After
Clytemnestra
murdered her husband, Electra joined with her brother Orestes to murder her mother.
A-Companion-to-the-Cantos-of-Ezra-Pound-II
.
.
procedit: L, "The human soul is not love, but love flows from it, and it delights not in the idea of itself but in the love which flows from it" [Richard of St.
Victor, Quomodo Spiritus sanctus est amor Patris et Filii (Migne, 1012B); cf.
DJN, Pai, 3-2, 222J.
2. "From the colour . . . : Reference to the doctrine of signatures of John Heydon [87:82J. Just as the color, shape, and size of item and leaf are aspects of the "signature" of a particular plant, so "love" or the "abili- ty to love," is the Signature of the "soul" or the mark of the divine in man [WB,
Approaches, 311 J .
3. Ygdrasail: [YggdrasiIJ: The great ash tree
in Eddic mythology [85:6J. Its roots reached to the center of the earth, and its
branches supported the Heavens. It con- tained and expressed the universe.
4. Bauds: From a myth of gods disguised to test the charity of people by seeking food and drink. They were refused by all except Baucis and her husband Philemon, who gave them what they had. The gods flooded other houses away but transformed their cottage into a temple and granted Bauds and Phile- mon their wish to serve as keepers. Years later they were metamorphosed into two trees that grew twined together. A rhyme with the pines at Takasago and ]se [4:22, 23J.
5. Castalia: A fountain dedicated to Apollo on Mr. Parnassus at Delphi. Pilgrims to the oracle purified themselves there. The various temples and shrines were built in niches cut
501;cf. 1 aboveJ.
17. Vae qui cogitatis inutile: L, "Woe to you who think without purpose. " Pound correlates the three states, Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, with Richard's three levels of intellectual activity. Cogitatio, in which "the mind flits aimlessly about the object" [GK, 77J, is "a haphazard improvident looking about" [Pai, 2-3, 500-501 J. "Woe" suggests the Hell-direction of those who do purpose? less thinking. Meditatio correlates with Pur- gatory and comtemplatio with mystic and visionary aspirations for Paradise.
18. quam in nobis . . . imago: L, part of a sentence that correctly reads: "Bona volun- tatis per quam in nobis divinae similitudinis imago reperietur," Pound translated it as: "The good things of will, through which an image of the divine likeness will be found in us" [SP,71J.
19. Randolph: John R. of Roanoke, Va. , who "loved much," as the Greek in the next line reads [87: 10J. His love of mankind led him to free his slaves by wills and several codicils between 1819 and 1831: "I give my slaves their freedom to which my conscience tells me they are justly entitled" [Bruce, Randolph, Vol. II, 49J.
20. inOI7f1)UEV 1[0/1. 6: H, "she loved much. " From the New Testament story of Jesus being tested by Simon the Pharisee [Luke 7. 47J. While Jesus "sat at meat" at Simon's house, a woman who was a sinner "brought an alabaster box of ointment" and "began to wash his feet with tears, and did wipe them with the hairs of her head . . . and annointed them with the ointment. " Simon thought
?
14. oEtva: inspiring. "
H, "terrifying" or
"fear-
is, there is the eye" [Richard of St. Victor, Benjamin Minor, 13; DG, Pai, 2-3, 500; DJN,Pai, 2-3,
? 542
90/606
90/606-607
543
that if Jesus were really a prophet he would have known what the woman was and would not have allowed her to come near him. Knowing what was in Simon's heart, Jesus told the story of the creditor who had two debtors, one who owed much and one who owed little. The creditor, finding neither had money to pay, forgave them both. Jesus asked, "Tell me therefore, which of them will love him most? " Simon gave the right answer and Jesus then compared his acbons with those of the sinner and concluded, "wherefore I say unto thee, her sins, which are many, are forgiven; for she loved much; but to whom little is forgiven, the same loveth little. " The Greek phrase is thematic
to this central Paradiso canto, the first half of which concerns the various ways divinity manifests itself through love: the woman's love is "a good thing of will" flowing from the soul, as was the love of Randolph in his act of manumission.
21. liberavit masnatos: L, "he freed his slaves," An act of humanitarian compassion which rhymes with that of Cunizza da Ro- mano, who freed her slaves. The Latin phrase is also applied to her [6:34; 29: 14].
22. Castalia: [cf. 5 above]_
23_ Evita: Prob. Eva Peron, wife of Juan P. then dictator of Argentina; but poss. Eva Braun, the mistress, consort, or companion of Hitler. While Pound was writing parts of this canto, Llfe magazine carried a picture of a breadline in Washington just at the time the Marshall Plan, with billions of dollars for Europe, was being announced. Eva Peron's response was to organize "a drive in Argen- tina for the poor gringos of the North" [EM, Difficult, 306]. The story, promoted by Lampman [97:60], caused Pound great amusement.
24. semina motuum: L, "seeds of motion. " This Latin tag is? used as a musical figure to express one of the most important religious concepts of The Cantos,-and one of the dimensions in which the mysterium is per- ceived similarly in both the East and the West. The good things of will (directio vol-
untatis) [77:57] flow from the soul as per- ceived by Richard of St. Victor, a Christian mystic, but Pound found a similar idea ex- pressed by Confucius in the Analects. A few fragments of Tsze Tze's Third Thesis climax: "He who possesses this sincerity does not lull himself to somnolence. . . . Fulfilling himself he attains full manhood. . . . The in? born nature begets this activity naturally, this looking straight into oneself and thence acting. These two activities constitute the process which unites outer and inner . . . and thence constitutes a harmony with the sea- sons of earth and heaven. . . . Hence the highest grade of this clarifying activity has no limit, it neither stops nor stays. Not coming to a stop, it endures; continuing du- rable, it arrives at the minima [the seeds whence movement springs]. From these hid- den seeds it moves forth slowly but goes far and with slow but continuing motion it penetrates the solid, penetrating the solid it comes to shine forth on high" [EP, CON, 179-181; see also CON, 59 and 89:252].
25_ Sibylla: The all-seeing priestess of the oracle at Delphi. For a number of years Pound tried to get "The Sibyl" by Thaddeus Zielinski translated into English. 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. "From the colour . . . : Reference to the doctrine of signatures of John Heydon [87:82J. Just as the color, shape, and size of item and leaf are aspects of the "signature" of a particular plant, so "love" or the "abili- ty to love," is the Signature of the "soul" or the mark of the divine in man [WB,
Approaches, 311 J .
3. Ygdrasail: [YggdrasiIJ: The great ash tree
in Eddic mythology [85:6J. Its roots reached to the center of the earth, and its
branches supported the Heavens. It con- tained and expressed the universe.
4. Bauds: From a myth of gods disguised to test the charity of people by seeking food and drink. They were refused by all except Baucis and her husband Philemon, who gave them what they had. The gods flooded other houses away but transformed their cottage into a temple and granted Bauds and Phile- mon their wish to serve as keepers. Years later they were metamorphosed into two trees that grew twined together. A rhyme with the pines at Takasago and ]se [4:22, 23J.
5. Castalia: A fountain dedicated to Apollo on Mr. Parnassus at Delphi. Pilgrims to the oracle purified themselves there. The various temples and shrines were built in niches cut
501;cf. 1 aboveJ.
17. Vae qui cogitatis inutile: L, "Woe to you who think without purpose. " Pound correlates the three states, Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, with Richard's three levels of intellectual activity. Cogitatio, in which "the mind flits aimlessly about the object" [GK, 77J, is "a haphazard improvident looking about" [Pai, 2-3, 500-501 J. "Woe" suggests the Hell-direction of those who do purpose? less thinking. Meditatio correlates with Pur- gatory and comtemplatio with mystic and visionary aspirations for Paradise.
18. quam in nobis . . . imago: L, part of a sentence that correctly reads: "Bona volun- tatis per quam in nobis divinae similitudinis imago reperietur," Pound translated it as: "The good things of will, through which an image of the divine likeness will be found in us" [SP,71J.
19. Randolph: John R. of Roanoke, Va. , who "loved much," as the Greek in the next line reads [87: 10J. His love of mankind led him to free his slaves by wills and several codicils between 1819 and 1831: "I give my slaves their freedom to which my conscience tells me they are justly entitled" [Bruce, Randolph, Vol. II, 49J.
20. inOI7f1)UEV 1[0/1. 6: H, "she loved much. " From the New Testament story of Jesus being tested by Simon the Pharisee [Luke 7. 47J. While Jesus "sat at meat" at Simon's house, a woman who was a sinner "brought an alabaster box of ointment" and "began to wash his feet with tears, and did wipe them with the hairs of her head . . . and annointed them with the ointment. " Simon thought
?
14. oEtva: inspiring. "
H, "terrifying" or
"fear-
is, there is the eye" [Richard of St. Victor, Benjamin Minor, 13; DG, Pai, 2-3, 500; DJN,Pai, 2-3,
? 542
90/606
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543
that if Jesus were really a prophet he would have known what the woman was and would not have allowed her to come near him. Knowing what was in Simon's heart, Jesus told the story of the creditor who had two debtors, one who owed much and one who owed little. The creditor, finding neither had money to pay, forgave them both. Jesus asked, "Tell me therefore, which of them will love him most? " Simon gave the right answer and Jesus then compared his acbons with those of the sinner and concluded, "wherefore I say unto thee, her sins, which are many, are forgiven; for she loved much; but to whom little is forgiven, the same loveth little. " The Greek phrase is thematic
to this central Paradiso canto, the first half of which concerns the various ways divinity manifests itself through love: the woman's love is "a good thing of will" flowing from the soul, as was the love of Randolph in his act of manumission.
21. liberavit masnatos: L, "he freed his slaves," An act of humanitarian compassion which rhymes with that of Cunizza da Ro- mano, who freed her slaves. The Latin phrase is also applied to her [6:34; 29: 14].
22. Castalia: [cf. 5 above]_
23_ Evita: Prob. Eva Peron, wife of Juan P. then dictator of Argentina; but poss. Eva Braun, the mistress, consort, or companion of Hitler. While Pound was writing parts of this canto, Llfe magazine carried a picture of a breadline in Washington just at the time the Marshall Plan, with billions of dollars for Europe, was being announced. Eva Peron's response was to organize "a drive in Argen- tina for the poor gringos of the North" [EM, Difficult, 306]. The story, promoted by Lampman [97:60], caused Pound great amusement.
24. semina motuum: L, "seeds of motion. " This Latin tag is? used as a musical figure to express one of the most important religious concepts of The Cantos,-and one of the dimensions in which the mysterium is per- ceived similarly in both the East and the West. The good things of will (directio vol-
untatis) [77:57] flow from the soul as per- ceived by Richard of St. Victor, a Christian mystic, but Pound found a similar idea ex- pressed by Confucius in the Analects. A few fragments of Tsze Tze's Third Thesis climax: "He who possesses this sincerity does not lull himself to somnolence. . . . Fulfilling himself he attains full manhood. . . . The in? born nature begets this activity naturally, this looking straight into oneself and thence acting. These two activities constitute the process which unites outer and inner . . . and thence constitutes a harmony with the sea- sons of earth and heaven. . . . Hence the highest grade of this clarifying activity has no limit, it neither stops nor stays. Not coming to a stop, it endures; continuing du- rable, it arrives at the minima [the seeds whence movement springs]. From these hid- den seeds it moves forth slowly but goes far and with slow but continuing motion it penetrates the solid, penetrating the solid it comes to shine forth on high" [EP, CON, 179-181; see also CON, 59 and 89:252].
25_ Sibylla: The all-seeing priestess of the oracle at Delphi. For a number of years Pound tried to get "The Sibyl" by Thaddeus Zielinski translated into English. 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,
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free-flowing waters suggest the way thought
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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].
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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~
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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
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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.
