But in 1934
Mussolini
let his old friend be sent to prison for not bending to Fascist orthodoxy.
A-Companion-to-the-Cantos-of-Ezra-Pound-II
34. hsien: [M2692]. "The tensile light" that flows from the divine [74:88]. A trans- literation of the character beside it. The dualism of fire and light is repeated with fire connoting sensual experience and light, intel? ligence [ef. 2,3 above].
35. 'EMv(,"" H, "Helen. " Epithet for a number of great queens. Here, Elizabeth I.
36. Ra-Set: [Cf. 19 above]. Says Mead: "We find Porphyry elsewhere explaining the Egyptian symbolism of the boats or barques of the 'daimones' as being intended to represent not solid bodies, but the vehi- cles in which they 'sail on the moist' " [Doc- trine, 47]. .
37. Queen's eye: In Jose-Maria de Heredia's Antoine et Chiopatre, Antony looked into Cleopatra's eyes and saw "Toute une mer immense au fuyient des galeres" ("A whole immense sea where galleons were fleeing);
[Dekker, Cantos, 105].
souls who love the body
moving . . .
: Paraphrase of the last
? 550
91/612-613
91/613-614
551
38. ne quaesaris: L, "he asked not. " EP's standard rendering of Horace's "ne quaesieris" [Calm. I, 11, IJ, which he takes to mean unhesitating commitment [SR, 96J.
39. He . . . hunting rite: The "he" is prob. the Trojan Brut of Layamon's Brut, who founded Albion after invoking the protec- tion of Diana. Albion was the new Troy, a city of love associated with Montsegur. In Ur-Canto 3, Pound placed Layamon with Heydon.
40. sanctus: L, "holy" or "divine,"
41. Leafdi . . . londe: OE, part of song sung to Diana by Brutus in Layamon's Brut: "Lady Diana, dear Diana / High Diana, help me in my need / Teach me through skill/ where I might go / to a winsome land" [CB-R, ZBC, 190J. Brutus, great grandson of Aeneas, came to an island empty except for wild deer, where his men found a marble temple sacred to Diana. Unlike his men, Brutus was unafraid. He "entered the temple alone, with a vessel of red gold, full of milk from a white hind he had shot, and wine separately" [ibid. J . After an elaborate ritual, he uttered the prayer from which these lines are taken.
42. Rome th'i1ke tyme was noght: OE, "Rome at this time was not [inhabitedJ. " From Robert of Brunne [ibid. J.
43. Lear: King Leir in Layamon.
44. Janus: Underworld god who rules the double gates of birth and death [47: ! OJ . In Layarnon, King Lear dies and is buried "inne Janies temple" (unlike his fate in Shake- speare).
45. Ideogram: Chen' [M315J, "terrify, shake, or excite. " Pound translates as, "tim~ ing the thunder. "
46. Constance: Constantin the Fair, a monk of post-Roman Briton, brother of Aldroein of Britanny, who sends him to . . . the Britons who have asked for help. He is per- suaded to "shed his hood" and become their king. Unable to govern, he is the victim of a plot and is beheaded. Vortiger, the crafty
earl behind all these doings, becomes king. But he has trouble and loses his throne; he then asks for help from the Angles and Saxons, who thus corne into the land.
47. Merlin's fader: Vortiger once fled to Wales, where he built a castle that kept fall- ing down. A wise man told him that the clay needed "the blood of a man born of no father. " He heard that the boy Merlin was "being taunted for having no father and a whore for a mother. " Merlin's mother, who had become a nun, was sent for.
48. Lord, thaet scop the dayes lihte: OE, "Lord, who created the daylight. " Slight modernization of a line from Aurelie's prayer before battle. Aurelie, the son of Constantin, was chosen by the people to be king after his father died [CB-R, ZBC,
190-194J.
49. a spirit bright: Merlin's mother ex- plained that she was the daughter of a king and that one night a fair figure "all clothed in gold" glided into her bedchamber and embraced her and afterwards she found she was with child [DC, Pai, 3-2, 242J.
50. "By the white dragon . . . ": Merlin is sent for and explains that the castle keeps falling down because two dragons, red and white, fight at midnight under a stone beneath the castle. Merlin foretells that Aurelie will become king but will be poisoned.
51. Aurelie: Just before he dies from the poison, he makes a request. As translated by CB-R: "And lay me at the east end, in Stonehenge, where lie much of my kin. " His brother, Uther, becomes king, and when he dies says (according to Pound), "Lay me by Aurelie. " Uther is buried there.
52. And yilden . . . : OE, "And he began to rear gilds. " An act attributed in Layamon to King Athelstan (924-940), who had peace guilds with judicial functions set up by the bishops and reeves of London. Not to be confused with later craft or trade guilds.
54. Sibile a boken lsette: OE, "Sibyl set in a book. " From the story of one Cadwalader, who had a vision. After his death, his wise men checked out his prophecy to see if it accorded with that of Merlin and Sibyl. They reported it did, saying, "Merlin said it in words, and Sibyl the wise set it in a book" [97: 160J.
55. kikery: An opprobrious epithet Pound applies to usurers and financiers-who foster wars and depressions to make money-as well as to intellectuals in universities and the publishing world who appear to support them. Once, when asked how he could say he was not anti-Semitic when he used words such as "kike" and "kikery," he replied with some feeling: "There are Jew kikes and non- Jew kikes. " Pound marked the passage in italics to be set in a somewhat smaller type: "carattere un poco piu piccolo" [MB, Trace, 296J. The passage is intended to rhyme with the 5 lines in The Divine Comedy where, at the summit of Paradise, St. Peter castigates "him who usurps my seat of earth" and says, "he has made of my burial place a cloaca of blood and filth" [Par. XXVII, 22-26J. Because there was no clear thought about the way divinity manifested in the world, such people as those listed allowed the incit- ing causes of WWI to operate in 1913. Marx and Fre"':ld need no glosses, but lest the reader jump to the wrong conclusion, see the
index to SP, where Marx is listed 18 times and Freud 4. If one reads all Pound has said about Freud over the years, . one concludes he has less quarrel with Freud than he does with Freudians, a rhyme with Christ and Christians or the Buddha and Buddhists [99:25J. Pound said: "People treated by Freudians, etc. get steadily more and more interested in their own footling interiors, and . . . less interesting to anyone else. . , . They are at the nadir from Spinoza's sane and hearty: the more perfect a thing is the
more it acts and the less it suffers" [NEW May 2, 1935J. N. B. : The functional words in the 8 lines are, "no clear thought about holiness. " A parallel to the unhappy custom of using racial epithets is found in Joyce's Leopold Bloom who, enraged by a money-
lender named Dodd, said: "Now he's what you call a dirty jew. " Dodd in fact wasn't a Jew and Bloom was [HKJ.
56. Maritain: Jacques M. , 1882? 1973, French philosopher who started out to be a scientist but changed to philosophy and wrote extensively on Thomism.
57. Hutchins: Robert Maynard H. , 1899- , American educator famous for estab- lishing novel degree requirements while chancellor of the University of Chicago. He championed intellectual attainment but is no
hero to Pound.
58. Benda: Julien B. , 1867-1956. French critic, novelist, and intellectual whose work Pound admired (fortunately Benda was a Jew). His La trahison des clercs [The treason of the intellectualsJ (I927) contends that it is moral treason to deny intellectual freedom to political candidates. A rhyme with Mus- solini's asserted credo: "freedom is not only a right, it is a duty. "
53. light . . . Ra-Set . . . aboveJ .
crystal:
[Cf. 36
"ecco il te": I, "here is the tea [74:488J.
61. "Dodici Apostoli": I, "The Twelve Apostles. " The name of one of the best restaurants in Verona.
62. (trattoria): "I, "restaurant. "
63. putana: I; "prostitute. " The affable "putana" at Verona wanted to change the spellings in Pound's edition of Cava1canti's poems from the "Capitolare" ms.
64. Come . . . piccolo: I, '''How he
bles the martyr! ' said the little boy. " Prob. young Veronese boy thought Pound or someone resembled the martyr John the Baptist.
65. Battista martire: I, "Baptist, the mar? tyr," applied to Battisti in 72 below.
66. Ortolo: I, "garden" [4:45].
67. San Zeno: I, "St. Zeno. " The patron saint of Verona, he is buried at the finest
59.
en caIcaire . . . : F, "in limestone, forty-
60.
four steps. " Reference to steps at the arena in Verona [4:48].
resem-
? 552
91/614-615
91/615-616
553
Rornanesque church of northern Italy, San Pietro.
68. San Pietro: I, "St. Peter. " The castle and church of S1. Peter offer a magnificent panoramic view of Verona.
69. "quel naszhong": I, "what a nation. " Remark in accent by French child upon see- ing doors of San Zeno.
70. Ed: Edgar Williams, brother of the poet William Carlos Williams. In 1911 he was in Italy on an architectual scholarship and helped Pound find a column inscribed by the sculptor, "Adarninus. " E. W. asked "how the hell we could have any architecture when we ordered our columns by the gross" [HK, Era, 323].
71. Nanni: A lawyer and journalist at Forli and one of the few socialists with whom Mussolini had maintained friendly relations since his youth. Torquato N. wrote the first full biographical sketch of Mussolini in 1924.
But in 1934 Mussolini let his old friend be sent to prison for not bending to Fascist orthodoxy. Later he was restored to favor and became a member of Mussolini's in-group during the Sala Republic; he was among those who were captured and shot with him and his mistress, Clara Petacci, at Como in 1945.
72. Battista: Cesare Battisti. He ran a Social- ist paper at Trent before WWI. When Mussol? ini was in Trent in 1909, he occasionally collaborated with Battisti by writing for the paper. Battisti was destined to die on the Austrian gallows for collaborating with the Italians in WWI. His fate influenced Mussol? ini to leave Avanti! , the official Socialist paper, and establish (Nov. 15, 1914) an "Intervention" paper: Il Popolo d'Italia: The Interventionists were a pro-Allied group in WWI.
73. Salo: The Sala Republic in Northern Italy, which Mussloini took over in 1943 as a subservient of Hitler after the fall of the Fascist government at Rome and his dis- missal by King Emanuele III.
74. (Arpinati): Leandro A. One of the
group captured with Mussolini during the attempted fiight from Salo. Pound presumes he died in the manner described, but the historical data are ambiguous.
75. Farinata: F. degli Uberti [78:79]. "Pudg'd" prob. describes a statue.
76. Can Grande's grin: Can Grande della Scala, the great friend and patron of Dante. A statue of Can Grande in the square at Verona shows him with a very toothfu1 smile. A photograph can be found in Ivancich, Ezra Pound in Italy.
82. quidity: The essential nature or "what- ness" of a thing which flows in "the pro- cess" from its virtu. Dante wrote: "Faith is the substance of things hoped for, / and the proof of things not apparent, / and this I take to be its quiddity" [Par. XXIV, 64-65; JW translation: Pai, 2-2, 190] . Pound adap- ted the Italian quiditate [93/631; 103:7J.
83. fire . . . crystal . . . light: [Cf. 2, 3, 15 above J .
4 Rhea: The female Titan, wife of Saturn (Cronos) and mother of the chief gods, in- cluding Ceres (Demeter). Her Latin name was Cybele. In works of art she is often depicted seated on a throne with lions at her side or sometimes riding in a chariot drawn by lions.
85. Musonius: A philosopher colleague of Apollonius of Tyana [94:42] who was forced by Nero to dig the Corinth Canal as a slave laborer-but he did it in defiance of tyranny. Hence, the "tough guy" epithet and the "honor" by Pound [94: 114].
86. Ideogram: Tan [M6037] , "dawn. "
87. The arcanum: The mysterium, or final secrets, unrevealed in the rites of Eleusis except symbolically. Also, the final or secret aspirations of esoteric alchemy. Pound wrote: "The mysteries are not revealed, and no guide book to them has been or will be written" [L, 327].
88. Kc,811OV 8V7C,-rrW H, "Daughter of Cadmus. "
89. parapernalia: Paraphernalia. Leucothea, daughter of Cadmus, in the form of a seabird flew over the foundering raft of Odysseus and told him to get rid of the clothes Calyp? so had given him rOd. V, 331-357; 95:32]
90. Tlemousune: H, "Misery to be suffered with patience. "
91. Domitian: Titus Flavius D. , 51-96, Ro- man emperor. D. was a strict moralist (for others, but a man of unrestrained sensuality himself) who executed many people for lit- tle reason and many for plotting against his tyranny. His wife finally joined others in a
plot that resulted in his murder. At least twice he banished all philosophers from Rome, once while Apollonius, the traveling man of wisdom, was there. Apollonius, re- fusing to leave, was arrested and taken to court [Apol/onius, Bk. VIII, chap. 3; Neault, Poi, 4? 1,4].
92. "Is this a bath-house? ": As Apollonius waited before court, a clerk said to him, "Man of Tyana, you must enter the court with nothing on you," meaning he should have no papers or books. A. 's response, taking the remark to mean "no clothes," resulted in a witty reply which Pound gives as, "Is this a bathouse. . . or a Court House? " [ibid. J.
93. o,AAOT? . . . 8LWK? LV: H, "Has the east wind abandoned him for the west wind to play with? " rOd. V, 332]. Concerns the havoc the winds of Poseidon played with Odysseus's raft. Apollonius traveled much in the eastern countries and was always wel- comed by kings and wise men and treated with great honor and respect. But in the west (Rome) his life was in danger.
94. Apollonius: Like many wise men of old, A. was supposedly able to converse with animals. In Egypt a "whining and fawning" lion approached him as he was sitting in the temple. He explained to bystanders: "This lion is begging me to make you understand that a human soul is within him" [Pai,4-1, 27; 94:42J.
95. charitas insuperabilis: L, "love invinci- ble. " From Richard of St. Victor's Tractatus de Gradibus Charitatis [Treatise on the steps of love].
96. Heydon: [87:82]. John Heydon; secre- tary of nature, author of The Holy Guide, where in Bk. I, Ch. II, we read: " . . . but if God would give you leave and power to ascend to those high places I meane to these heavenly thoughts and studies . . . " [po 26J. And later: "for God, when he cast his mind upon the building of the world, he went to make a beautiful and goodly work, meet for the Power, Wisdome and Pleasure of such a Builder, and therefore a stirring and change-
77. T ommy Cochran: A boyhood
who lived next door to Pound in Jenkin- town. A photograph of the two sitting together can be seen in Stock's Ezra Pound's
Pennsylvania [po 24]. Can Grande's "grin" must have evoked a memory of a similar grin sported by Tommy Cochran when they were young. The same line appears in the Pisan Cantos, also associated with Farinata
[78:79].
78. Plenod' alegreca: S, "full of mirth. " the spelling may indicate a connotation of "in the Greek style. "
79. Rapunzel: OG, "lamb's lettuce. " The name of various plants used as salad greens. Also, the comic name of a Grimm's fairy tale. In "A Study in French Poets" [Instiga- tions, 62J, Pound described a Poem by Mon~as: "Mo[(~as was born in 1856, the year after Verhaeren, but his Madeline-aux- serpents might be William Morris on Rapunzel. "
80. Adah Lee, Ida: In 1906 Pound met Miss Adah Lee and Miss Ida Lee Mapel, ladies from Virginia, with whom he maintained a friendship for over 40 years. In 1919 he and Dorothy stayed at Ida Lee's Paris flat. Dur- ing the St. Elizabeths years, the Mapel ladies both lived in Washington and visited Pound regularly. Dorothy later described them to Stock as "two old ladies not used to having friends in gaol. " She said that "they were
invaluable" [NS, Life, 540].
81. Merlin's moder: [Cf. 49 above].
friend
,
,~
? 554
91/616
91/617,92/618
555
able work, because there might be no cun? ning shown, no delight taken in one ever like or still thing; but light fighting for speed, is ever best in such a ground: let us away, and follow" [po 28]. Heydon recommends that on should rule the desire for "honour and pleasure" and seek rather "Wisdorne and Vertue" [pp. 31. 32] and adds: "let us know
. first, that the minde of man being come from that high City of Heaven, desireth of her self to live still that heavenly life" [pp. 33? 34]. A few pages later Heydon writes: "the whole Creation is concerned in this Number four" [po 39]. In Bk. III Heydon writes: "And to say there is no such things as Pulchritude, and some say, there is no way to felicity" [po 87]. Speaking of the vision of Euterpe, Heydon writes [Bk. VI] : "her hour to Translation was come, and tak- ing as I thought our last leave, she past before my eyes into the Aether ofNature"
[WB in EH,Approaches, 313? 316].
97. Pythagoras: [Cf. II above]. Apollonius claimed himself to be a spiritual descendant of Pythagoras. Heydon claimed that both Pythagoras and Apollonius were able to be in two different places at the same time: hence, Apollonius "who was with Pytha? goras at Taormina" while being elsewhere with others [Neault,Pai, 4? 1,17].
98. Taormina: A town that flourished as a Greek colony. In E Sicily at the foot of Mt. Etna above the Ionian Sea. Apollonius taught philosophy there.
99. Porphyrius: Prophyry, A. D. 232/3? 305, a scholar-philosopher who studied under Longinus at Athens and became a devoted personal disciple of Plotinus at Rome. He edited the Enneads after 300. A prolific writer who adopted many Neoplatonic concepts.
100. NUXTo, . . . f}11? P<Y. : H, "But of the Night both day and skie were born" [Hesiod, Theogony II, 13 (Loeb)]. EP quotes the line from Heydon [Bk. II, Chapt. III, p. 13]. who attributes it to Plato.
101. Z'lVOS rrvpos: H, "Wheat of Zeus. "
Pound added these words to Hesiod to get a third element "born of night" [NeaUlt, Pai, 4? 1, IS].
102. "my bikini . . . ": Pound paraphrases the words of Leucothea rOd. V, 339? 350] when she told Odysseus to get rid of his water-logged clothes and raft and rely on her magic cloth: "kredemnon" [96: I].
103. celandine: Heydon believed that some beasts "have knowledge in the Virtue of Plants," so they will go to the right place for medicinal help [92:3].
104. before my eyes: [Cf. 96 above].
105. The water?
