of
Catholic
Biography), ca.
A-Companion-to-the-Cantos-of-Ezra-Pound-II
"Iapo .
.
.
": On returning to his home after the Mussolini government fell, Admiral Uberti wrote a letter to his son Riccardo, who said: "[I] received a letter from my father telling me that, arriving in Vincenza, he had seen, .
.
an arch with the old crest of the Uberti .
.
.
[and] learned that it was the tomb of Lapo degli Uberti, who had died a Ghibelline exile in Vincenza six hundred years before.
My father added in his letter, 'who knows if I too will not die a Ghibelline exile in Vencenza' for some vento di siepeJ The latter is an Italian idiom, literally 'wind coming from the hedge,' which means, of course, a shot from an ambush.
I wrote to Pound about it after the war, when he was writing Section: Rock?
Drill" [Italian Quar?
terly, Spring 1973, 104].
29. KM,! wv eVYCx7f/P: H, "Daughter of Cadmus" [91:88].
30. per diafana: I, "through diaphanous? ness" [36:4].
31. AevKoc;: H, "white,"
32, AevKofJoe: H, Pound's transcription of
Leucothea, the white goddess Ino, daughter of Cadmus, who was metamorphosed into a sea? bird [91 :89].
33. Nicoletti: Giachino N. , the prefect at Gardone [74:52].
34. Ramperti: Marco R. , an Italian jour? nalist.
35. Desmond Fitzgerald: [92:7].
36. the crystal wave, , . solid: A recurrent paradisal motif [25/119; 40/201; 76/457; 76/459; 94: 18].
37. Ideograms: [93:125? 127].
38. YAO's worry: [53:14]. Legend says that he passed over his own son and named Shun as his sllccessor, knowing that to carry on the middle kingdom would need the one man. Ideograms: "One man" [94:126].
Trace, 327? 329.
1. LOVE
ing in the world [90: I]. Perhaps the "5000 years" goes back to Antef [93 :4]. Pound's conviction that the best document about the Creation is the microcosm and the macro- cosm, and that science is the best instrument to give us knowledge about the intelligence of divinity at work, is echoed here. The importance of the macrocosm in this spec- trum is indicated by the comets and great stars, a rhyme with later references to the constellation Berenice [97: 170; 102:42] and with many earlier references to the SUD and stars [5:5; 37:72; 37/237; 74/425, etc. ; ABCR, 17? 27; "Hudson: Poet Strayed into Science," SP, 429-432].
place: The
divine
spirit
flow?
"[God is]
2. "Consonantium demonstratrix": L, "demonstration of harmonies. " Miscopied from Musica Theorica, a section of the Pa- Irologiae Latina [Migne, 90, 91IC].
3. e? ciT': H, "said. "
4. Beda: L, "Bede. " The Venerable Bede.
5. Deus . . . mundi: L, "God is the spirit of the world" [ibid. , 987C].
in the marriage bed"
[ibid. ,1I90c].
Glossary
6.
best and everlasting being" [ibid. , 987D].
7. Tempus est ubique: L, "time is every- where" [ibid. , 1050C].
8. non motus: L, "[time is] not motion" [ibid. , 1050B].
9. in vesperibus orbis: L, for in vepribus orbis, "sphere among thornbushes" [ibid. , 1186B]. Pound prob. thought his note can? cerned Hesperus, Vesper, or Venus as the evening star, which would climax the passage by a return to the opening theme of love
[JE,Pai,4. 1,182].
10. Expergesci thalmis: L, " t o be awakened
animal
sempiternum: L,
11. gravat serpella nimbus: L, "mist weighs down the wild thyme" [ibid. , 1192A].
12. Delcroix: [88:46]. Because Carlo D. was a lyric poet and wrote a peceptive study of Mussolini entitled A Man and the People (1924), Pound thought he had a perception
r
? ? 588
95/645
95/645-647
589
39. Windsor: King Edward VIII. According to one account, he was instrumental in keep~ ing WWII from starting [86:47; 89/601; 109:40; HK, Pai, 2-1, 41J. An example of what one man can do at a critical moment.
40. Saint Bertrand: [48:45J. A village that evokes for Pound the destruction of the light of Provence during the Albigensian Crusade
[SR, 90J.
41. Montrejeau: Town in S France, in the department of Haute~GaronneJ 011 the Ga- ronne River some 27 miles SE of Tarbes. 1t marked the northern boundary of the Albi? gensian slaughter.
42. Elder Lightfoot: An elderly black gen- tleman at S1. Elizabeths Pound was fond of. He entertained all with his cogent wit and pithy remarks, some of which concerned Darwin's ideas of natural selection. Light- foot's observation was that evolution ap- peared to be going backwards [DGJ.
43. design: Intelligent design apparent in the universe is one of the central compo- nents in Pound's convictions that "the gods exist" [SP, 49-52J. Here used ironically about Elder's perceptions.
44. Miss Ida: Ida Mapel and her sister Adah, whom Pound met first in Spain in 1906; in 1919 he and Dorothy stayed at their Paris apartments. rhe two sisters visited him in jail in 1946 and at S1. Elizabeths quite often
[91:801?
45. "de Nantes . . . prisonnier": F, "There is a prisoner from Nantes. " Line from a 17th- century song Pound found in a collection made by Yvette Guilbert and translated in 1912 [Kearns, Guide, 219J.
50. the jap girl: Prob. someone Pound heard going ecstatic over Rembrandt.
51. the russe: F, "in the Russian manner"; used here to describe a particular person, possibly the wife of Colonel Goleyevsky [74: 172J, who might have talked enthusias? tically about Turgenev's novel Smoke, a fa? vorite with the French and with Pound: "Turgenev in 'Fumee' and in the 'Nichee de Gentilshommes' digging out the stupidity of the Russian" [SP, 189J.
52. Turgenev: [80:29J. Ivan T. , 1818-1883, a Russian novelist who was one of the most famous and effective of "the Westernizers," as opposed to "the Slavophiles. " In his rna? ture years, he spent over half of his time in western Europe, most of it in Paris where he was a close friend of Flauber1. In his early London years Pound thought highly of him: "Galdos, Flaubert, Turgenev, see them all in a death struggle with provincial stupidity"
[L, 25; cf. also. SP, 414J. The Slavophiles would represent provincial stupidity.
53. Uncle William . . . Memory": W. B. Yeats [41:37; 77:163J. The ladies Pound recalls here from those pre-WWI years were doubtless so-called by Yeats (perhaps during his visits to Rapallo in the late 20s), who quoted a line from Blake: "The Muses are daughters of Memory" [74:439J.
54. Pirandello: Luigi P. , 1867-1936, one of the greatest of all Italian dramatists and nov- elists. One of his main literary concerns was the nature of reality and the impossiblity of catching it or fixing it. It must remain in memory, as in Six Characters in Search ofan
Author (1921) [SP, 434? 435J.
55. Pulitzer: Pound's outrage grew more in- tense because literary prizes such as the Pu- litzer went to hacks and seldom to the real creative people who were "making it new. "
56. historic blackout: A cue to Pound's in- creasing paranoia: he came to believe that, as in the past [cf. 74 below], a group of inter- national conspirators were deliberately'keep- ing the right information from the people and part of their object now was to destroy the Constitution as conceived by Adams and
Jefferson. Pound wrote, thinking of Upward [74:275J and Bunting [74:153], "All the resisters blacked out" [Knox,Pai, 3-1, 82J.
57. Leucothae: [Cf. 32 aboveJ.
58. "My bikini. . . ": [91: 102J.
59. And if! see . . . thought: [92:30J.
64. Gardasee: With the beautiful blues of Lago di Garda [76:91J, who would want vacuity?
65. Mr Beddoes: Thomas Lovell B. , 1803- 1849, English poet often praised by Pound [see "Beddoes and Chronology," SP, 378- 383J, esp. for his "Death's Jest Book, or the Fool's Tragedy" (1825), where we read: "0 world, world! the gods and fairies left thee, for thou were too wise, and now, thou So- cratic star, thy demon, the Great Pan, Folly, is parting from thee" [ibid. , 381 J.
67. Responsus: L, "answer. " The "some- thing there" would not be a dead halt of the process as in stasis.
68. a hand . . . : The secret organized mon- eymen [cf. 55 aboveJ hold all the face cards: they make the organized cowards.
69. something decent: The divine spirit or the "intimate essence" is that unnamable something [94: 142J, as reflected in Richard of S1. Victor [SP, 71 J.
70. dicto millesimo: L, "at said date or time. "
71. St Hilary: Prob. S1. H. of Poiliers (8 saints named Hilary are listed in the Diet.
of Catholic Biography), ca. 315-ca. 367, bishop and church father who became the major voice in the 4th century against Arianism [96:28J, the most persistent heresy the church had to deal with for hundreds of years. His writings in defense of the dogma of the Trinity were informed, impassioned, and lyrical. Because of his beliefs he was exiled in 353 to Phrygia by Emperor Con- stantius II (who supported the Arians), not to be released until 361. His enemies called him "the sower of discord and the trouble? maker of the Orient" [New Catholic Ency- clopediaJ. The Church of St. Hilaire at Poi-
46. periplum: L [59: 10J.
. . .
40 years: In
47. Madrid
first met the Mapel sisters.
1906,
when he
48. Carriere show: [80:241 J. Prob. a refer? ence to a retrospective show of his works held either at the time of his death in 1906 or in 1946,40 years later.
49. "Bret": Prob. the Hemingway "lost gen? eration" heroine of The Sun Also Rises.
T
60. Elsa
Loringhoven, a post-WWI wild woman, who wrote for the Little Review. Dedicated to free love and free everything else, she once shocked W. C. Williams by telling him that what he ought to do to become great "was to contract syphilis from her and so free . . .
[hisJ mind for serious art. " Pound was sym- pathetic to her because she preached cosmo- politanism and antiprovincialism [Morse,
Pai, 10-3, 595-596J.
61. Dinklage: An author Pound remem- bered because of his dedication to the truth. In a letter to Reno Ddlin about journalistic "lies in 1914 war," he says: "Von Dinklage demurred at A. B. C. for first grade frog kids"
[RO,Pai, ]]? 2, 283J.
62. what's his name: Prob. Robert Cowart, a young sailor who got caught in the ropes of the U. S. Navy dirigible Akron and was swept into the air. Two others who were also caught fell to their deaths, but "Cowart wrapped himself securely in the mooring line and held on" [Morse, Pai, 10. 3, 597J.
63. Hindoos . . . vacuity: Pou? nd's not very sympathetic idea of the Hindu concept of nirvana; it's not the thing itself so much as its consequences Pound objects to. His asso- ciations inform the rest of this canto. The famous "We appear to have lost the radiant world" passage in "Cavalcanti" is followed by a description of two kinds of "the Hin- doo disease, fanaticisms and excess that pro- duce Savonarola, . . . [andJ asceticisms that produce fakirs . . . . Between those diseases, existed the Mediterranean sanity . . . that gave the churches like St Hilaire . . . the clear lines and proportions" [LE, 154J. And again: "Against these European Hindoos we find the 'medieval clean line'" [LE, 150J.
Kassandra:
Elsa von
Freytag?
66. Santayana:
Pound's idea of intelligence in the cherry stone which made it able to create the cher- ry tree [113:431, he replied, in effect, that Pound had something there-but it would be intelligence of "an unconscious sort" [NS, Life, 429J.
George S.
[80:49J. To
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?
590
95/647
96/651
591
tiers [45:16], built in his honor, has the clean lines and the economy of form [HK, Era, 327] of the oak leaf of John Heydon, "secretary of nature" [87:82]. Pound would applaud one of his central teachings: "the existence of God can be known by reason, but his nature is incomprehensible" [ibid]. One can deduce from this premise that the human race is safer if it celebrates mystery
as mystery, the arcanum as arcanum, than if it deduces, argumentatively, a lot of abstract dogma and starts burning and killing people in the name of such dogma. One of the reasons Pound praises the mysteries of Eleu- sis is that they maintained this distinction.
72. an oak-leaf: John Heydon said Hilary [92:40] looked at an oak leaf. A rhyme with "learn of the green world" and "the green casque has outdone your elegance" [81/521]: a central tenet of Pound's reli- gion. One must marvel at both the elegance and the absolute economy of forms created in nature. Any plant distributes its branches and spreads its leaves in a mathematically precise way to obtain the optimum amount
of sunlight. Since so precise a design implies a designer, Pound concurs with St. Hilary: "the existence of God can be known by reason" (109:49]. The point bears repeating as it is central to The Cantos. The "vine- leaf' evokes the god Dionysus, to discrimi-
nate him from the martyr Dionisis (hence the repetition of the line), but also because he was central to the Eleusinian mysteries.
73. St Denys: The Church of St. Denis, built in the 12th century on the spot in Montmartre where two missionaries, Dionisis and Eleuthedo, were martyred by beheading in 273 [Historia Francorum, I, 31; CB. R, ZBC,40].
74. Calvin: [14:16; 62:15]. His "logically developed" and fundamentalist belief that the Bible is the sole source of divine wisdom led to the burning of heretics, such as Mi- chael Servetus in 1533. The point seems to be that Calvin did not succeed in destroying the names of the earlier martyrs by a black- out [89:87; cf. 56 above], because the flight of the Huguenots at the battle of St. Denis on Nov. 16, 1567 memorialized them
[CB-R, ibid].
75. the wave . . . sea-god: The 10? line pas- sage invokes again the Homeric scene where the raft of Odysseus is destroyed by the storm created by Poseidon and he is saved by Ino, daughter of Cadmus, who had been turned into Leucothea. She took pity on him with her kredemmon [ad. v, 325-376], which Pound called a "bikini" [cf. 91: 102].
76. VOUTOV ? ? ? ? a:i17Kwv: H, "to reach the land of the Phaeacians" [ibid. , 344-345] .
Background
Max Gallo, Mussolini's Italy, trans. Charles Markmann, Macmillan,
1973; J. B. Bury, History o f the Later Roman Empire, II, London, 1923 [Later R. E. ]; History of the Langobards by Paul the Deacon, trans. William Dudley Foulke, Longmans, Green & Co. , New Y ork, 1906 [Foulke, History] ; Constance Head, Justinian I I of Byzantium, Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1972 [Head, J. II]; John W. Barker, Justinian and The Later Roman Empire, Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1966; Anthony Birley, Septimius Severus, Doubleday, 1972; Luigi Villari, The Liberation of Italy, C. C. Nelson, Wisconsin, 1959.
Exegeses
EP, SP, 231,450; GK, 209; LE, 250; WB, in EH, Approaches, 312; Akiko Miyake, Pai, 7-1 & 2, 110; JW,Pai, 2? 2, 176; EH, Pai, 2? 3, 498; JW, Later, 102-132; Pearlman, Pai, 1-2, 163; Flory, Pai, 4? 2 & 3, 325; CFT, Pai, 2? 2, 223-242; Leo the Wise, Pai, 2-2, 245? 311; MB, Trace, 304; DD, Sculptor, 239-240; CB? R, ZBC, 136, 146, 151,258.
[As Cunizza says (Par. IX, 61-62): "Above are mirrors-you call them Thrones-by which the light of God as judge is reflected upon us. " The? source of divine wisdom is given as "pen yeh" at 94/640, followed by the comment, "That is of thrones, and above them: Justice. " Said Pound: "Thrones concerns the states of mind of people responsible for something more than their personal conduct" (Don Hall, Paris Review, no. 28, 1962, p. 49)].
Glossary
CANTO XCVI
Sources
J. P. Migne, Patrologiae Cursus Completus, vol. 95, 1851: this volume contains The Complete Works of the Venerable Bede, and Paul the Deacon's History o f the Langobards [Migne, column no. ]; Alexander Del Mar, History ofMonetary Systems, Chicago, 1896 [HMS]; The Book o f the Eparch o f Leo The Wise, trans. into modern Greek and Latin with a French translation by Professor Jules Nicole and published as Le Livre du Prefet, Geneva, 1893 [EP. B] ; Cicero, De Officiis, 2; Catullus, Carmen,
93; Dante, Pur. I; Homer, ad. V, XIII.
5. ROMA . . . : L, formerly. . . . "
"Rome, which
1
l
I. Kpf/oE/1vov:
Leucothea [95 :32, 75] threw to the drown? ing Odysseus to save him [ad. V, 351]: "So saying the goddess gave him the veil, and herself plunged again into the surging deep, like a sea? mew; and the dark wave hid her. "
2. Aestheticisme . . . : F, "Aestheticism as church politics. "
3. hearth . . . diafana: -Thrones opens with a religious rite that is more than aesthetic. As indicated below, the name Tuscany (1, Toscana) derives from the Latin thus, thuris ("frankincense," "olibanum") and links the opening to the rhymes with Dionysus [2:20] at the end of Canto 95. The aromatic gum frankincense (pure incense) seems to derive
from a variety of African cedar or juniper. The rite may be conceived as one of purifica- tion and linked forward to the Na? Khi
[110:21; Eisenhauer,Pai, 9? 2, 251].
4. Aether . . . thure: L, "The air rains down coins / the earth throws up corpses, / Tuscany which from incense" [Migne, 474,492]. "Thusca" is a miscopying of Thuscia.
H, "veil,
scarf. " What
6. Sabines: An ancient people living NE of Rome who were the source of many legends, including one about the rape of their women to supply wives for the followers ofRomulus. For centuries they fought the Romans but
? ? ?
29. KM,! wv eVYCx7f/P: H, "Daughter of Cadmus" [91:88].
30. per diafana: I, "through diaphanous? ness" [36:4].
31. AevKoc;: H, "white,"
32, AevKofJoe: H, Pound's transcription of
Leucothea, the white goddess Ino, daughter of Cadmus, who was metamorphosed into a sea? bird [91 :89].
33. Nicoletti: Giachino N. , the prefect at Gardone [74:52].
34. Ramperti: Marco R. , an Italian jour? nalist.
35. Desmond Fitzgerald: [92:7].
36. the crystal wave, , . solid: A recurrent paradisal motif [25/119; 40/201; 76/457; 76/459; 94: 18].
37. Ideograms: [93:125? 127].
38. YAO's worry: [53:14]. Legend says that he passed over his own son and named Shun as his sllccessor, knowing that to carry on the middle kingdom would need the one man. Ideograms: "One man" [94:126].
Trace, 327? 329.
1. LOVE
ing in the world [90: I]. Perhaps the "5000 years" goes back to Antef [93 :4]. Pound's conviction that the best document about the Creation is the microcosm and the macro- cosm, and that science is the best instrument to give us knowledge about the intelligence of divinity at work, is echoed here. The importance of the macrocosm in this spec- trum is indicated by the comets and great stars, a rhyme with later references to the constellation Berenice [97: 170; 102:42] and with many earlier references to the SUD and stars [5:5; 37:72; 37/237; 74/425, etc. ; ABCR, 17? 27; "Hudson: Poet Strayed into Science," SP, 429-432].
place: The
divine
spirit
flow?
"[God is]
2. "Consonantium demonstratrix": L, "demonstration of harmonies. " Miscopied from Musica Theorica, a section of the Pa- Irologiae Latina [Migne, 90, 91IC].
3. e? ciT': H, "said. "
4. Beda: L, "Bede. " The Venerable Bede.
5. Deus . . . mundi: L, "God is the spirit of the world" [ibid. , 987C].
in the marriage bed"
[ibid. ,1I90c].
Glossary
6.
best and everlasting being" [ibid. , 987D].
7. Tempus est ubique: L, "time is every- where" [ibid. , 1050C].
8. non motus: L, "[time is] not motion" [ibid. , 1050B].
9. in vesperibus orbis: L, for in vepribus orbis, "sphere among thornbushes" [ibid. , 1186B]. Pound prob. thought his note can? cerned Hesperus, Vesper, or Venus as the evening star, which would climax the passage by a return to the opening theme of love
[JE,Pai,4. 1,182].
10. Expergesci thalmis: L, " t o be awakened
animal
sempiternum: L,
11. gravat serpella nimbus: L, "mist weighs down the wild thyme" [ibid. , 1192A].
12. Delcroix: [88:46]. Because Carlo D. was a lyric poet and wrote a peceptive study of Mussolini entitled A Man and the People (1924), Pound thought he had a perception
r
? ? 588
95/645
95/645-647
589
39. Windsor: King Edward VIII. According to one account, he was instrumental in keep~ ing WWII from starting [86:47; 89/601; 109:40; HK, Pai, 2-1, 41J. An example of what one man can do at a critical moment.
40. Saint Bertrand: [48:45J. A village that evokes for Pound the destruction of the light of Provence during the Albigensian Crusade
[SR, 90J.
41. Montrejeau: Town in S France, in the department of Haute~GaronneJ 011 the Ga- ronne River some 27 miles SE of Tarbes. 1t marked the northern boundary of the Albi? gensian slaughter.
42. Elder Lightfoot: An elderly black gen- tleman at S1. Elizabeths Pound was fond of. He entertained all with his cogent wit and pithy remarks, some of which concerned Darwin's ideas of natural selection. Light- foot's observation was that evolution ap- peared to be going backwards [DGJ.
43. design: Intelligent design apparent in the universe is one of the central compo- nents in Pound's convictions that "the gods exist" [SP, 49-52J. Here used ironically about Elder's perceptions.
44. Miss Ida: Ida Mapel and her sister Adah, whom Pound met first in Spain in 1906; in 1919 he and Dorothy stayed at their Paris apartments. rhe two sisters visited him in jail in 1946 and at S1. Elizabeths quite often
[91:801?
45. "de Nantes . . . prisonnier": F, "There is a prisoner from Nantes. " Line from a 17th- century song Pound found in a collection made by Yvette Guilbert and translated in 1912 [Kearns, Guide, 219J.
50. the jap girl: Prob. someone Pound heard going ecstatic over Rembrandt.
51. the russe: F, "in the Russian manner"; used here to describe a particular person, possibly the wife of Colonel Goleyevsky [74: 172J, who might have talked enthusias? tically about Turgenev's novel Smoke, a fa? vorite with the French and with Pound: "Turgenev in 'Fumee' and in the 'Nichee de Gentilshommes' digging out the stupidity of the Russian" [SP, 189J.
52. Turgenev: [80:29J. Ivan T. , 1818-1883, a Russian novelist who was one of the most famous and effective of "the Westernizers," as opposed to "the Slavophiles. " In his rna? ture years, he spent over half of his time in western Europe, most of it in Paris where he was a close friend of Flauber1. In his early London years Pound thought highly of him: "Galdos, Flaubert, Turgenev, see them all in a death struggle with provincial stupidity"
[L, 25; cf. also. SP, 414J. The Slavophiles would represent provincial stupidity.
53. Uncle William . . . Memory": W. B. Yeats [41:37; 77:163J. The ladies Pound recalls here from those pre-WWI years were doubtless so-called by Yeats (perhaps during his visits to Rapallo in the late 20s), who quoted a line from Blake: "The Muses are daughters of Memory" [74:439J.
54. Pirandello: Luigi P. , 1867-1936, one of the greatest of all Italian dramatists and nov- elists. One of his main literary concerns was the nature of reality and the impossiblity of catching it or fixing it. It must remain in memory, as in Six Characters in Search ofan
Author (1921) [SP, 434? 435J.
55. Pulitzer: Pound's outrage grew more in- tense because literary prizes such as the Pu- litzer went to hacks and seldom to the real creative people who were "making it new. "
56. historic blackout: A cue to Pound's in- creasing paranoia: he came to believe that, as in the past [cf. 74 below], a group of inter- national conspirators were deliberately'keep- ing the right information from the people and part of their object now was to destroy the Constitution as conceived by Adams and
Jefferson. Pound wrote, thinking of Upward [74:275J and Bunting [74:153], "All the resisters blacked out" [Knox,Pai, 3-1, 82J.
57. Leucothae: [Cf. 32 aboveJ.
58. "My bikini. . . ": [91: 102J.
59. And if! see . . . thought: [92:30J.
64. Gardasee: With the beautiful blues of Lago di Garda [76:91J, who would want vacuity?
65. Mr Beddoes: Thomas Lovell B. , 1803- 1849, English poet often praised by Pound [see "Beddoes and Chronology," SP, 378- 383J, esp. for his "Death's Jest Book, or the Fool's Tragedy" (1825), where we read: "0 world, world! the gods and fairies left thee, for thou were too wise, and now, thou So- cratic star, thy demon, the Great Pan, Folly, is parting from thee" [ibid. , 381 J.
67. Responsus: L, "answer. " The "some- thing there" would not be a dead halt of the process as in stasis.
68. a hand . . . : The secret organized mon- eymen [cf. 55 aboveJ hold all the face cards: they make the organized cowards.
69. something decent: The divine spirit or the "intimate essence" is that unnamable something [94: 142J, as reflected in Richard of S1. Victor [SP, 71 J.
70. dicto millesimo: L, "at said date or time. "
71. St Hilary: Prob. S1. H. of Poiliers (8 saints named Hilary are listed in the Diet.
of Catholic Biography), ca. 315-ca. 367, bishop and church father who became the major voice in the 4th century against Arianism [96:28J, the most persistent heresy the church had to deal with for hundreds of years. His writings in defense of the dogma of the Trinity were informed, impassioned, and lyrical. Because of his beliefs he was exiled in 353 to Phrygia by Emperor Con- stantius II (who supported the Arians), not to be released until 361. His enemies called him "the sower of discord and the trouble? maker of the Orient" [New Catholic Ency- clopediaJ. The Church of St. Hilaire at Poi-
46. periplum: L [59: 10J.
. . .
40 years: In
47. Madrid
first met the Mapel sisters.
1906,
when he
48. Carriere show: [80:241 J. Prob. a refer? ence to a retrospective show of his works held either at the time of his death in 1906 or in 1946,40 years later.
49. "Bret": Prob. the Hemingway "lost gen? eration" heroine of The Sun Also Rises.
T
60. Elsa
Loringhoven, a post-WWI wild woman, who wrote for the Little Review. Dedicated to free love and free everything else, she once shocked W. C. Williams by telling him that what he ought to do to become great "was to contract syphilis from her and so free . . .
[hisJ mind for serious art. " Pound was sym- pathetic to her because she preached cosmo- politanism and antiprovincialism [Morse,
Pai, 10-3, 595-596J.
61. Dinklage: An author Pound remem- bered because of his dedication to the truth. In a letter to Reno Ddlin about journalistic "lies in 1914 war," he says: "Von Dinklage demurred at A. B. C. for first grade frog kids"
[RO,Pai, ]]? 2, 283J.
62. what's his name: Prob. Robert Cowart, a young sailor who got caught in the ropes of the U. S. Navy dirigible Akron and was swept into the air. Two others who were also caught fell to their deaths, but "Cowart wrapped himself securely in the mooring line and held on" [Morse, Pai, 10. 3, 597J.
63. Hindoos . . . vacuity: Pou? nd's not very sympathetic idea of the Hindu concept of nirvana; it's not the thing itself so much as its consequences Pound objects to. His asso- ciations inform the rest of this canto. The famous "We appear to have lost the radiant world" passage in "Cavalcanti" is followed by a description of two kinds of "the Hin- doo disease, fanaticisms and excess that pro- duce Savonarola, . . . [andJ asceticisms that produce fakirs . . . . Between those diseases, existed the Mediterranean sanity . . . that gave the churches like St Hilaire . . . the clear lines and proportions" [LE, 154J. And again: "Against these European Hindoos we find the 'medieval clean line'" [LE, 150J.
Kassandra:
Elsa von
Freytag?
66. Santayana:
Pound's idea of intelligence in the cherry stone which made it able to create the cher- ry tree [113:431, he replied, in effect, that Pound had something there-but it would be intelligence of "an unconscious sort" [NS, Life, 429J.
George S.
[80:49J. To
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?
590
95/647
96/651
591
tiers [45:16], built in his honor, has the clean lines and the economy of form [HK, Era, 327] of the oak leaf of John Heydon, "secretary of nature" [87:82]. Pound would applaud one of his central teachings: "the existence of God can be known by reason, but his nature is incomprehensible" [ibid]. One can deduce from this premise that the human race is safer if it celebrates mystery
as mystery, the arcanum as arcanum, than if it deduces, argumentatively, a lot of abstract dogma and starts burning and killing people in the name of such dogma. One of the reasons Pound praises the mysteries of Eleu- sis is that they maintained this distinction.
72. an oak-leaf: John Heydon said Hilary [92:40] looked at an oak leaf. A rhyme with "learn of the green world" and "the green casque has outdone your elegance" [81/521]: a central tenet of Pound's reli- gion. One must marvel at both the elegance and the absolute economy of forms created in nature. Any plant distributes its branches and spreads its leaves in a mathematically precise way to obtain the optimum amount
of sunlight. Since so precise a design implies a designer, Pound concurs with St. Hilary: "the existence of God can be known by reason" (109:49]. The point bears repeating as it is central to The Cantos. The "vine- leaf' evokes the god Dionysus, to discrimi-
nate him from the martyr Dionisis (hence the repetition of the line), but also because he was central to the Eleusinian mysteries.
73. St Denys: The Church of St. Denis, built in the 12th century on the spot in Montmartre where two missionaries, Dionisis and Eleuthedo, were martyred by beheading in 273 [Historia Francorum, I, 31; CB. R, ZBC,40].
74. Calvin: [14:16; 62:15]. His "logically developed" and fundamentalist belief that the Bible is the sole source of divine wisdom led to the burning of heretics, such as Mi- chael Servetus in 1533. The point seems to be that Calvin did not succeed in destroying the names of the earlier martyrs by a black- out [89:87; cf. 56 above], because the flight of the Huguenots at the battle of St. Denis on Nov. 16, 1567 memorialized them
[CB-R, ibid].
75. the wave . . . sea-god: The 10? line pas- sage invokes again the Homeric scene where the raft of Odysseus is destroyed by the storm created by Poseidon and he is saved by Ino, daughter of Cadmus, who had been turned into Leucothea. She took pity on him with her kredemmon [ad. v, 325-376], which Pound called a "bikini" [cf. 91: 102].
76. VOUTOV ? ? ? ? a:i17Kwv: H, "to reach the land of the Phaeacians" [ibid. , 344-345] .
Background
Max Gallo, Mussolini's Italy, trans. Charles Markmann, Macmillan,
1973; J. B. Bury, History o f the Later Roman Empire, II, London, 1923 [Later R. E. ]; History of the Langobards by Paul the Deacon, trans. William Dudley Foulke, Longmans, Green & Co. , New Y ork, 1906 [Foulke, History] ; Constance Head, Justinian I I of Byzantium, Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1972 [Head, J. II]; John W. Barker, Justinian and The Later Roman Empire, Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1966; Anthony Birley, Septimius Severus, Doubleday, 1972; Luigi Villari, The Liberation of Italy, C. C. Nelson, Wisconsin, 1959.
Exegeses
EP, SP, 231,450; GK, 209; LE, 250; WB, in EH, Approaches, 312; Akiko Miyake, Pai, 7-1 & 2, 110; JW,Pai, 2? 2, 176; EH, Pai, 2? 3, 498; JW, Later, 102-132; Pearlman, Pai, 1-2, 163; Flory, Pai, 4? 2 & 3, 325; CFT, Pai, 2? 2, 223-242; Leo the Wise, Pai, 2-2, 245? 311; MB, Trace, 304; DD, Sculptor, 239-240; CB? R, ZBC, 136, 146, 151,258.
[As Cunizza says (Par. IX, 61-62): "Above are mirrors-you call them Thrones-by which the light of God as judge is reflected upon us. " The? source of divine wisdom is given as "pen yeh" at 94/640, followed by the comment, "That is of thrones, and above them: Justice. " Said Pound: "Thrones concerns the states of mind of people responsible for something more than their personal conduct" (Don Hall, Paris Review, no. 28, 1962, p. 49)].
Glossary
CANTO XCVI
Sources
J. P. Migne, Patrologiae Cursus Completus, vol. 95, 1851: this volume contains The Complete Works of the Venerable Bede, and Paul the Deacon's History o f the Langobards [Migne, column no. ]; Alexander Del Mar, History ofMonetary Systems, Chicago, 1896 [HMS]; The Book o f the Eparch o f Leo The Wise, trans. into modern Greek and Latin with a French translation by Professor Jules Nicole and published as Le Livre du Prefet, Geneva, 1893 [EP. B] ; Cicero, De Officiis, 2; Catullus, Carmen,
93; Dante, Pur. I; Homer, ad. V, XIII.
5. ROMA . . . : L, formerly. . . . "
"Rome, which
1
l
I. Kpf/oE/1vov:
Leucothea [95 :32, 75] threw to the drown? ing Odysseus to save him [ad. V, 351]: "So saying the goddess gave him the veil, and herself plunged again into the surging deep, like a sea? mew; and the dark wave hid her. "
2. Aestheticisme . . . : F, "Aestheticism as church politics. "
3. hearth . . . diafana: -Thrones opens with a religious rite that is more than aesthetic. As indicated below, the name Tuscany (1, Toscana) derives from the Latin thus, thuris ("frankincense," "olibanum") and links the opening to the rhymes with Dionysus [2:20] at the end of Canto 95. The aromatic gum frankincense (pure incense) seems to derive
from a variety of African cedar or juniper. The rite may be conceived as one of purifica- tion and linked forward to the Na? Khi
[110:21; Eisenhauer,Pai, 9? 2, 251].
4. Aether . . . thure: L, "The air rains down coins / the earth throws up corpses, / Tuscany which from incense" [Migne, 474,492]. "Thusca" is a miscopying of Thuscia.
H, "veil,
scarf. " What
6. Sabines: An ancient people living NE of Rome who were the source of many legends, including one about the rape of their women to supply wives for the followers ofRomulus. For centuries they fought the Romans but
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