LXXXV–XCV (Section: Rock-Drill)
- Published in 1956 as Section: Rock-Drill, 85–95 de los cantares by New Directions, New York.
Pound was flown from Pisa to Washington to face trial on a charge of treason on the 16th of November 1945. Found unfit to stand trial because of the state of his mental health, he was incarcerated in St. Elizabeths Hospital, where he was to remain until 1958. Here he began to entertain writers and academics with an interest in his work and to write, working on translations of the Confucian Book of Odes and of Sophocles' play Women of Trachis as well as two new sections of the cantos; the first of these was Rock Drill.
The two main written sources for the Rock Drill cantos are the Confucian Classic of History, in an edition by the French Jesuit Séraphin Couvreur, which contained the Chinese text and translations into Latin and French under the title Chou King (which Pound uses in the poem), and Senator Thomas Hart Benton's Thirty Years View: Or A History of the American Government for Thirty Years From 1820–1850, which covers the period of the bank wars. In an interview given in 1962, and reprinted by J. P. Sullivan (see References), Pound said that the title Rock Drill "was intended to imply the necessary resistance in getting a main thesis across — hammering."
The first canto in the sequence, Canto LXXXV, contains 104 Chinese characters from the Chou King, in addition to a number of Latin phrases, mostly taken from Couvreur's translation. There are also a small number of Greek words. The overall effect for the English-speaking reader is one of unreadability, and the canto is hard to elucidate unless read alongside a copy of Couvreur's text.
The core meaning is summed up in Pound's footnote to the effect that the History Classic contains the essentials of the Confucian view of good government. In the canto, these are summed up in the line "Our dynasty came in because of a great sensibility", where sensibility translates the key character Ling, and in the reference to the four Tuan, or foundations, benevolence, rectitude, manners and knowledge. Rulers who Pound viewed as embodying some or all of these characteristics are adduced: Queen Elizabeth I, Cleopatra, Alexander the Great, as are Napoleon III, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Dexter White, who stand for everything Pound opposes in government and finance.
The world of nature, Pound's source of wealth and spiritual nourishment, also features strongly; images of roots, grass and surviving traces of fertility rites in Catholic Italy cluster around the sacred tree Yggdrasil. The natural world and the world of government are related to tekhne or art. Richard of St. Victor, with his emphasis on modes of thinking, makes an appearance, in close company with Eriugena, the philosopher of light.
Canto LXXXVI opens with a passage on the Congress of Vienna and continues to hold up examples of good and bad rulers as defined by the poet with Latin and Chinese phrases from Couvreur woven through them. The word Sagetrieb, meaning something like the transmission of tradition, apparently coined by Pound, is repeated after its first use in the previous canto, underlining Pound's belief that he is transmitting a tradition of political ethics that unites China, Revolutionary America and his own beliefs.
Canto LXXXVII opens on usury and moves through a number of references to "good" and "bad" leaders and lawgivers interwoven with Neoplatonic philosophers and images of the power of natural process. This culminates in a passage bringing together Laurence Binyon's dictum slowness is beauty, the San Ku, or three sages, figures from the Chou King who are responsible for the balance between heaven and earth, Jacques de Molay, the golden section, a room in the church of St. Hilaire, Poitiers built to that rule where one can stand without throwing a shadow, Mencius on natural phenomena, the 17th-century English mystic John Heydon (who Pound remembered from his days working with Yeats) and other images relating to the worship of light including "'MontSegur, sacred to Helios". The canto then closes with more on economics.
The following canto, Canto LXXXVIII, is almost entirely derived from Benton's book and focuses mainly on John Randolph of Roanoke and the campaign against the establishment of the Bank of the United States. Pound viewed the setting up of this bank as a selling out of the principles of economic equity on which the U.S. Constitution was based. At the centre of the canto there is a passage on monopolies that draws on the lives and writings of Thales of Miletus, the emperor Antoninus Pius and St. Ambrose, amongst others.
Canto LXXXIX continues with Benton and also draws on Alexander del Mar's A History of Money Systems. The same examples of good rule are drawn on, with the addition of the Emperor Aurelian. Possibly in defence of his focus on so much "unpoetical" material, Pound quotes Rodolphus Agricola to the effect that one writes "to move, to teach or to delight" (ut moveat, ut doceat, ut delectet), with the implication that the present cantos are designed to teach. The naturalists Alexander von Humboldt and Louis Agassiz are mentioned in passing.
Apart from a passing reference to Randolph of Roanoke, Canto XC moves to the world of myth and love, both divine and sexual. The canto opens with an epigraph in Latin to the effect that while the human spirit is not love, it delights in the love that proceeds from it. The Latin is paraphrased in English as the final lines of the canto. Following a reference to signatures in nature and Yggdrasil, the poet introduces Baucis and Philemon, an aged couple who, in a story from Ovid's Metamorphoses, offer hospitality to the gods in their humble house and are rewarded. In this context, they may be intended to represent the poet and his wife.
This canto then moves to the fountain of Castalia on Parnassus. This fountain was sacred to the Muses and its water was said to inspire poetry in those who drank it. The next line, "Templum aedificans not yet marble", refers to a period when the gods were worshiped in natural settings prior to the rigid codification of religion as represented by the erection of marble temples. The "fount in the hills fold" and the erect temple (Templum aedificans) also serve as images of sexual love.
Pound then invokes Amphion, the mythical founder of music, before recalling the San Ku/St Hilaire/Jacques de Molay/Eriugena/Sagetrieb cluster from Canto LXXXVII. Then the goddess appears in a number of guises: the moon, Mother Earth (in the Randolph reference), the Sibyl (last encountered in the context of the American Revolution in Canto LXIV), Isis and Kuanon. In a litany, she is thanked for raising Pound up (m'elevasti, a reference to Dante's praise of his beloved Beatrice in the Paradiso) out of hell (Erebus).
The canto closes with a number of instances of sexual love between gods and humans set in a paradisiacal vision of the natural world. The invocation of the goddess and the vision of paradise are sandwiched between two citations of Richard of St. Victor's statement ubi amor, ibi oculuc est ("where love is, there the eye is"), binding together the concepts of love, light and vision in a single image.
Canto XCI continues the paradisiacal theme, opening with a snatch of the "clear song" of Provençe. The central images are the invented figure Ra-Set, a composite sun/moon deity whose boat floats on a river of crystal. The crystal image, which is to remain important until the end of The Cantos, is a composite of frozen light, the emphasis on inorganic form found in the writings of the mystic Heydon, the air in Dante's Paradiso, and the mirror of crystal in the Chou King amongst other sources. Apollonius of Tyana appears, as do Helen of Tyre, partner of Simon Magus and the emperor Justinian and his consort Theodora. These couples can be seen as variants on Ra-Set.
Much of the rest of the canto consists of references to mystic doctrines of light, vision and intellection. There is an extract from a hymn to Diana from Layamon's 12th-century poem Brut. An italicised section, claiming that the 1913 foundation of the Federal Reserve Bank, which took power over interest rates away from Congress, and the teaching of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud in American universities ("beaneries") are examples of what Julien Benda termed La trahison des clercs, contains anti-Semitic language. Towards the close of the canto, the reader is returned to the world of Odysseus; a line from Book Five of the Odyssey tells of the winds breaking up the hero's boat and is followed shortly by Leucothea, "Kadamon thugater" or Cadmon's daughter) offering him her veil to carry him to shore ("my bikini is worth yr raft").
An image of the distribution of seeds from the sacred mountain opens Canto XCII, continuing the concern with the relationship between natural process and the divine. The kernel of this canto is the idea that the Roman Empire's preference for Christianity over Apollonius and its lack respect for its currency resulted in the almost total loss of the "true" religious tradition for a thousand years. A number of Neoplatonic philosophers, familiar from earlier cantos but with the addition of Avicenna, are listed as representing a fine thread of light in these Dark Ages.
Canto XCIII opens with a quote, "A man's paradise is his good nature", taken from The Maxims of King Kati to His Son Merikara. The canto then proceeds to look at examples of benevolent action by public figures that, for Pound, illustrate this maxim. These include Apollonius making his peace with animals, Saint Augustine on the need to feed people before attempting to convert them, and Dante and William Shakespeare writing on distributive justice, an aspect of their work that the poet points out is generally overlooked. Central to this aspect is a fragment from Dante, non fosse cive, taken from a passage in Paradiso, Canto VIII, in which Dante is asked "would it be worse for man on earth if he were not a citizen?" and unhesitatingly answers in the affirmative.
Towards the end of the canto, the Make it new ideograms from Canto LIII reappear as the poem moves back towards the world of myth, closing with another phrase from the Divine Comedy, this time from Purgatorio, Canto XXVIII. The phrase tu mi fai rimembrar translates as "you remind me" and comes from a passage in which Dante addresses Matilda, the presiding spirit of the Garden of Eden. What she reminds him of is Persephone at the moment that she is abducted by Hades and the spring flowers fell from her lap. This blending of a pagan sense of the divine into a Christian context stands for much of what appealed to Pound in medieval mysticism.
We return to the world of books in Canto XCIV. The canto opens with the name of Hendrik van Brederode, a lost leader of the Dutch Revolution, forgotten while William I, Prince of Orange is remembered. This name is lifted from correspondence between John Adams and Benjamin Rush which was finally published in 1898 by Alexander Biddle, a descendant of Pound's "villain" Nicholas. The rest of the canto consists mainly of paraphrases and quotations from Philostratus' Life of Apollonius. At its conclusion, the poem returns to the world of light via Ra-Set and Ocellus.
Canto XCV opens with the word "LOVE" in block capitals and recaps many of the Rock Drill examples of the relationship between love, light and politics. A passage deriving polis from a Greek root word for ploughing also returns us to Pound's belief that society and economic activity are based on natural productivity. The canto, and sequence, then closes with an extended treatment of the passage from the fifth book of the Odyssey in which a drowning Odysseus/Pound is rescued by Leucothea.
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