No More Learning

413. W. Lawrence:
William brother of
1889-1915,
younger
? 384
which is what people wanted to hear about.
He preferred to talk about the arts [cf. T. E. Lawrence and His Friends, passim, which mentions often his passion to set up a printing press] .
422. T. L. : T. E. Lawrence. Will Lawrence probably showed Pound some of his brother's photographs of the rock temples in Arabia Petra which were probably taken during his second stay at Carchemish (spring 1912- spring 1914). During that time T. E. L. had an unpleasant encounter with Germans constructing the Constantinople-Bagdad line of the 3B (Berlin-Belgrade-Bagdad) railway.
423_ Snow: Thomas Collins S. , M. A. Oxford 1874, lecturer in English language and literature at Jesus College in 1913. He was among those who took part in the discussion after Pound had read his paper on Caval- canti, in which he probably asserted that in some ways Cavalcanti could compare with Sappho_
424. 1JCd/Je~TMT-T-TTT-Cx. { flOL: H, cpCt. llJ? TmI1Ol: "He seems to me. " Sappho's poem "To Anactoria", Lyra Graeca I, fr. 2, p. 186 [OBGV, no. 141], begins with the words: </JIXivEr"" ) l O t <f}Vt<: iao<: ( " A very god he seems to me"). The very aged Snow cited this line as evidence that Sappho was better than Cava1canti.
425. l'aer tremare: I, "the air to tremble"; part of 2d line of Cava1canti's sonnet 7 [T, 38].
426_ Magdalen: A college of Oxford Uni- versity.
427. "The Hound of Heaven": Poem by Francis Thompson, 1859-1907, which appeared in his Poems (1893).
428. burn . nd freeze: Traditional hallmark of Sappho because of an Ambrose Philips translation (1711) of her "Hymn to Aphro- dite" ["To Anactoria" in 424 above], in which he interpolated two lines: "Though now to freeze, he soon shall burn / And be thy victim in his turn. "
429. Siki: "Battling" Siki, a light- heavyweight boxing champion of the 1920"
74/444-446
a Senegalese of brutish strength. But Pound remembered Siki for his deftness not his brutality [HK].
430_ Burr: Prob. prisoner at DTC.
431. Corporal Casey: Member of cadre at DTC.
432. Ie bonhomme Staline: F, "simple Stalin. "
433. Koba: R, "the bear. " Nickname of Stalin as a boy in Georgia [52: II].
434_ Rhys: Ernest R. , 1859-1946. One of the few English editors Pound knew from his earliest years in England and could praise.
435. "A'hv joost. . . . . . . . Tommy Luff": Prob. a comic anecdote Pound heard Rhys tell. The carefully counted dots prob. replace "buggered. "
436_ Clio: The muse of history.
437. Terpsichore: The muse of the dance.
438. Granville: Prob. Harley Granville- Barker, 1877-1946, English actor, manager, and playwright.
439. three ladies: Perhaps the "Tre donne Intorno" [78:133], or the three Graces, or both.
440. eaao/. 1? vowL: H (aspirate euao/J. ? vmm), "for generations to come" [Elpenor's line: 1:12;Od. XI,76].
441. aram vult nemus: L, "the grove needs an altar" [first statement of recurrent theme: 78:91; 79:126; 90/607].
442. Madame Lucrezia: Lucrezia Borgia [30:8,11].
443. Cesena: Town in Fadi Province, Emilia, Italy; controlled by the Malatestas from 1385 to 1465. Site of the Biblioteca Malatestiana, where Pound deposited a copy of A Draft o f XVI. Cantos in 1926.
74/446-447
445_ Torquato where art thou? : Manlio Torquato Dazzi, in 1926 director of the Malatestiana. "There will be a public copy of the XVI in the Malatestiana at Cesena, if Dazzi consents to house it for me" [L, 190].
446. Tevere: I, "Tiber. " Evokes assassina- tion of Duke of Gandia at 5/18 ("Click of hooves on the cobbles") [5 :32,46].
447. la Stuarda: I, "the Stuart. " Mary Queen of Scots [80:423].
448. Mead: George Robert Stow M. , 1863- 1933, editor of a quarterly review called The Quest (London 1909-1930), which was devoted to occult and/or mystic subjects such as reincarnation. Pound wrote about him as having a sense of humor and gave lines from Mead to illustrate: "'1 know so many people who were Mary Queen of Scots. And when I consider what wonderful people they used to be in their earlier incarnations, I ask WHAT they can have been at in the interim to have arrived where
385
pours down" [HK, Pai, I-I, 83; 4:20; 85 :214; cf. 88 above].
456. formato locho: I, "in a prepared place" [LE, 166, from "Donna mi prega"; 36/178].
457. Arachne: The girl who challenged Athena to a weaving contest; because the girl dared to contest the gods, Athena changed her into a spider so she could weave forever; hence, "a spider. "
458. mi porta fortuna: I, "brings me good luck. "
459. EIKONEl:: H, "pictures, images. " 460. Trastevere: [cf. 24 above]. Pound
wrote in A Visiting Card: "And the mosaics in Santa Maria in Trastevere recall a wisdom lost by scholasticism. . . . In his After Strange Gods Eliot loses all the threads of Arachne" [SP,320].
461. black Jim: A servant, during the 1890s, at the Hotel "Easton," the boarding- house at 24 E. 47th St. , New York, run by the Weston branch of Pound's family, where he spent time as a youth ["Indiscre-
tions," PD, 42-50].
462. . . . Ritz-Carlton: Famous luxury hotel,
now the office building at 380 Madison Ave. , which replaced the Westons' boarding- house at 24 E. 47th St. , New York [JW].
463. Monsieur Fouquet: John D. F. , an architect with an office in Grand Central Depot who lived at the boardinghouse during the early 1890s. He had once been Uncle Ezra's partner in a hotel they ran at Nyack. Their lively arguments impressed young Pound, who described Fouquet as having a "shrill, high, normal tone . . . ascending to pure Punch and Judy or droop- ing to a false double-bass . . . I adored both him and my great-uncle" [PD, 34; JW, Pai, 12-1,55-75]_ Uncle Ezra is named Amos in "Indiscretions. "
464. Napoleon 3rd: Charles Louis N. Bona- parte, 1808-1873, known as Louis Napoleon; emperor of the French (1852-1871); called Barbiche because of his goatee.
444. joli . _. Mal. testiana: F, quarter-hour. " I, "in the Biblioteca Malates- tiana. " Fang says now there are no initials on the back of the door [II, 269] .
450. Fortean Society: A society, organized in 1931, directed by Tiffany Thayer, de- voted to the study of the works of Charles Fort (1874-1932), an American journalist who was interested in researching and documenting unusual and unexplained natural phenomena. The Fortean Society's magazine was called Doubt.
451. bambooiform: Neologism to suggest shape of grass.
452. "La Nascita": I, "_the birth. " The Birth of Venus by Botticelli. The child is prob. Mary, Pound's daughter, and the eyes are those of her mother Olga Rudge.
453. Capoquadri: Name of the house in Siena where Pound used to stay during visits [83 :36].
454. Helios: The sun. The "form beached" is Aphrodite in La Nascita.
455. funge la purezza: I, "the tensile light
"pleasant
they are' " [GK,226]_ 449. metempsychosis at
tion.
. . . .
? :
Reincarna-
? ? ? ! ' I
i!
386
74/447
74/448-449
387
465. barbiche: F, "goatee. "
466. Mr. Quackenbos, or
Abraham Quackenbush, a real estate man who in 1906 had an office at 236 E. 87th SI. He was an old bore who lived at the board-
:inghouse and was always put at the head of "the other long table" so that he would not interfere with Uncle Ezra's heated conversa- tions with M. Fouquet [ibid. ].
467. Mrs. Chittenden's . . . : Poss, Kate SaraC.
, 1856-1959, American organist, composer, and lecturer, who may have been a transient resident at the boardinghouse, which, along with Ezra Weston's hotel in Nyack, preserved the elegance of "the old South" observed by Weston when he was caught in the American South during the
Civil War.
468. Mouquin's:
rant Pound referred to in letter to WCW [L, 159].
469. Train: George Francis T. , 1829-1904, American merchant and writer. Founded Train & Co. , which sent clipper-ships to California and made a fortune backing the Union Pa~iflc Railroad. As an independent candidate for U. S. President in 1872, Train made famous inflammatory speeches against politicians, for which he was castigated. He traveled around the world in 67 days and
delivered speeches on the downfall of Napoleon III which were hailed by the French people. Before his death Train often sat on the street outside Mills Hotel in Greenwich Village; earlier he was called the "Sage of Madison Square" because he fed birds and spoke to people openly in the park. Train spent many of his later years in silence, writing messages. He died a pauper
[JW]. In "Indiscretions" Pound wrote: "Francis Train still sat white-headed, or with I think a stiff straw hat on the back of his head, in' a plain wooden hemicycular chair on the pavement before some hotel . . . I was told that he was Francis Train . . . and I read that . . . he had been jailed" [PD, 10].
470. fellow throwing a knife: "Indiscre- tions" gives: "a man throwing a large jack-
knife some fifty feet after a fleeing male figure" [PD, 10].
471. Towers of Pisa . . . : First in a long list of brie-a-brae brought back from Europe and North Africa by Aunt Frances (Frank) Weston. She took the young Pound with her in 1892 and 1898. Also mentioned are family memorabilia from Massachusetts, the home state of the Westons [PD,3-10].
472. 1806 Barre Mass'chusetts: Barre, Mass. Town in central Massachusetts, NW of Worcester.
473. Charter Oak: In writing of his ancestry Pound said: "hence Joseph Wadsworth, who stole the Connecticut charter and hid it in Charter Oak, to the embarrassment of legitimist tyranny" [PD, 6].
474. Torwaldsen lion: Bertel Thorwaldsen, 1770-1844, the Danish sculptor; one of his best known works is the statue of a lion at Lucerne, Switzerland.
475. Paolo Uccello: Paolo di Dono U. , ca. 1396-1475, Florentine painter; one of the "realists" of the 15th century. "I liked Quattrocento paintin'. P. Uccel1o. First freshman theme, I wrote was on Paulo Uccello, picture in Louvre I reckon" [Speak- ing, 138].
476. Al Hambra: The famous group of buildings of Granada, Spain.
Tangiers area, with Gibraltar: "He heard then a warm heavy sigh . . . and the loose brass quoits of the bedstead jingles . . . All the way from Gibraltar" [DG].
480. Mrs. Jevons' hotel: Prob. an inn Pound stayed at in Gibraltar.
481. veder Nap'oiiiii: [vedere . . . ]: I, "to see Naples. " Part of Italian proverb: "See Naples and die"; i. e. you will then have seen everything [HK].
482. Pavia the romanesque: Capital of Pavia, province of Lombardy, N Italy. Its Church of San Michele is an excellent example of 12th-century Lombard Roman- esque architecture.
483. San Zeno: San Zeno Maggiore, a Romanesque church in V erona. Contains the column signed Adamo me fecit [45:14].
484. S. Pietro: San Pietro Martire (formerly San Giorgetto dei Domeniconi), on right bank of Adige in Verona. Contains fresco by Giovanni Maria Fa1conetto: "The Corona- tion of the Virgin," with kneeling Teutonic knights [Fang, II, 260] .
485. madonna in Ortolo: L, Madonna in the Garden, painting by Stefano da Verona
[4:45].
486. e "fa . . . tremare": I, "and 'make the air tremble with clarity' " [cf. 425 above].
487. Trattoria . . . : I, "Inn of the Apostles (twelve). " Small restaurant in V erona where Pound and Manlio Torquato Dazzi ate in 1912 when they visited the Biblioteca Capitolare to consult the Cavalcanti MSS
[Fang, II, 316].
488. "Ecco il te": I, " 'Here is the tea. ' "
489. piccolo: I, "young boy"; here the first stage in the multistaged career of a waiter.
490. Assisi: Town in Umbria, central Italy; birthplace of SI. Francis of Assisi. Above the saint's tomb, two Gothic churches were built, both decorated with frescoes by Cimabue, Giotto, and others [for decline of coffee see Kimpel, Pai, 10-2,307].
491. Orleans: Town in Loiret Department, N central France.
492. Mr. Carver: George Washington C. , ? 1864-1943, American agricultural chemist who discovered many new uses for products of the South. He got farmers to give up soil-exhausting cotton for crop rotation of peanuts and sweet potatoes. "From the peanut he made cheese, milk, coffee, flour, ink, dyes, soap, wood stains and insulating board" [EB].
493. arachidi: I, "peanuts. " As food short- ages developed during the war, Pound tried to persuade a number of bureaucrats thilt Italy should start cultivating peanuts. In A Visiting Card he wrote: "Peanuts could bring self-sufficiency in food to Italy or, rather to the empire, for these 'monkey nuts' would grow better in Cyrenaica" [SP, 319].
494. wops: Italian immigrants who at- tempted to enter the U. S. without permis- sion had a form given to them at Ellis Island stamped WOPS-"without papers. " Thus, the term came to refer to Italians in general. Pound does not use it in a pejorative sense.
495. Ragusa: A port of Dalmatia; from 1205 to 1358 under the control of Venice.
496. Herr Bacher's father: Heinrich B. 's father, Michael, was a woodcarver who resided near Brunico, in the Italian Tyrol
[EH].
New Y ork
French
restau-
Quackenbush:
mirador . . .
S, "the gal-
477. el
lery of Queen Lindaraja"; prob. Lindaraxa, the Zegri princess in Gines Perez de Hita's Guerras Civiles de Granada. .
478. PerdicarisjRais UIi: [cf. 161, 163 above ] .
479. Mr. Joyce . . . Hercules: From Victor Berard's works on the Odyssey, especially Calypso et la Mer de L 'Atlantide [Armand Colin, PariS, 1927-1929]. Joyce got the idea that Calypso's island was near Gibraltar, which he conceived to be the "Pillars of Hercules. " Leopold Bloom's train of thought, as he prepares Molly's breakfast and lurks outside her bedroom door (Ulysses, Chap. II, p. 56], associates a gift, also from the
Lindaraja:
497. Salustio's . . . :
1470, son of Sigismundo Malatesta and Isotta [Ixotta] degli Atti. The "itaglios" refer to the seals ofSalustio cut by Pisanello: see specimen in frontispiece of GK.
498. crystal jet: Recurrent image of divinity manifest. The progression from water in early cantos to crystal, jade, and other forms-such as the great acorn of light in the later, paradisal cantos-becomes ever clearer.
499. Verlaine: Paul V. , 1844-1896. "The one word 'Verlaine' assembles 'crystal' and 'jet' and sculptor under the sign of his 'Clair de Lune' which closes with great
S. Malatesta,
1448-
? ? 388
74/449,75/450
75/450-451
389
ecstatic fountains among statues ('les grands jets d'eau sveltes parmi 1es marbres')"
[HK, Era, 482-483].
500. Zephyrus/Apeliota: West and East
winds: "Wind also is of the process. "
501. nec accidens est: L, "and is not an attribute. "
502. est agens: L, "it is an agent. "
503. rose in the steel dust: A pattern formed under magnetic influence. A graphic image of divine order operating in the material world-a miracle which can be seen occasionally in such a thing as the "down" on a swan. Allen Upward had written: "He who has watched the iron crumbs drawn into patterns by the magnet; or who in the
Milano (15th-century)" [cf. 8 Gerhart Munch (g canto) [cf. 2
CANTO LXXV
Sources
Virgil, Aeneid VI; EP, GK, 203, 151-152,ABCR, 54.
Background
EP, Townsman, 1 (Jan. 1938), p. 18; R. Murray Schafer, Ezra Pound and Music, New Directions, New York, 1977,348-399 and
passim.
Exegesis
EH, Pai, 10-2,295-296; WB, Pai, 10-3, 594; Stephen 1. Adams, "The Soundscope of The Cantos," Humanities Assoc. Review, 28 (Spring 1977), 167-188.
Glossary
2. Gerhart: G. Munch, German (Dresden) pianist, composer, and arranger who during the 1930s spent a lot of time in Rapallo, where he played concerts with Olga Rudge. He arranged Janequin's Le Chant des Oiseaux, along with other old music that appealed to Pound [GK, 151-153]. Along with Antheil [74:64], Pound considered Munch in the vanguard of the moderns.
3. Buxtehude: Dietrich B. , 1637-1707, German composer and organist who influ~ enced the work of Bach.
4. Klages: Ludwig K. , 1872-1956, German anthropologist to whom Munch addressed a number of letters. Klage's major work in five volumes, Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele [The intellect as adversary of the soul], had an influe. nce upon Munch's work. His name and ideas came to Pound via Munch [EH, Pai, 10-2, 295-296]. Not to be confused with Charles Klages a 19th-century French composer and guitarist.
S. Stiindebuch: G, "collection" [GK, 203]. The word, not to be found in most German dictionaries, occurs in the title of a book of Jost Amman's illustrations to the songs of Hans Sachs [WB,Pai, 10-3,594].
6. -not of one _. .