The Cantos - LXXIV–LXXXIV (The Pisan Cantos)

LXXIV–LXXXIV (The Pisan Cantos)

First published as The Pisan Cantos. New York: New Directions, 1948.

With the outbreak of war in 1939, Pound was in Italy, where he remained, despite a request for repatriation he made after Pearl Harbor. During this period, his main source of income was a series of radio broadcasts he made on Rome Radio. He used these broadcasts to express his full range of opinions on culture, politics and economics, including his opposition to American involvement in a European war and his anti-Semitism. In 1943, he was indicted for treason in absence, and wrote a letter to the indicting judge in which he claimed the right to freedom of speech in his defence.

Pound was arrested in Rapallo by Italian partisans on May 3, 1945, was detained in Genoa, and was eventually transferred to the American Disciplinary Training Center (DTC) north of Pisa on May 22. Here he was held in a specially reinforced cage, initially sleeping on the ground in the open air. After three weeks, he had a breakdown that resulted in his being given a cot and pup tent in the medical compound. Here he gained access to a typewriter. For reading matter, he had a regulation-issue Bible along with three books he was allowed to bring in as his own "religious" texts: a Chinese text of Confucius, James Legge's translation of the same, and a Chinese dictionary. He later found a copy of the Pocket Book of Verse, edited by Morris Edmund Speare, in the latrine. The only other thing he brought with him was a eucalyptus pip. Throughout the Pisan sequence, Pound repeatedly likens the camp to Francesco del Cossa's March fresco depicting men working at a grape arbour.

With his political certainties collapsing around him and his library inaccessible, Pound turned inward for his materials and much of the Pisan sequence is concerned with memory, especially of his years in London and Paris and of the writers and artists he knew in those cities. There is also a deepening of the ecological concerns of the poem. The awarding of the Bollingen Prize to the book caused considerable controversy, with many people objecting to the honoring of someone they saw as a madman and/or traitor. However, The Pisan Cantos is generally the most admired and read section of the work. It is also among the most influential, having affected poets as different as H.D. and Gary Snyder.

Canto LXXIV immediately introduces the reader to the method used in the Pisan Cantos, which is one of interweaving themes somewhat in the manner of a fugue. These themes pick up on many of the concerns of the earlier cantos and frequently run across sections of the Pisan sequence. This canto begins with Pound looking out of the DTC at peasants working in the fields nearby and reflecting on the news of the death of Mussolini, "hung by the heels".

In the first thread, the figure of Pound/Odysseus reappears in the guise of "OY TIS", or No Man, the name the hero uses in the Cyclops episode of the Odyssey. This figure blends into the Australian rain god Wuluwaid, who had his mouth closed up by his father (was deprived of freedom of speech) because he "created too many things". He, in turn, becomes the Chinese Ouan Jin, or "man with an education". This theme recurs in the line "a man on whom the sun has gone down", a reference to the nekuia from canto I, which is then explicitly referred to. This recalls The Seafarer, and Pound quotes a line from his translation, "Lordly men are to earth o'ergiven", lamenting the loss of the exiled poet's companions. This is then applied to a number of Pound's dead friends from the London/Paris years, including W.B. Yeats, James Joyce, Ford Madox Ford, Victor Plarr and Maurice Hewlett. Finally, Pound/Odysseus is seen "on a raft blown by the wind".

Another major theme running through this canto is that of the vision of a goddess in the poet's tent. This starts from the identification of a nearby mountain with the Chinese holy mountain Taishan and the naming of the moon as sorella la luna (sister moon). This thread then runs through the appearance of Kuanon, the Buddhist goddess of mercy, the moon spirit from Hagaromo (a Noh play translated by Pound some 40 years earlier), Sigismondo's lover Ixotta (linked in the text with Aphrodite via a reference to the goddess' birthplace Cythera), a girl painted by Manet and finally Aphrodite herself, rising from the sea on her shell and rescuing Pound/Odysseus from his raft. The two threads are further linked by the placement of the Greek word brododactylos ("rosy-fingered") applied by Homer to the dawn but given here in the dialect of Sappho and used by her in a poem of unrequited love. These images are often intimately associated with the poet's close observation of the natural world as it imposes itself on the camp; birds, a lizard, clouds, the weather and other images of nature run through the canto.

Images of light and brightness associated with these goddesses come to focus in the phrase "all things that are, are lights" quoted from John Scotus Eriugena. He, in turn, brings us back to the Albigensian Crusade and the troubadour world of Bernard de Ventadorn. Another theme sees Ecbatana, the seven-walled "city of Dioce", blend with the city of Wagadu, from the African tale of Gassire's Lute that Pound derived from Frobenius. This city, four times rebuilt, with its four walls, four gates and four towers at the corners is a symbol for spiritual endurance. It, in turn, blends with the DTC in which the poet is imprisoned.

The question of banking and money also recurs, with an anti-Semitic passage aimed at the banker Mayer Amschel Rothschild. Pound brings in biblical injunctions on usury and a reference to the issuing of a stamp scrip currency in the Austrian town of Wörgl. The canto then moves on to a longish passage of memories of the moribund literary scene Pound encountered in London when he first arrived, with the phrase "beauty is difficult", quoted from Aubrey Beardsley, acting as a refrain. After more memories of America and Venice, the canto ends in a passage that brings together Dante's celestial rose, the rose formed by the effect of a magnet on iron filings, an image from Paul Verlaine of a fountain playing in the moonlight, and a reference to a poem by Ben Jonson in a composite image of hope for "those who have passed over Lethe".

Canto LXXV is mainly a facsimile of the German pianist Gerhart Münch's violin setting of the 16th-century Italian Francesco Da Milano's transcription for lute of French composer Clément Janequin's choral work Le Chant des oiseaux, an ancient song recalled to Pound's mind by the singing of birds on the fence of the DTC, and a symbol for him of an indestructible form preserved and transmitted through many versions, times, nations and artists. (Compare the nekuia of canto I.) Münch was a friend and collaborator of Pound in Rapallo, and the short prose section at the beginning of the canto celebrates his work on other early music figures.

Canto LXXVI opens with a vision of a group of goddesses in Pound's room on the Rapallo hillside and then moves, via Mont Segur, to memories of Paris and Jean Cocteau. There follows a passage in which the poet recognises the Jewish authorship of the prohibition on usury found in Leviticus. Conversations in the camp are then cross-cut into memories of Provence and Venice, details of the American Revolution and further visions. These memories lead to a consideration of what has or may have been destroyed in the war. Pound remembers the moment in Venice when he decided not to destroy his first book of verse, A Lume Spento, an affirmation of his decision to become a poet and a decision that ultimately led to his incarceration in the DTC. The canto ends with the goddess, in the form of a butterfly, leaving the poet's tent amid further references to Sappho and Homer.

The main focus of Canto LXXVII is accurate use of language, and at its centre is the moment when Pound hears that the war is over. Pound draws on examples of language use from Confucius, the Japanese dancer Michio Itô, who worked with Pound and Yeats in London, a Dublin cab driver, Aristotle, Basil Bunting, Yeats, Joyce and the vocabulary of the U.S. Army. The goddess in her various guises appears again, as does Awoi's hennia, the spirit of jealousy from Aoi No Ue, a Noh play translated by Pound. The canto closes with an invocation of Dionysus (Zagreus).

After opening with a glimpse of Mount Ida, an important locus for the history of the Trojan War, Canto LXXVIII moves through much that is familiar from the earlier cantos in the sequence: del Cossa, the economic basis of war, Pound's writer and artist friends in London, "virtuous" rulers (Lorenzo de Medici, the emperors Justinian, Titus and Antoninus, Mussolini), usury and stamp scripts culminating in the Nausicaa episode from the Odyssey and a reference to the Confucian classic Annals of Spring and Autumn in which "there are no righteous wars".

The moon and clouds appear at the opening of Canto LXXIX, which then moves on through a passage in which birds on the wire fence recall musical notation and the sounds of the camp and thoughts of Wolfgang Mozart, del Cossa and Marshal Philippe Pétain meld to form musical counterpoint. After references to politics, economics, and the nobility of the world of the Noh and the ritual dance of the moon-nymph in Hagaromo that dispels mortal doubt, the canto closes with an extended fertility hymn to Dionysus in the guise of his sacred lynx.

Canto LXXX opens in the camp in the shadow of death and soon turns to memories of London, Paris and Spain, including a recollection of Walter Rummel, who worked with Pound on troubadour music before World War I and of Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, Laurence Binyon and others. The canto is concerned with the aftermath of war, drawing on Yeats' experiences after the Irish Civil War as well as the contemporary situation. Hagoromo appears again before the poem returns to Beardsley, also in the shadow of death, declaring the difficulty of beauty with a phrase from Symons and Sappho/Homer's rosy-fingered dawn woven through the passage.

Pound writes of the decline of the sense of the spirit in painting from a high-point in Sandro Botticelli to the fleshiness of Rubens and its recovery in the 20th century as evidenced in the works of Marie Laurencin and others. This is set between two further references to Mont Segur. Pound/Odysseus is then saved from his sinking raft by Walt Whitman and Richard Lovelace as discovered in the anthology of poetry found in the camp toilet and the other prisoners are compared with Odysseus' crew, "men of no fortune". The canto then closes with two passages, one a pastiche of Browning, the other of Edward Fitzgerald's Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, lamenting the lost London of Pound's youth and an image of nature as designer.

Canto LXXXI opens with a complex image that illustrates well Pound's technical approach. The opening line, "Zeus lies in Ceres' bosom", merges the conception of Demeter, passages in previous cantos on ritual copulation as a means of ensuring fertility, and the direct experience of the sun (Zeus) still hidden at dawn by two hills resembling breasts in the Pisan landscape. This is followed by an image of the other mountain that reminded the poet of Taishan surrounded by vapors and surmounted by the planet Venus ("Taishan is attended of loves / under Cythera, before sunrise").

The canto then moves through memories of Spain, a story told by Basil Bunting, and anecdotes of a number of familiar personages and of George Santayana. At the core of this passage is the line "(to break the pentameter, that was the first heave)", Pound's comment on the "revolution of the word" that led to the emergence of Modernist poetry in the early years of the century.

The goddess of love then returns after a lyric passage situating Pound's work in the great tradition of English lyric, in the sense of words intended to be sung. This heralds perhaps the most widely quoted passages in The Cantos, in which Pound expresses his realisation that "What thou lovest well remains, / the rest is dross" and an acceptance of the need for human humility in the face of the natural world that prefigures some of the ideas associated with the deep ecology movement.

The opening of Canto LXXXII marks a return to the camp and its inmates. This is followed by a passage that draws on Pound's London memories and his reading of the Pocket Book of Verse. Pound laments his failure to recognise the Greek qualities of Swinburne's work and celebrates Wilfred Scawen Blunt, Rudyard Kipling, Ford Madox Ford, Walt Whitman, Yeats and others. After an expanded clarification of the Annals of Spring and Autumn / "there are no righteous wars" passage from Canto LXXVIII, this canto culminates in images of the poet drowning in earth (in a quasi-sexual embrace) and a recurrence of the Greek word for weeping, ending with more bird-notes seen as a periplum.

After a number of cantos in which the elements of earth and air feature so strongly, Canto LXXXIII opens with images of water and light, drawn from Pindar, George Gemistos Plethon, John Scotus Eriugena, the mermaid carvings of Pietro Lombardo and Heraclitus' phrase panta rei ("everything flows"). A passage addressed to a Dryad speaks out against the death sentence and cages for wild animals and is followed by lines on equity in government and natural processes based on the writings of Mencius. The tone of placid acceptance is underscored by three Chinese characters that translate as "don't help to grow that which will grow of itself" followed by another appearance of the Greek word for weeping in the context of remembered places.

Close observation of a wasp building a mud nest returns the canto to earth and to the figure of Tiresias, last encountered in Cantos I and XLVII. The canto moves on through a long passage remembering Pound's time as Yeats' secretary in 1914 and a shorter meditation on the decline in standards in public life deriving from a remembered visit to the senate in the company of Pound's mother while that house was in session. The closing lines, "Down derry-down / Oh let an old man rest", return the poem from the world of memory to the poet's present plight.

Canto LXXXIV opens with the delivery of Dorothy Pound's first letter to the DTC on October 8. This letter contained news of the death in the war of J.P. Angold, a young English poet whom Pound admired. This news is woven through phrases from a lament by the troubadour Bertran de Born (which Pound had once translated as "Planh for the Young English King") and a double occurrence of the Greek word tethneke ("died") remembered from the story of the death of Pan in Canto XXIII.

This death, reviving memories of the poet's dead friends from World War I, is followed by a passage on Pound's 1939 visit to Washington, D.C. to try to avert American involvement in the forthcoming European war. Much of the rest of the canto is concerned with the economic basis of war and the general lack of interest in this subject on the part of historians and politicians; John Adams is again held up as an ideal. The canto also contains a reproduction, in Italian, of a conversation between the poet and a "swineherd's sister" through the DTC fence. He asks her if the American troops behave well and she replies OK. He then asks how they compare to the Germans and she replies that they are the same.

The moon/goddess reappears at the core of the canto as "pin-up" and "chronometer" close to the line "out of all this beauty something must come". The closing lines of the canto, and of the sequence, "If the hoar frost grip thy tent / Thou wilt give thanks when night is spent", sound a final note of acceptance and resignation, despite the return to the sphere of action, prompted by the death of Angold, that marks most of the canto.