reforms, but not a popular revolution, and they left Tuscany still under the Austrian empire.

  Vienna, the capital of that empire, is presented in images out of the early ‘hell cantos’, as ‘hell’s bog’, ‘the midden of Europe…the black hole of all | mental vileness…the privy that stank Franz Josef’, all this because ‘In their soul was usura and in their minds darkness’. Given that vision of Austria, Napoleon did well to defeat its army at Marengo in 1800 –