Mead on Simon Magus has opened my mind to a number of new
possibilities
[cf.
A-Companion-to-the-Cantos-of-Ezra-Pound-II
It was final- ly finished and published in 1956 as the 2d number pf Edge.
The sibyl is mainly a pro- phetess but seems also to function as an intercessor [97: 160].
Sheri Martinelli is un- derstood to be the real-life sibyl at St.
Elizabeths.
26. m'elevasti: I, "you lifted me up" [adap? ted from Par. 1,75], praise which Dante lovingly attributes to Beatrice.
27. Erebus: The dark place through which souls must pass on the way to Hades.
28_ Isis: In Egyptian mythology, Isis, the earth goddess, was the wife of Osiris, god of the sun and the Nile-in which form he visi- ted her as flooding water. Isis correlates with Ishtar, Demeter, and Ceres as the goddess of grain, renewal, and compassion. In the myth, she gathered up the limbs of Osiris and re- stored the god of light under Ra to his power. Early in his career Pound wrote a
series of articles that together are called, "I gather the Limbs of Osiris. " They appeared in New Age, Dec. 7, 191 I-Feb. 15, 1912 [SP, 21-43]_ Here, at a particularly dramatic moment in The Cantos, Pound brings a key element in Western myth together in one image with the compassionate bodhisattva of the East, Kuanon.
Spanish poet from Andalusia who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1956 while in Puerto Rico. The death of his father (which be observed in 1900) was a great trauma from which he never freed himself. During the remainder of his life, he traveled a lot and lived in the U. S. , Puerto Rico, and Cuba. He lectured in Argentina in 1948. Returning to the U. S. by ship, he had the intense mystical experience that he tried to evoke in Animal de Fonda (! 949). In this
book, his obsession with nothingness and the fear of death, symbolized in earlier books by various sea and ocean metaphors, is resolved. Animal de Fonda is filled with joy, mystical aspirations, and the union of the "inner" and "outer" selves, realized by a perception of spirit as beauty, ecstasy, and light. Poem 29 in this volume ("Soy animal de fonda") is the immediate source of Pound's imagery
[Jimenez, Libros, p. 1339].
34. Castalia: [Cf. 5 above]_ Castalia was a
water nymph who, pursued by Apollo, leaped into the spring at Delphi which bears her name. A rhyme with the myth of Are- thusa.
35. Arethusa: A water nymph in the service of Diana [Ovid, Meta. V, 600 ff. ]. As with Daphne [2:26] Pound changes some details in the myth. Arethusa, bathing naked in a still stream, inspired lust in a water-god, who pursued her. She fled far, but finally, feeling his heavy panting on her hair, she called for help to Diana, who spirited her into the earth so she could escape and brought her to light again as a fountain in Sicily. The pop- lars and willows of the source are changed to the elms of the lawn of St. Elizabeths, and Areth. usa is seen as a lone nymph.
36. Wei and Han: Two Chinese rivers which join. This rhymes with the Arethusa myth: as a fountain Arethusa flowed together with
the water? god Alpheus.
37. Richardus: Among the "gists" from Richard of St. Victor [85:52] Pound gives one that translates, "watch birds to under- stand how spiritual things move, animals to understand physical motion" [SP, 71]. The
r
29. Kuanon:
[74: 81].
30. the blue serpent: The uraeus, or blue cobra: the emblem of the sacred serpent in the headdress of Egyptian divinities. At this time Pound's interest in Egyptian analogues for his canto themes led Sheri Martinelli (the most immediate motivation for Canto 90) to do a painting entitled "Isis of the Two King? dams" [Pai, 3-2, 240]. About this painting David Gordon wrote: "Here is the faintly blue serpentine cobra just below the sun-disc
of this composite Egyptian and Chinese god- dess of compassion: 'the natural object is always the adequate symbol. ' And it is she herself who is lifting the protagonist from the dust" [DG, Pai, 3-2, 241]-and from the dust to one of the most dramatic paradisal visions of the poem. Here the musical leit- motif "aram vult nemus" ("the grove needs its altar"), sounded several times earlier,
[74:441; 78:91; 79:126] receives visionary fulfillment. Beginning with the viper and the blue serpent, all nature answers the call and comes from the depths of the ocean and out of the earth to the grove, where smoke and bright flame rise from the altar. Just as Dio- nysus at the moment of declaring his god? head evoked a furry assemblage out of the air [2/7-9]-lynx, leopard, and panther-so in the following lines the hieratic animals answer the call.
31. lamps float: Ceremony celebrating the death of Adonis. Every July at Rapallo, "vo- tive lights [were] set adrift in the Golfo di Tigullio for the festival of Montallegre Ma- donna. " EP associated it with primitive rites to Tammuz-Adonis [HK, Era, 368; 47:7].
32. "De fondo": S, "of the depths. "
33. Juan Ramon: J_ R. Jimenez, 1881-1958,
? 544
free-flowing waters suggest the way thought
90/607-609
52. Xe)uSwv: H, "swallow. " An echo of 1. 429 of The Waste Land and the Philomela of Pervigilium Venen? s.
53. Corpus: L, "Body. " Evokes rhyme with
the church festival and procession on Corpus
Christi day, the first Thursday after Trinity Sunday.
54. Erebus: Dark place in the netherworld.
After the incantation, we have a vision of souls being delivered out of Hades and rising up out of the earth.
55. Tyro: Daughter of Salmoneus who be- came enamored with the divine river [2:12].
56. Alcmene: [Alcmena]: Wife of Jupiter
and mother of Hercules.
57. e i cavalieri: I, "and the chevaliers, or cavalry. "
58. 'HA? KTP": H, "Electra. " Daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra. Clytemnes- tra became the paramour of Aegisthus while Agamemnon was away at the Trojan War. After Clytemnestra murdered her husband, Electra joined with her brother Orestes to murder her mother.
59. Trees die & the dream remains: Accord- ing to Sheri Martinelli, this line was evoked by a thought of Juan Ramon Jimenez [cf. 33 above]. Pound was struck by a line something like, "Love dies but the trees re- main. " Going a step beyond his own "What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross" [81/521], it prompted him to "make it new" and evoke the dream, which for him is the vision still of paradiso terrestre.
60. ex animo: L, "from the soul. " 61. UBI AMOR . . . : [Cf. 16 above].
91/610
545
ought to flow in the unburdened [DJN,Pai, 3-2,225].
38. Gaio! . . . : I, "merry, merry. " 39. rilievi: I, "reliefs. " In sculpture.
mind
CANTO XCI
Sources
Jean Beck, Die Melodien der Troubadours und Trouvers; Philos- tratus, Life ofApolionius ofTyana, trans. F. C. Conybeare (Loeb Classical library) [Apollonius]; L. A. Waddell, Egyptian Civiliza- tion, Its Sumerian Origin, London, 1930; Boris de Rachewiltz, Papiro Magico Vaticano, Rome, 1954, and Massime degli antichi Egiziani, Milan, 1954; John Heydon, The Holy Guide, 1662; Homer, Odyssey [Od. ]; Dante, Paradiso [Par. ]; Jose-Maria de Heredia, "Antoine et Cleopatre"; Horace, Carmina[Carm. ]; Laya- mon, Brut, ed. Sir Frederick Madden, 3 vols. , London, 1847; Julien Benda, La trahison des clercs, Paris, B. Grasset, 1927; Richard of St. Victor, Tractatus de Gradibus Charitatis; G. Caval- canti, "Sonnet XVII"; Juan Ramon Jimenez, Animal de Fonda, Buenos Aires, 1949.
Background
EP, "Psychology and Troubadours," SR, 87-100; "Neo-Platonicks etc. ," GK, 222-226; "Kulchur: Part One," GK, 127-132; LE, 150- ISS; NPL, 157; SP, 45, 53; Instigations, 62; NS, Ezra Pound's Pennsylvania, Toledo, Ohio, 1976; Gianfranco Ivancich, Ezra Pound in Italy, New York, Rizzoli, 1978; G. R. S. Mead, The Doc- trine of the Subtle Body, London, 1919 [Doctrine]; John Read, Through Alchemy to Chemistry, London, 1957 [Alchemy]; Timothy Materer, Vortex, Pound, Eliot, and Lewis, Ithaca, N. Y. 1979, 184-197; E. A. Wallis Budge, The Book o f the Dead, New York, Bell, 1960.
Exegeses
EH, Pai, 1-2, 272; HK, Pai, 2-2, 332-334; Peck, Pai, I-I, 14, 21, 36; Surette, Pai, 2-3, 419-421; DD, Sculptor, 217-232; CFT, Pai, 2-3, 449-471; J. D. Neault, "Apollonius of Tyana," Pal, 4-1, 3-54; WB, "Secretary of Nature, J. Heydon," in EH, Approaches, 303-318; CB-R, "Lay Me by Aurelie," in EH, Approaches, 253-271, and ZBC, 185-203; JW, Pai, 2-2, 175-191, and Later, 83-101; MB, Trace, 278-302.
Glossary
40. Faunus: L, "woodland sprite. " The Ital-
ian Pan.
41. sirenes: L, "sirens. " Female sea? nymphs.
42. stone taking form: a rhyme with Dio-
nysus's creation of the sacred cats "out of
nothing" with "void air taking pelt" [2/8].
Here we have the vision of Zeus creating the stone altar of the grove Qut of the air in sculptured relief, as Amphion [cf. 7 above] called the stone walls into being with his lyre.
43. ac ferae: L, "and wild beasts. "
44. cervi: L, "deer. "
45. Pardus: L, "panther. "
46. leopardi: I, "leopards" or "jaguars. "
47. Bagheera: The name of the black pan- ther in Kipling's Jungle Book; he educates Mowgli, the boy brought up by a wolf (bagh means "tiger" in Urdu).
48. E7Tt xfJovi: H, "around [or "on"] the earth. "
49. at xeOVWt: H, "spirits of the under- world. " The spirit nature of the voices is indicated by the various butterfly wings
[48:42,50,53; 113/788]
50. Palatine: One of the great hills of Rome.
S1. pineta: I, "pinewood. "
1. ab 10 . . . vai: P, "with the sweetness that comes to my heart. " Conflation of several troubadour lines into one. Pound changed both the words and the music of his sources, so that we read "my heart" instead of "his
heart" [HK, Pai, 2-2, 333-335]. Note the articulation with several important vortex- image metaphors: (1) the music of Janne- quin's birds [75/450] ; (2) the numerous no- tations of birds on wires in different config~
? 546
91/610
91/610
547
urations throughout the Pisan Cantos; and (3) the new emphasis given to birds as meta- phors for the spirit, drawn from Richard of St. Victor [90:37].
2. the body of light: The "tensile light" descending. The primal Neoplatonic light- the divine principle, or "the total light process-which manifests as intelligence in man [74:100]. With the word "body," Pound brings into The Cantos more specific allusions to the mystical symbolism of the alchemists as set forth in the summary work of G. R. S. Mead, The Doctrine of the Subtle Body [Doctrine]. Mead's work in the mys- tery religions covered a lifetime and was set forth in many volumes, such as Simon Magus, 1892,; Thrice-greatest Hermes, 3 vols. , 1906; Mysten'es o f Mithra, 1907; and Chaldaean Oracles, 2 vols. , 1908. The Doc- trine o f the Subtle Body is a brief work (109 pp. ) which concentrates his theories in chap- ters entitled "The Spirit Body," "The Radiant-Body," and "The Resurrection- Body. " Neoplatonists who occur often in the Pound canon are the subjects of detailed study by Mead: Orpheus, Porphyry, Psellos, Iamblicus, Hermes Trismegistus, John Hey- don [GK, 225]. In "Psychology and Trouba- dours" (first published in Mead's journal Quest, then in The Spirit of Romance), Pound wrote [SR, 9In. ]: "Let me admit at once that a recent lecture by Mr.
Mead on Simon Magus has opened my mind to a number of new possibilities [cf. 10 below]. Later Pound carne to speak of Mead as "Old Krore" [GK, 225] and certainly didn't ac- cept any of his ideas about "resurrection body" after death, but Mead provided rhymes with the image Pound used from light-philosophers in the Neoplatonic tradi- tion, which presumes a body of divine fire to be the procreative source of all life in both the macrocosm and the microcosm. Mead, using the ancient myth of a tree as an image of the total universe [cf. rhyme with Yggdra- sil, 90:3], says: "Hidden in the seed of the tree is the principle (ratio, logos) of the tree. This is the formative power (virtus, dynamis) in the seed, the spermatic principle, which is calIed symbolically in Greek spintheris-
mos . . . [which] means, literally, emISSIOn of sparks,' 'sparking,' 'Light-spark,' or light- emanation,' . . . [this spermatic principle] is used by a number of Gnostic schools as a symbolic expression for the 'germ' of the spritual man" [Doctrine, 84-85]. Quoting from the Stoics, Pound wrote: "From god the creative fire, went forth spermatic logai"
[GK, 128]. About a Hellenistic work ad- mired by both Porphyry and Proclus, Mead says: "this famous poem sets forth a highly mystical doctrine concerning the nature of the subtle body . . . and purports to reveal the mystery of the divine paternal fire and the secret of the life of the great mother . . . a doctrine of the living fire and all its works"
[Doctrine, 22-23]. Speaking of the chief document of the "Simonian [Simon the Magus] school" called Great Announce- ment, Mead says it "presents us with a high- ly developed doctrine of the divine fire and
of the tree of life . . . entirely in keeping? with the subtle body theory of psychical alchemy" [Doctrine, 24].
3. the body of fire: Helios, Apollo, the source of divinity or the operating intelli- gence in the created universe-in man and nature [5: 10]. Speaking of how the essence of spirit and the divinity that were manifest in the works of early painters became lost in the carnality of Renaissance painting, Pound said: "The people are corpus, corpuscular, but not in the strict sense 'animate,' it is no longer the body of air clothed in the body of fire; it no longer radiates, light no longer moves from the eye" [LE, 153].
4. your eyes . . . sunken: A metaphor of eyes as the window of the "radiant divinity" buried deep within the human "persona" ("soul" and "body" cannot be used lest an endless number of sectarian or dogmatic associations, not intended, be evoked) [81:54]. Said Pound: "We have about us the universe of fluid force, and below us the germinal universe of wood alive, of stone alive. Man is . . . a mechanism rather like an electric appliance" [SR, 92]. Tracing par- allels between electric phenomena and the contact of one human psyche and another,
in which "a spark will leap," he goes on to pose "a possibly subtler form of energy," which leads to ideas about "chivalric love" and sex, which in turn returns us to the divine fire and the body of light. "Sex is . of a double function . . . or, as we see in the realm of fluid force, one sort of vibration produces at different intensities, heat and light" [SR, 94]. The water images here and through the rest of this canto have rhymes in alchemical mysticism, in which the moon and water express the female principle, whereas the sun and fire express the male; but often in a wider sense the sphere of water connotes the ambience of the spirit. Mead says of the myth of souls imprisoned in the flesh: "they lose the direct vision they previously enjoyed . . . their bodies are now 'watery sphere,' and their organs of vision 'windows not eyes' [Doctrine, 40]. Says Pound: "Let us say qUite simply that light is a projection from the luminous fluid, from the energy that is in the brain, down along the nerve cords which receive certain vibra- tions in the eye. Let us suppose man capable of exteriorizing a new organ, horn, halo, Eye of Horus" [NPL, 154]. Says Read: "Hermes Trismegistus, the patron of alchemy and al- leged father of the Hermetic Art, was the Greek equivalent of the Egyptian god, Thoth, the personification of wisdom. The Egyptian triad, Osiris, Isis, and Horus, were all endowed with alchemical attributes. Osiris, the Sun-god, was a symbol of the
active, masculine principle and vivifying force; Isis, the Mood-goddess [90:28], pas- sive and fertile, bore an earthly significance; Horus, their annual offspring, was an image of the infant year and the process of growth and multiplication" [Alchemy, 62]. But "earthly" included the four elements, earth, water, air, and fire. Of these, fire and water had to combine with earth and air to give the combinations hot-dry, hot-moist, cold- dry, cold-moist, which were the qualities in various degrees of all creation. "The deep" in these lines leads in many directions: to the deepest reaches of the self, as well as to the waters of primal chaos. It metamorpho- ses into other forms in this canto: crystal
and flowing crystal as well as the medium by which the golden sun-boat traverses the underworld to be reborn and made new
[cf. 28 below] .
5. Reina: Prob. the goddess Aphrodite, whom Pound wanted restored to her pedes- tal at Terracina (near Circeo), as well as a generalized epithet for "Isis-Persephone- Demeter-Kuanon. " It links also with a poem by Bernart de V entadorn composed for Eleanor of Aquitaine ("can vei la lauzeter mover," "When I see the lark on the wing"), in which the poet speaks of "the eyes of Eleanor as the mirrors in which the poet drowns, like Narcissus drowning in the pool that reflects his image" [EH, Pai, 1-2,272].
6. qui labora! , orat: L, "he who works, prays. " Variant of Latin tag Grare est labor- are: "To work is to pray. "
7. Undine: [On dine] : Mythical
with sirenlike magical attraction for men, but "symbolically the inverse of sirens: in the latter, the fishy part of their body . . .
[relates them to] the water (and the moon) and woman; with undines, it is the femi- nine-or perilous-nature of the waters which is symbolized" [eirlot, 337]. When they are in the water, they may represent dangerous currents and torrents; when they are on a rock, the waters are placid.
8. Circeo: Town on the Ligurian coast of Italy near Terracina [74:208]. If the god- dess were restored to her pedestal here (as Pound said he would do if he had the mate- rial means [SP, 53]), her stone eyes would again be looking seaward, and that would be "worth more than any metaphysical argu~ ment" [SP,45].
9. Apollonius: A. of Tyana. A first-century mystic, man of Wisdom, miracle-worker, and seer. A Pythagorean and a sun-worshipper [cf. 94 below; 94:42] . At the end of his trial [ef. 91? 94 below], he metamorphosed into thin air, an act that rhymes with the trans- formation of Helen of Tyre by powers de- rived from Pythagoras. Said A. to the em- peror, "Nay, you cannot even take my
sea-creature
? 548
91/610-611
91/611-612
549
body. " The source continues: "And with these words he vanished from the court" [Apolionius, Bk. VIII, chap. 5]. Thus,
Apollonius.
10. Helen of Tyre: Pound wrote, "there would seem to be in the legend of Simon Magus and Helen of Tyre a clearer prototype of 'chivalric love' than in anything herein? after discussed" [SR, 91]. Mead in his study entitled Simon Magus: An Essay [cf. 2 above] said of Helen of Troy that after the Trojan War she was changed by the angels into another form and "lived in a brothel in Tyre," where Simon Magus found her "and purchased her freedom" [Surette, Pai, 2-3, 419-421]. Pound lists her [NFL, 157] with "priestesses in the temple of Venus" and other female religious celebrants to support his thesis that sexuality and love are manifes- tations of the divine power in all nature including man, and that sexual congress, if so considered by the devotee, is a religious act Such a belief contributed to the "medi- terranean sanity" which he found in Prov- ence: "I believe that a light from Eleusis persisted throughout the middle ages and set beauty in the song of Provence and Italy"
[SF, 53]. Sex acts in the Eleusinian rites of initiation and celebration were conceived as acts of worship. Thus Pound says of "chival- ric love" (which was by no means ascetic or platonic) that it "was, as I understand it, an art, that is to say, a religion" [SR, 87]. So Helen of Tyre takes her place among the servants of Aphrodite as a celebrant of the sanctity of love, a far better thing than the condition wrought by the usurers, who "brought whores for Eleusis" [45/230].
11. Pithagoras: [Pythagoras]: Greek philos- opher of the 6th century B. C. His doctrines figure large in Neoplatonism. Pound values his ideas of order and usually lists him as one of the pre-Socratics in the tradition of Neo- platonism and the medieval philosophers of light and finds in their ideas rhymes with similar ones in Confucius [GK, 24, 25, 28, 121, 255, 333]. He used the "holy tet- ractys" of P. as an ordering or structural forma for the Leopoldine, Chinese, and
Adams cantos. Mead said: "what we may call revived or Pythagorean Orphism spells already . . . a decided 'Oriental,' influence" [Doctrine, 40]. The final source of both Middle Eastern and Far Eastern esoteric doc- trine was Indian.
12. Ocellus: O. Lucanus, Pythagorean phi- losopher of the 6th century to whom Pound a! Hibutes the phrase, "To build light"
[87:43].
13. et Iibidinis expers: L, "and having no part in lust. " Refers to the ascetic life of Helen of Tyre and the Pythagoreans. The phrase is in Lacharme's Latin description of the Confucian odes [59:6].
14. Justinian, Theodora: Justinian I, 483- 565, Byzantine emperor, and his wife the Empress Theodora. Famous for codifying the laws and building the Hagia Sophia [65: 126,77:44,94:45].
IS. GREAT CRYSTAL: The great "acorn of light": Neoplatonic metaphor from Gros- seteste's de Luce. The source of the primal creative force [74:249; 116/795]. It mirrors the pine as a reflection in water and thus doubles it. Pound found such ideas as para- digms of reality in Plato and the Platonists after him, who "have caused man after man to be suddenly conscious of the reality of the nous, of mind, apart from any man's individual mind, of the sea crystalline and enduring, of the bright as it were molten glass that envelops us, full of light"
[GK,44].
16. pensar . . . ripaus: P, "to think of her is my rest. " From Arnaut's, "En breu brisral temps braus," which Pound translates: "Briefly bursteth season brisk" [LE, 135]. Connected with the "If I see her not" refrain
[JW].
17. Miss Tudor: Elizabeth I, a historical fig- ure who made a difference, as did Sigis- mundo, Justinian, and Theodora. It was the divine nous reflected in the depth of her eyes, the window of divinity flowing on in process, that animated Drake-referred to in "he saw it" [cf. 21 below].
18. compenetrans: L, "intensely pen- etrating. "
19. Princess Ra-Set: Conflation of "two ancient Egyptian male divinities, Ra and Set . . . into a single female entity" [B de R, Approaches, 181], thus representing the full solar and lunar cycles. Ra, the sun-god, as good and Set, the moon-god, as evil. In the Osiris myth, Set, bound in chains by Horus, is liberated by Isis. Ra-Set thus connects' with Isis-Kuanon [90:28]. The "cloud" in this passage has esoteric Significance both sensual and spiritual. Says Mead: "Porphyry
. . .
20. convien . . . amando: I, "It is right that the mind should move by loving" [Par. XXVI,34-35].
21. Drake: Sir Francis Drake, 1540-1596. The first Englishman to circumnavigate the globe. In the power struggle between Spain and England, Drake played a critical role. In 1587, he entered the port of Cadiz and destroyed the Spanish fleet there; in 1588, he was vice-admiral in the fleet that defeated the Armada. In him, the spirit of the Eliza- bethan age reached its height. A "luminous" persona who altered history.
22. ichor: H, "the fluid that flows in the veins of gods. " An ethereal blood.
23. arnor: L, "love. " With "ichor" we have a metaphor: Love is not the soul but the divine fluid that flows from the soul [cf. 90:1]. Mead says, "Homer knew that blood was the food and aliment of spirit," and, "Diogenes Laertius. . . attributes to Pythagoras the opinion 'that the soul is nourished by blood' " [Doctrine, 38n. ].
24. J. Heydon: [90:2]
25. Apollonius: [Cf. 94 below] .
26. Ocellus: [Cf. 12 above].
27. "to this khan": Source of quote un-
known. A khan is an Oriental inn surround- ing a courtyard, as well as the title of a ruler in Central Asia.
28. The golden sun boat: The vehicle by which the Egyptian sun-god Ra traversed the underworld during the night to reappear in the east at dawn, as set forth in the Book of the Dead. The journey is a rhyme with that of Helios [23: 12-18] .
tells us that
attract a moist spirit to them, and condense it like a cloud (for the moist being con- densed in air constitutes a cloud)" [Doc- trine, 48].
29. Love
line of The Divine Comedy: "the Love which moves the sun and the other stars"
[Par. XXXIII, 145].
30. ''''pix ~Wl1wv: H, "beside the altar. "
31. Tamuz!
26. m'elevasti: I, "you lifted me up" [adap? ted from Par. 1,75], praise which Dante lovingly attributes to Beatrice.
27. Erebus: The dark place through which souls must pass on the way to Hades.
28_ Isis: In Egyptian mythology, Isis, the earth goddess, was the wife of Osiris, god of the sun and the Nile-in which form he visi- ted her as flooding water. Isis correlates with Ishtar, Demeter, and Ceres as the goddess of grain, renewal, and compassion. In the myth, she gathered up the limbs of Osiris and re- stored the god of light under Ra to his power. Early in his career Pound wrote a
series of articles that together are called, "I gather the Limbs of Osiris. " They appeared in New Age, Dec. 7, 191 I-Feb. 15, 1912 [SP, 21-43]_ Here, at a particularly dramatic moment in The Cantos, Pound brings a key element in Western myth together in one image with the compassionate bodhisattva of the East, Kuanon.
Spanish poet from Andalusia who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1956 while in Puerto Rico. The death of his father (which be observed in 1900) was a great trauma from which he never freed himself. During the remainder of his life, he traveled a lot and lived in the U. S. , Puerto Rico, and Cuba. He lectured in Argentina in 1948. Returning to the U. S. by ship, he had the intense mystical experience that he tried to evoke in Animal de Fonda (! 949). In this
book, his obsession with nothingness and the fear of death, symbolized in earlier books by various sea and ocean metaphors, is resolved. Animal de Fonda is filled with joy, mystical aspirations, and the union of the "inner" and "outer" selves, realized by a perception of spirit as beauty, ecstasy, and light. Poem 29 in this volume ("Soy animal de fonda") is the immediate source of Pound's imagery
[Jimenez, Libros, p. 1339].
34. Castalia: [Cf. 5 above]_ Castalia was a
water nymph who, pursued by Apollo, leaped into the spring at Delphi which bears her name. A rhyme with the myth of Are- thusa.
35. Arethusa: A water nymph in the service of Diana [Ovid, Meta. V, 600 ff. ]. As with Daphne [2:26] Pound changes some details in the myth. Arethusa, bathing naked in a still stream, inspired lust in a water-god, who pursued her. She fled far, but finally, feeling his heavy panting on her hair, she called for help to Diana, who spirited her into the earth so she could escape and brought her to light again as a fountain in Sicily. The pop- lars and willows of the source are changed to the elms of the lawn of St. Elizabeths, and Areth. usa is seen as a lone nymph.
36. Wei and Han: Two Chinese rivers which join. This rhymes with the Arethusa myth: as a fountain Arethusa flowed together with
the water? god Alpheus.
37. Richardus: Among the "gists" from Richard of St. Victor [85:52] Pound gives one that translates, "watch birds to under- stand how spiritual things move, animals to understand physical motion" [SP, 71]. The
r
29. Kuanon:
[74: 81].
30. the blue serpent: The uraeus, or blue cobra: the emblem of the sacred serpent in the headdress of Egyptian divinities. At this time Pound's interest in Egyptian analogues for his canto themes led Sheri Martinelli (the most immediate motivation for Canto 90) to do a painting entitled "Isis of the Two King? dams" [Pai, 3-2, 240]. About this painting David Gordon wrote: "Here is the faintly blue serpentine cobra just below the sun-disc
of this composite Egyptian and Chinese god- dess of compassion: 'the natural object is always the adequate symbol. ' And it is she herself who is lifting the protagonist from the dust" [DG, Pai, 3-2, 241]-and from the dust to one of the most dramatic paradisal visions of the poem. Here the musical leit- motif "aram vult nemus" ("the grove needs its altar"), sounded several times earlier,
[74:441; 78:91; 79:126] receives visionary fulfillment. Beginning with the viper and the blue serpent, all nature answers the call and comes from the depths of the ocean and out of the earth to the grove, where smoke and bright flame rise from the altar. Just as Dio- nysus at the moment of declaring his god? head evoked a furry assemblage out of the air [2/7-9]-lynx, leopard, and panther-so in the following lines the hieratic animals answer the call.
31. lamps float: Ceremony celebrating the death of Adonis. Every July at Rapallo, "vo- tive lights [were] set adrift in the Golfo di Tigullio for the festival of Montallegre Ma- donna. " EP associated it with primitive rites to Tammuz-Adonis [HK, Era, 368; 47:7].
32. "De fondo": S, "of the depths. "
33. Juan Ramon: J_ R. Jimenez, 1881-1958,
? 544
free-flowing waters suggest the way thought
90/607-609
52. Xe)uSwv: H, "swallow. " An echo of 1. 429 of The Waste Land and the Philomela of Pervigilium Venen? s.
53. Corpus: L, "Body. " Evokes rhyme with
the church festival and procession on Corpus
Christi day, the first Thursday after Trinity Sunday.
54. Erebus: Dark place in the netherworld.
After the incantation, we have a vision of souls being delivered out of Hades and rising up out of the earth.
55. Tyro: Daughter of Salmoneus who be- came enamored with the divine river [2:12].
56. Alcmene: [Alcmena]: Wife of Jupiter
and mother of Hercules.
57. e i cavalieri: I, "and the chevaliers, or cavalry. "
58. 'HA? KTP": H, "Electra. " Daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra. Clytemnes- tra became the paramour of Aegisthus while Agamemnon was away at the Trojan War. After Clytemnestra murdered her husband, Electra joined with her brother Orestes to murder her mother.
59. Trees die & the dream remains: Accord- ing to Sheri Martinelli, this line was evoked by a thought of Juan Ramon Jimenez [cf. 33 above]. Pound was struck by a line something like, "Love dies but the trees re- main. " Going a step beyond his own "What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross" [81/521], it prompted him to "make it new" and evoke the dream, which for him is the vision still of paradiso terrestre.
60. ex animo: L, "from the soul. " 61. UBI AMOR . . . : [Cf. 16 above].
91/610
545
ought to flow in the unburdened [DJN,Pai, 3-2,225].
38. Gaio! . . . : I, "merry, merry. " 39. rilievi: I, "reliefs. " In sculpture.
mind
CANTO XCI
Sources
Jean Beck, Die Melodien der Troubadours und Trouvers; Philos- tratus, Life ofApolionius ofTyana, trans. F. C. Conybeare (Loeb Classical library) [Apollonius]; L. A. Waddell, Egyptian Civiliza- tion, Its Sumerian Origin, London, 1930; Boris de Rachewiltz, Papiro Magico Vaticano, Rome, 1954, and Massime degli antichi Egiziani, Milan, 1954; John Heydon, The Holy Guide, 1662; Homer, Odyssey [Od. ]; Dante, Paradiso [Par. ]; Jose-Maria de Heredia, "Antoine et Cleopatre"; Horace, Carmina[Carm. ]; Laya- mon, Brut, ed. Sir Frederick Madden, 3 vols. , London, 1847; Julien Benda, La trahison des clercs, Paris, B. Grasset, 1927; Richard of St. Victor, Tractatus de Gradibus Charitatis; G. Caval- canti, "Sonnet XVII"; Juan Ramon Jimenez, Animal de Fonda, Buenos Aires, 1949.
Background
EP, "Psychology and Troubadours," SR, 87-100; "Neo-Platonicks etc. ," GK, 222-226; "Kulchur: Part One," GK, 127-132; LE, 150- ISS; NPL, 157; SP, 45, 53; Instigations, 62; NS, Ezra Pound's Pennsylvania, Toledo, Ohio, 1976; Gianfranco Ivancich, Ezra Pound in Italy, New York, Rizzoli, 1978; G. R. S. Mead, The Doc- trine of the Subtle Body, London, 1919 [Doctrine]; John Read, Through Alchemy to Chemistry, London, 1957 [Alchemy]; Timothy Materer, Vortex, Pound, Eliot, and Lewis, Ithaca, N. Y. 1979, 184-197; E. A. Wallis Budge, The Book o f the Dead, New York, Bell, 1960.
Exegeses
EH, Pai, 1-2, 272; HK, Pai, 2-2, 332-334; Peck, Pai, I-I, 14, 21, 36; Surette, Pai, 2-3, 419-421; DD, Sculptor, 217-232; CFT, Pai, 2-3, 449-471; J. D. Neault, "Apollonius of Tyana," Pal, 4-1, 3-54; WB, "Secretary of Nature, J. Heydon," in EH, Approaches, 303-318; CB-R, "Lay Me by Aurelie," in EH, Approaches, 253-271, and ZBC, 185-203; JW, Pai, 2-2, 175-191, and Later, 83-101; MB, Trace, 278-302.
Glossary
40. Faunus: L, "woodland sprite. " The Ital-
ian Pan.
41. sirenes: L, "sirens. " Female sea? nymphs.
42. stone taking form: a rhyme with Dio-
nysus's creation of the sacred cats "out of
nothing" with "void air taking pelt" [2/8].
Here we have the vision of Zeus creating the stone altar of the grove Qut of the air in sculptured relief, as Amphion [cf. 7 above] called the stone walls into being with his lyre.
43. ac ferae: L, "and wild beasts. "
44. cervi: L, "deer. "
45. Pardus: L, "panther. "
46. leopardi: I, "leopards" or "jaguars. "
47. Bagheera: The name of the black pan- ther in Kipling's Jungle Book; he educates Mowgli, the boy brought up by a wolf (bagh means "tiger" in Urdu).
48. E7Tt xfJovi: H, "around [or "on"] the earth. "
49. at xeOVWt: H, "spirits of the under- world. " The spirit nature of the voices is indicated by the various butterfly wings
[48:42,50,53; 113/788]
50. Palatine: One of the great hills of Rome.
S1. pineta: I, "pinewood. "
1. ab 10 . . . vai: P, "with the sweetness that comes to my heart. " Conflation of several troubadour lines into one. Pound changed both the words and the music of his sources, so that we read "my heart" instead of "his
heart" [HK, Pai, 2-2, 333-335]. Note the articulation with several important vortex- image metaphors: (1) the music of Janne- quin's birds [75/450] ; (2) the numerous no- tations of birds on wires in different config~
? 546
91/610
91/610
547
urations throughout the Pisan Cantos; and (3) the new emphasis given to birds as meta- phors for the spirit, drawn from Richard of St. Victor [90:37].
2. the body of light: The "tensile light" descending. The primal Neoplatonic light- the divine principle, or "the total light process-which manifests as intelligence in man [74:100]. With the word "body," Pound brings into The Cantos more specific allusions to the mystical symbolism of the alchemists as set forth in the summary work of G. R. S. Mead, The Doctrine of the Subtle Body [Doctrine]. Mead's work in the mys- tery religions covered a lifetime and was set forth in many volumes, such as Simon Magus, 1892,; Thrice-greatest Hermes, 3 vols. , 1906; Mysten'es o f Mithra, 1907; and Chaldaean Oracles, 2 vols. , 1908. The Doc- trine o f the Subtle Body is a brief work (109 pp. ) which concentrates his theories in chap- ters entitled "The Spirit Body," "The Radiant-Body," and "The Resurrection- Body. " Neoplatonists who occur often in the Pound canon are the subjects of detailed study by Mead: Orpheus, Porphyry, Psellos, Iamblicus, Hermes Trismegistus, John Hey- don [GK, 225]. In "Psychology and Trouba- dours" (first published in Mead's journal Quest, then in The Spirit of Romance), Pound wrote [SR, 9In. ]: "Let me admit at once that a recent lecture by Mr.
Mead on Simon Magus has opened my mind to a number of new possibilities [cf. 10 below]. Later Pound carne to speak of Mead as "Old Krore" [GK, 225] and certainly didn't ac- cept any of his ideas about "resurrection body" after death, but Mead provided rhymes with the image Pound used from light-philosophers in the Neoplatonic tradi- tion, which presumes a body of divine fire to be the procreative source of all life in both the macrocosm and the microcosm. Mead, using the ancient myth of a tree as an image of the total universe [cf. rhyme with Yggdra- sil, 90:3], says: "Hidden in the seed of the tree is the principle (ratio, logos) of the tree. This is the formative power (virtus, dynamis) in the seed, the spermatic principle, which is calIed symbolically in Greek spintheris-
mos . . . [which] means, literally, emISSIOn of sparks,' 'sparking,' 'Light-spark,' or light- emanation,' . . . [this spermatic principle] is used by a number of Gnostic schools as a symbolic expression for the 'germ' of the spritual man" [Doctrine, 84-85]. Quoting from the Stoics, Pound wrote: "From god the creative fire, went forth spermatic logai"
[GK, 128]. About a Hellenistic work ad- mired by both Porphyry and Proclus, Mead says: "this famous poem sets forth a highly mystical doctrine concerning the nature of the subtle body . . . and purports to reveal the mystery of the divine paternal fire and the secret of the life of the great mother . . . a doctrine of the living fire and all its works"
[Doctrine, 22-23]. Speaking of the chief document of the "Simonian [Simon the Magus] school" called Great Announce- ment, Mead says it "presents us with a high- ly developed doctrine of the divine fire and
of the tree of life . . . entirely in keeping? with the subtle body theory of psychical alchemy" [Doctrine, 24].
3. the body of fire: Helios, Apollo, the source of divinity or the operating intelli- gence in the created universe-in man and nature [5: 10]. Speaking of how the essence of spirit and the divinity that were manifest in the works of early painters became lost in the carnality of Renaissance painting, Pound said: "The people are corpus, corpuscular, but not in the strict sense 'animate,' it is no longer the body of air clothed in the body of fire; it no longer radiates, light no longer moves from the eye" [LE, 153].
4. your eyes . . . sunken: A metaphor of eyes as the window of the "radiant divinity" buried deep within the human "persona" ("soul" and "body" cannot be used lest an endless number of sectarian or dogmatic associations, not intended, be evoked) [81:54]. Said Pound: "We have about us the universe of fluid force, and below us the germinal universe of wood alive, of stone alive. Man is . . . a mechanism rather like an electric appliance" [SR, 92]. Tracing par- allels between electric phenomena and the contact of one human psyche and another,
in which "a spark will leap," he goes on to pose "a possibly subtler form of energy," which leads to ideas about "chivalric love" and sex, which in turn returns us to the divine fire and the body of light. "Sex is . of a double function . . . or, as we see in the realm of fluid force, one sort of vibration produces at different intensities, heat and light" [SR, 94]. The water images here and through the rest of this canto have rhymes in alchemical mysticism, in which the moon and water express the female principle, whereas the sun and fire express the male; but often in a wider sense the sphere of water connotes the ambience of the spirit. Mead says of the myth of souls imprisoned in the flesh: "they lose the direct vision they previously enjoyed . . . their bodies are now 'watery sphere,' and their organs of vision 'windows not eyes' [Doctrine, 40]. Says Pound: "Let us say qUite simply that light is a projection from the luminous fluid, from the energy that is in the brain, down along the nerve cords which receive certain vibra- tions in the eye. Let us suppose man capable of exteriorizing a new organ, horn, halo, Eye of Horus" [NPL, 154]. Says Read: "Hermes Trismegistus, the patron of alchemy and al- leged father of the Hermetic Art, was the Greek equivalent of the Egyptian god, Thoth, the personification of wisdom. The Egyptian triad, Osiris, Isis, and Horus, were all endowed with alchemical attributes. Osiris, the Sun-god, was a symbol of the
active, masculine principle and vivifying force; Isis, the Mood-goddess [90:28], pas- sive and fertile, bore an earthly significance; Horus, their annual offspring, was an image of the infant year and the process of growth and multiplication" [Alchemy, 62]. But "earthly" included the four elements, earth, water, air, and fire. Of these, fire and water had to combine with earth and air to give the combinations hot-dry, hot-moist, cold- dry, cold-moist, which were the qualities in various degrees of all creation. "The deep" in these lines leads in many directions: to the deepest reaches of the self, as well as to the waters of primal chaos. It metamorpho- ses into other forms in this canto: crystal
and flowing crystal as well as the medium by which the golden sun-boat traverses the underworld to be reborn and made new
[cf. 28 below] .
5. Reina: Prob. the goddess Aphrodite, whom Pound wanted restored to her pedes- tal at Terracina (near Circeo), as well as a generalized epithet for "Isis-Persephone- Demeter-Kuanon. " It links also with a poem by Bernart de V entadorn composed for Eleanor of Aquitaine ("can vei la lauzeter mover," "When I see the lark on the wing"), in which the poet speaks of "the eyes of Eleanor as the mirrors in which the poet drowns, like Narcissus drowning in the pool that reflects his image" [EH, Pai, 1-2,272].
6. qui labora! , orat: L, "he who works, prays. " Variant of Latin tag Grare est labor- are: "To work is to pray. "
7. Undine: [On dine] : Mythical
with sirenlike magical attraction for men, but "symbolically the inverse of sirens: in the latter, the fishy part of their body . . .
[relates them to] the water (and the moon) and woman; with undines, it is the femi- nine-or perilous-nature of the waters which is symbolized" [eirlot, 337]. When they are in the water, they may represent dangerous currents and torrents; when they are on a rock, the waters are placid.
8. Circeo: Town on the Ligurian coast of Italy near Terracina [74:208]. If the god- dess were restored to her pedestal here (as Pound said he would do if he had the mate- rial means [SP, 53]), her stone eyes would again be looking seaward, and that would be "worth more than any metaphysical argu~ ment" [SP,45].
9. Apollonius: A. of Tyana. A first-century mystic, man of Wisdom, miracle-worker, and seer. A Pythagorean and a sun-worshipper [cf. 94 below; 94:42] . At the end of his trial [ef. 91? 94 below], he metamorphosed into thin air, an act that rhymes with the trans- formation of Helen of Tyre by powers de- rived from Pythagoras. Said A. to the em- peror, "Nay, you cannot even take my
sea-creature
? 548
91/610-611
91/611-612
549
body. " The source continues: "And with these words he vanished from the court" [Apolionius, Bk. VIII, chap. 5]. Thus,
Apollonius.
10. Helen of Tyre: Pound wrote, "there would seem to be in the legend of Simon Magus and Helen of Tyre a clearer prototype of 'chivalric love' than in anything herein? after discussed" [SR, 91]. Mead in his study entitled Simon Magus: An Essay [cf. 2 above] said of Helen of Troy that after the Trojan War she was changed by the angels into another form and "lived in a brothel in Tyre," where Simon Magus found her "and purchased her freedom" [Surette, Pai, 2-3, 419-421]. Pound lists her [NFL, 157] with "priestesses in the temple of Venus" and other female religious celebrants to support his thesis that sexuality and love are manifes- tations of the divine power in all nature including man, and that sexual congress, if so considered by the devotee, is a religious act Such a belief contributed to the "medi- terranean sanity" which he found in Prov- ence: "I believe that a light from Eleusis persisted throughout the middle ages and set beauty in the song of Provence and Italy"
[SF, 53]. Sex acts in the Eleusinian rites of initiation and celebration were conceived as acts of worship. Thus Pound says of "chival- ric love" (which was by no means ascetic or platonic) that it "was, as I understand it, an art, that is to say, a religion" [SR, 87]. So Helen of Tyre takes her place among the servants of Aphrodite as a celebrant of the sanctity of love, a far better thing than the condition wrought by the usurers, who "brought whores for Eleusis" [45/230].
11. Pithagoras: [Pythagoras]: Greek philos- opher of the 6th century B. C. His doctrines figure large in Neoplatonism. Pound values his ideas of order and usually lists him as one of the pre-Socratics in the tradition of Neo- platonism and the medieval philosophers of light and finds in their ideas rhymes with similar ones in Confucius [GK, 24, 25, 28, 121, 255, 333]. He used the "holy tet- ractys" of P. as an ordering or structural forma for the Leopoldine, Chinese, and
Adams cantos. Mead said: "what we may call revived or Pythagorean Orphism spells already . . . a decided 'Oriental,' influence" [Doctrine, 40]. The final source of both Middle Eastern and Far Eastern esoteric doc- trine was Indian.
12. Ocellus: O. Lucanus, Pythagorean phi- losopher of the 6th century to whom Pound a! Hibutes the phrase, "To build light"
[87:43].
13. et Iibidinis expers: L, "and having no part in lust. " Refers to the ascetic life of Helen of Tyre and the Pythagoreans. The phrase is in Lacharme's Latin description of the Confucian odes [59:6].
14. Justinian, Theodora: Justinian I, 483- 565, Byzantine emperor, and his wife the Empress Theodora. Famous for codifying the laws and building the Hagia Sophia [65: 126,77:44,94:45].
IS. GREAT CRYSTAL: The great "acorn of light": Neoplatonic metaphor from Gros- seteste's de Luce. The source of the primal creative force [74:249; 116/795]. It mirrors the pine as a reflection in water and thus doubles it. Pound found such ideas as para- digms of reality in Plato and the Platonists after him, who "have caused man after man to be suddenly conscious of the reality of the nous, of mind, apart from any man's individual mind, of the sea crystalline and enduring, of the bright as it were molten glass that envelops us, full of light"
[GK,44].
16. pensar . . . ripaus: P, "to think of her is my rest. " From Arnaut's, "En breu brisral temps braus," which Pound translates: "Briefly bursteth season brisk" [LE, 135]. Connected with the "If I see her not" refrain
[JW].
17. Miss Tudor: Elizabeth I, a historical fig- ure who made a difference, as did Sigis- mundo, Justinian, and Theodora. It was the divine nous reflected in the depth of her eyes, the window of divinity flowing on in process, that animated Drake-referred to in "he saw it" [cf. 21 below].
18. compenetrans: L, "intensely pen- etrating. "
19. Princess Ra-Set: Conflation of "two ancient Egyptian male divinities, Ra and Set . . . into a single female entity" [B de R, Approaches, 181], thus representing the full solar and lunar cycles. Ra, the sun-god, as good and Set, the moon-god, as evil. In the Osiris myth, Set, bound in chains by Horus, is liberated by Isis. Ra-Set thus connects' with Isis-Kuanon [90:28]. The "cloud" in this passage has esoteric Significance both sensual and spiritual. Says Mead: "Porphyry
. . .
20. convien . . . amando: I, "It is right that the mind should move by loving" [Par. XXVI,34-35].
21. Drake: Sir Francis Drake, 1540-1596. The first Englishman to circumnavigate the globe. In the power struggle between Spain and England, Drake played a critical role. In 1587, he entered the port of Cadiz and destroyed the Spanish fleet there; in 1588, he was vice-admiral in the fleet that defeated the Armada. In him, the spirit of the Eliza- bethan age reached its height. A "luminous" persona who altered history.
22. ichor: H, "the fluid that flows in the veins of gods. " An ethereal blood.
23. arnor: L, "love. " With "ichor" we have a metaphor: Love is not the soul but the divine fluid that flows from the soul [cf. 90:1]. Mead says, "Homer knew that blood was the food and aliment of spirit," and, "Diogenes Laertius. . . attributes to Pythagoras the opinion 'that the soul is nourished by blood' " [Doctrine, 38n. ].
24. J. Heydon: [90:2]
25. Apollonius: [Cf. 94 below] .
26. Ocellus: [Cf. 12 above].
27. "to this khan": Source of quote un-
known. A khan is an Oriental inn surround- ing a courtyard, as well as the title of a ruler in Central Asia.
28. The golden sun boat: The vehicle by which the Egyptian sun-god Ra traversed the underworld during the night to reappear in the east at dawn, as set forth in the Book of the Dead. The journey is a rhyme with that of Helios [23: 12-18] .
tells us that
attract a moist spirit to them, and condense it like a cloud (for the moist being con- densed in air constitutes a cloud)" [Doc- trine, 48].
29. Love
line of The Divine Comedy: "the Love which moves the sun and the other stars"
[Par. XXXIII, 145].
30. ''''pix ~Wl1wv: H, "beside the altar. "
31. Tamuz!
