Benin: The city and river in S Nigeria, whence
Frobenius
collected masks and arti~ facts.
A-Companion-to-the-Cantos-of-Ezra-Pound-II
?
?
?
?
450
81/517-518
81/518
eluding Les Indiscretions de l' htstoire, 6
vols. , Paris, 1903-1909, which is in Pound's library at Brunnenburg. A. C. was most fa- mous for his research in sexual behavior, as reported in his last book The Eratikon: Being an Illustrated Treasury o f Scientific Marvels of Human Sexuality, trans. by Ro- bert Meadows and privately issued by the Anthropological Press, New York, 1933. An introductory note to the book says, "Dr. Cabanes, actuated by the spirit of the real scientist, has brought to light strange data which make vital contributions to our know- ledge of the forces controlling the intimate life of men and women. " Cabanes's work would thus interest Pound as a continuation of Remy de Gourmont's work on the sexual- ity of other species in The Natural Philoso- phy of Love. The meaning of the egg in his pocket is not known, though a weird theory has been suggested [Pai, 11-3,451-453].
19. Basil . . . Canaries: B. Bunting, born in the Tyne Valley area of England, and still (in 1982) going strong. [For the story of his life and work see Pai, 9-1, Spring 1980, devoted to him and his Pound connectionsJ. During the three days between the Crucifixion and the Resurrection, when Christ was supposed to have been harrowing Hell, the villagers- man, woman and child-were supposed to beat drums day and night nourished by little except wine. They did this until the hands of many became a bloody mess and hundreds were groaning with pain. They called the an- nual event a simple village fiest-a. "As for life
in the Canaries," says Bunting, "I suppose Ezra is thinking of my description of the sexual mores of the islands in those days, so very unlike those of New York and Philadel- phia in his time, perhaps even a bit alarming to his fundamentally puritan soul" [Bunting,
Pai, 10-3,619-621].
20. Possum: T. S. Eliot.
21. portagoose: Portuguese.
22. Cole: [80: 153]. Reprise of the demon- stration Cole mounted at Italy's entrance into WWI.
451
23. Andre Spire: [77:134]. Pound wrote: "Old Spire who had sat on a Credit Agricole board said: 'Yes, very nice, communal cre- dit, but when you get your board, every man on that board has a brother-in-law'" [JIM, 47) . The agricultural credit board was a de- vice to extend credit to farmers for seed, fertilizer, etc. Since community credit for development is at the heart of Social Credit economics, note that Pound was aware of one of the most serious flaws in it as a program: influence and favoritism, which, being impossible to prevent, posed serious problems even with reasonable control.
24. John Adams: [31:15; 69:56]. JA said that TJ feared monarchy but that he (JA) feared an aristocracy.
25. MrJefferson: [31:2).
26. To break . . . heave: To bring poetry back to the speech of the people, it was necessary to get rid of artificially imposed rhythms: a first premise of Pound's revolu- tion in poetry.
27. Jo Bard: Josef B. , 1882-1975, Hungari- an writer Pound knew in the late 20s and early 30s. Bard wrote essays for the Dial, the New English Weekly, etc. Pound mentions him in a review ofW . C. Williams's A Voyage to Pagany. A book by Bard, Shipwreck in Europe, shows Americans not speaking: "I think the continental author mentions as a general and known post-war quantity: the American or Americans who comes or corne to Vienna to find out why they can't enjoy life even after getting a great deal of money" [PE, 79). Bard married Eileen Agar of the "trick sunlight" [76:50). Pound visited them and saw the effect of the light when he went to London in 1938 for the funeral of Olivia Shakespear. It was Bard who intro- duced Pound to Frobenius [HK).
28. La Rouchefoucauld: La Rochefoucauld [31:36]. A sophisticated French stylist.
29. de Maintenon: Fran,oise d'Aubigne, Marquise de M. , 1635? 1719, first the mis? tress and later the second wife of Louis XIV of France. A Woman of wit and wisdom.
Exegeses
LL,Motive, 121-123; CE,Ideas, 148. 149; DD, Sculptor, 171? 172; EH, Approaches, 340-347, 376? 377; HK, Era, 132? 133, 155? 156, 489-492; Peck, Pai, 1? 1, 3-36; Achilles Fang, "Materials for the Study of Pound's Cantos," Ph. D. dissertation, Harvard University,
1958, Vols. ]], Ill.
1. Zeus . . . bosom: Divine power abides in nature and manifests itself through the green world of Ceres (Demeter), the goddess of corn, the harvest, and fruitfulness.
2. Taishan: [74:46].
3. Cythera: Aphrodite, the planet Venus.
4. Hay . . . desaparacen: S, "Here is much Catholicism / . ,. and very little religion / . . . I believe that kings disappear. "
5. Padre Jose: [77:45].
6. Dolores: [37:61]. Perhaps the girl who told the young Pound to eat bread in 1907.
7. Come pan . . . : S, "eat bread, boy. " A recurrent phrase [80: 10].
8. Sargent: [80:352]. Perhaps the girl in Sargent's 1891 painting "La Carmencita" is Dolores [Fang, Ill, 136].
9. Velazquez: [80:292].
10. Museo del Prado: The Spanish National Museum [80: IS].
11. peseta: Spanish monetary unit, similar to Italian lira.
12. Bowers: Claude Gernade B. , 1879? 1958, American historian and diplomat, ambassa- dor to Spain, 1933? 1939. Pound praised his historical study Jefferson and Hamilton in a number of places and wrote to him in 1938. Bowers's letter in reply, dated May 10, 1938, mentions "the atmosphere of incre-
dible hate" in Spain [NS, Life, 352].
13. London reds: During the time of the
Spanish Civil War, Moscow considered the collective security of the Allied nations to be
more important than any other issue. They wanted Britain, France, the U. S. , and the Soviets to stand firm against the Nazi-Fascist threat. To that end, it was official policy not to upset the Western democracies by spon- soring worldwide revolution. Thus, at the ti9'le of the people's revoiution against Fran- 10 and the Falangists in Spain, there were several Red or Communist groups. Some joined the fight against Franco, but because of the Moscow line, some were actually fighting on the side of Franco. The two
groups were represented among the Marxists in London and the U. S. Some English units left for Spain to join the battle, as did the Abraham Lincoln Battalion from the United States. But some, following the Moscow line meticulously, would not expose the agents of Franco working in London [George Or- well, Homage to Catalonia, Boston, Beacon Press, 1962].
14. Franco: Francisco F. , 1892? 1975, Span. ish general and dictator who was victorious with the help of Germany and Italy in the Spanish Civil War.
15. Alcazar: Alcazar de San Juan, town in central Spain which Pound visited in 1906. He lists it as one of the Islamic monuments that gave "a sense of man and of human dignity yet unobliterated" [GK, 53]. Ironi? cally, it was the bloody siege of Alcazar that Franco said won the war for him.
16. Eso es . . . muerto: S, "that is mourning, Ha! / my husband is dead. "
17. locanda: I, "inn. "
18. Cabranez: Prob. Dr. Augustin Cabanes, 1862-1928, author of some 60 volumes, in?
Glossary
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 452
81/518-519
81/519-521
453
Pound's criticism, agreeing with Bard, was that in novels and poetry ordinary people such as bakers and innkeepers were made to sound like people of wit and wisdom.
30. Te cavero . . . a te: I, "I'll cut your guts out / [and I] yours" [1O:21J. Highly idio- matic and strong talk in the language of the people.
31. Mencken: H. L. M. , 1880-1956, Ameri- can editor, author, critic, and philologist with whom Pound corresponded for years. Pound was much impressed with a remark of his and mentions it often: "Nevertheless, I believe that all schemes of monetary reform collide inevitably with the nature of man in the mass. He can't be convinced in anything less than a geological epoch" [GK, 182J.
32. Some cook . . . : [54: 14J.
33. 'Ivl'~ . . . "vap",: H, "Little wheel . . . . . man to my house. " The first word should be Iv'Y~ and the accent on 1roTt should be grave. The line occurs in Theocritus, "Idyll 2"
[Loeb, The Greek Bucolic Poets, 26J. The complete line is a refrain repeated 10 times as a magic spell worked by a young maid to draw her lover) who has taken up with an~ other) back to her.
34.
Benin: The city and river in S Nigeria, whence Frobenius collected masks and arti~ facts.
35. Frankfurt: The German city in which the Frobenius Institute is located and where many cultural objects from Africa were housed. Pound's indirect way of saying that the black soldier who made his table was as handsome as any his race ever produced.
36. Kuanon: [90:29J.
37. And at first . . . : The next several lines
derive from Santayana's Persons and Places, which Pound prob. read in manuscript some- time in 1940 [L, 331, 333J. Santayana was born in Spain and tells of his first impres~ sions of Boston, where he arrived at age 9: "my eye . . . was caught by symbols ofY an- kee ingenuity and Y ankee haste . . . . I was fascinated by the play of those skeleton
disgusted by such a
wheels . . .
land, generally following the last lines of a laisse.
44. Althea: Intended to evoke the Lovelace poem, "To Althea from Prison," which says "And my divine Althea comes / To whisper at the grates. " Pound has no such visitor.
45. libretto: Just as Canto 75 is the musical score of Janequin, so the climactic pages of Canto 81 are given a musical label to under- score the extraordinary musical cadences de~ liberately evoked in one of the major climac- tic statements of the poem.
46. Lawes: Henry L. , 1596-1662, the En- glish musician and composer noted for his masques and airs for voice. But he did not write for the crowd, as Pound knew: "Lawes and Campion will not gather 10,000 ground- lings. Not in our time" [GK, 155J. Lawes set Waller's "Go, Lovely Rose" to music
[Espey, Mauberley, 98J.
47. Jenkyns: John Jenkins, 1592-1678, En- glish composer and musician to Charles I and II. He composed many fancies for viol and organ.
48. Dolmetsch: [80:197J. Arnold D. The Dolmetsch foundation (! 928) was founded to encourage interest in old music. Pound celebrates his work often [GK, 71, 248;LE, 431-440J.
49. Hast 'ou . . . shade: The 4 lines derive from the 3d stanza of Ben Jonson's "The Triumph of Charis," which goes: "Have you seen but a bright lily grow, / Before rude hands have touched it? / Ha' you marked but the fall 0 ' the snow / Before the soil hath smutched it? / Ha' you felt the wool 0' the beaver? Or swan's down ever? "
[74:504J.
50. Waller: Edmund W. , 1606-1687, the En- glish poet who wrote: "Go, lovely Rose. " Pound glances at this poem in his "Envoy" to Mauberley.
51. Dowland: John D. , 1563-1626, Irish composer and lutanist. Pound mentions his lute compositions [GK, 151J.
52. Y our eyen . . . susteyne: From Merciles Beaute, attributed to Chaucer.
53. Ed ascoltando . . . : I, "and listening to the gentle murmur. " Pound told HK: "Not a quotation, merely author using handy language. ' ,
54. new . . . eyes: Image of reflected divini- ty, with sexual overtones as the sacred vision (inluminatio coitu [36: 13J) becomes more urgent and pervasive here and in many later cantos [Peck, Pai, 1-1 J.
55. hypostasis: Here divinity of the object as object in itself, not as container for a spirit that might come or go.
56. Ed)w,: H, "knowing" or "seeing. " Part of a verb which in context and some of its forms may mean either "know" or "see. " Pound's source is debatable, because the word is pandemic. Since Pound was a devo- tee of the Pre-Sacratics (in particular the Pythagoreans) and kept John Burnet's Greek Philosophy at hand, he may have noticed the extenqed discussion Burnet gives to 'E[oo, and E[ofj as "figures" (in the sense of "forms") deriving from the "boundless" or unformed. Earlier thinkers had thought of air as a sort of "mist. " But Pythagoras was the first to conceive of abstract space in which forms had to exist to be seen and known. This line of thought led to the con- clusion that all things that are are numbers. "The early Pythagoreans represented num- bers and explained their properties by means
of dots arranged in certain 'figures or pat- terns'" [Burnet, 52J. The most famous fig? ure is the tetraktys. )t, as are all other figures or patterns, is an eiooc:;. Etowc:;, as participle substantive, would give us "shape, figure, or being apprehensible to the eyes and mind (seeing or knowing). "
57. Learn of the green world: Or in other words: "See the lilies of the field, they toil not neither do they spin; yet I say unto you Solomon in all his glory is not arrayed like one of these. "
58. Paquin: A Parisian couturier [80:434; WB,Pai, 11? 3, 444J.
and I was
dirty ramshackle pier for a great steamship
line" [Santayana, Persons and Places, I, 134].
38. Santayana: [80:49J.
39. Muss: Mussolini. He affected a populist image by cultivating localisms of the pro- vince he came from.
grief . . .
[These passages from Santayana were identi- fied by Carol H. Cantrell in a MS submitted to Paideuma. J
41. George Horace: G. H. Lorimer, 1868- 1937, American journalist and editor-in- chief of the Saturday Evening Post (1899- 1936), and a neighbor of the Pounds at Wyncote.
42. Beveridge: Albert Jeremiah B. , 1862- 1927, U. S. senator (1899-1911), a supporter of Theodore Roosevelt and an organizer of the Progessive party in 1912. He made an inspection trip to the Philippines in 1899. He refused to discuss or write about the trip because "he was saving his observations for the speech he planned to make as his initial bow to the Senate" [Bowers, Beveridge and the Progressive Party, 112J . All others failed to get an interview with the senator but Lorimer went to Washington and succeeded by persistence: "The spring and summer of
1900 found Beveridge feverishly at work. He had agreed with George H. Lorimer . . . to write six articles in the imperialistic vein, on his experiences in the Philippines" [ibid. , 131]. Thus, to be accurate Pound's "three articles" should read "six" [Fang, II, 68J .
43. AOI! : [79:109J. A noise perhaps of la- mentation) picking up from the idea of grief in preceding lines: Aoz' occurs 172 times in the Oxford manuscript of Chanson de Ro-
40. the
about his aunt's grief at the death of her daughter, that it "was violent, but violent only by fits, as when each new visitor came to condole with her, and she had to repeat the whole story, with appropriate floods of tears, sobs, and lamentations" [ibid. , 127J.
climax:
Santayana
wrote
? ? ? 454
59. The green casque: The "bottle" from which Madam La Vespa is born [83:72].
60. "Master thyself . . . ": Paraphrase of the rhythm of Chaucer's "Subdue thyself, and others thee shall hear" from the "Ballade of Good Counsel" [Speare, 1].
61. Blunt: Wilfred Scawen B. , 1840-1922, poet, diplomat, politician, world traveler, and defender of home rule for India, Egypt, and even Ireland, for which he became the first Englishman to go to prison. In the Lon- don years, Pound thought highly of Blunt and sent some of his poetry to Harriet Mon- roe, saying, "the Blunt stuff, glory of the name etc. ought to build up our posi- tion . . . " [L, 34]. On Jan. 18, 1914, a com- mittee of poets including Yeats, Masefield, Pound, and several others "presented to Wil-
81/521-522
fred Seawen Blunt 'in token of homage' a
82/523-524 455 Glossary
CANTO LXXXII Sources
EP, CON, 22; Aeschylus, Agamemnon; Morris Speare, The Pocket Book of Verse, 1940 [Speare]; Petrarch, Sonetti e Canzoni,
Fano, 1503.
Background
EP, "Salve a Pontifex;" ALS, 63; SP, 227; L, 7, 55, 62, 65,
80-83; LE, 269-270, 274-275;ABCR, 48; The Cambridge History of English Literature, Vol. XII [CHEL] ; Edmund Gosse, The Life of A. C. Swinburne, London, 1917 [Gosse, SWInburne]; Dafne Fielding, Those Remarkable Cunards, New York, Atheneum, 1958 [DF, Cunards] ;Dial, vol. 71, Aug. 1921; Rudolph Hirsch, Printing, Selling, and Reading, 1450-1550, Wiesbaden, 1967; H. Price, Fifty Years of Psychical Research, New York, Arno Press, reprinted 1975.
Exegeses
Knox, Pai, . 3-1, 77-78; LL, Motive, 118-120; EH, Approaches, 338-350; WB, Rose, 95-156; HK, Era, 486-488; Achilles Fang, "Materials for the Study of Pound's Cantos," Ph. D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1958, Vol. II [Fang].
1I. EMO~ . . . : H, "my husband . . . hand. " Clytemnestra [Agamemnon, 1404- 1406] says: "This is Agamemnon, my hus- band, dead by my right hand, and a good job" [cf. LE, 269-270].
12. hac dextera mortus: [dextra mortuus] : L, "dead by this right hand. " Pound, in comparing the Thomas Stanley Greek and Latin editions of the play, cites these lines.
13. Lytton: It was not Lytton but Lady Gregory's husband, Sir William Gregory, who first saw Blunt in the bullring. In 1862, at a bullfight in Madrid, Sir William was "struck by the extraordinary good looks of the young matador . . . and asking who he was, heard that he was an attache from the English Embassy, Wilfred Blunt" [Lady Gre- gory's preface to Blunt's diaries, cited by Fang, U, 163].
14. Packard: Frank Lucius P. , 1877-1942, Canadian author of such books as Greater
carved . . . by the brilliant Gaudier-Brzeska. . . ," So
reliquary
sculptor,
wrote in Poetry [vol. 3, no. 4. , March 1914, 220-223]. Edith Finch [Wilfred Scawen Blunt1 J reporting on a visit made to Blunt by Pound and Aldington says that Pound said: "I am trying to persuade them both into some kind of sanity, . . . Where there is neither decency nor art . . .
81/517-518
81/518
eluding Les Indiscretions de l' htstoire, 6
vols. , Paris, 1903-1909, which is in Pound's library at Brunnenburg. A. C. was most fa- mous for his research in sexual behavior, as reported in his last book The Eratikon: Being an Illustrated Treasury o f Scientific Marvels of Human Sexuality, trans. by Ro- bert Meadows and privately issued by the Anthropological Press, New York, 1933. An introductory note to the book says, "Dr. Cabanes, actuated by the spirit of the real scientist, has brought to light strange data which make vital contributions to our know- ledge of the forces controlling the intimate life of men and women. " Cabanes's work would thus interest Pound as a continuation of Remy de Gourmont's work on the sexual- ity of other species in The Natural Philoso- phy of Love. The meaning of the egg in his pocket is not known, though a weird theory has been suggested [Pai, 11-3,451-453].
19. Basil . . . Canaries: B. Bunting, born in the Tyne Valley area of England, and still (in 1982) going strong. [For the story of his life and work see Pai, 9-1, Spring 1980, devoted to him and his Pound connectionsJ. During the three days between the Crucifixion and the Resurrection, when Christ was supposed to have been harrowing Hell, the villagers- man, woman and child-were supposed to beat drums day and night nourished by little except wine. They did this until the hands of many became a bloody mess and hundreds were groaning with pain. They called the an- nual event a simple village fiest-a. "As for life
in the Canaries," says Bunting, "I suppose Ezra is thinking of my description of the sexual mores of the islands in those days, so very unlike those of New York and Philadel- phia in his time, perhaps even a bit alarming to his fundamentally puritan soul" [Bunting,
Pai, 10-3,619-621].
20. Possum: T. S. Eliot.
21. portagoose: Portuguese.
22. Cole: [80: 153]. Reprise of the demon- stration Cole mounted at Italy's entrance into WWI.
451
23. Andre Spire: [77:134]. Pound wrote: "Old Spire who had sat on a Credit Agricole board said: 'Yes, very nice, communal cre- dit, but when you get your board, every man on that board has a brother-in-law'" [JIM, 47) . The agricultural credit board was a de- vice to extend credit to farmers for seed, fertilizer, etc. Since community credit for development is at the heart of Social Credit economics, note that Pound was aware of one of the most serious flaws in it as a program: influence and favoritism, which, being impossible to prevent, posed serious problems even with reasonable control.
24. John Adams: [31:15; 69:56]. JA said that TJ feared monarchy but that he (JA) feared an aristocracy.
25. MrJefferson: [31:2).
26. To break . . . heave: To bring poetry back to the speech of the people, it was necessary to get rid of artificially imposed rhythms: a first premise of Pound's revolu- tion in poetry.
27. Jo Bard: Josef B. , 1882-1975, Hungari- an writer Pound knew in the late 20s and early 30s. Bard wrote essays for the Dial, the New English Weekly, etc. Pound mentions him in a review ofW . C. Williams's A Voyage to Pagany. A book by Bard, Shipwreck in Europe, shows Americans not speaking: "I think the continental author mentions as a general and known post-war quantity: the American or Americans who comes or corne to Vienna to find out why they can't enjoy life even after getting a great deal of money" [PE, 79). Bard married Eileen Agar of the "trick sunlight" [76:50). Pound visited them and saw the effect of the light when he went to London in 1938 for the funeral of Olivia Shakespear. It was Bard who intro- duced Pound to Frobenius [HK).
28. La Rouchefoucauld: La Rochefoucauld [31:36]. A sophisticated French stylist.
29. de Maintenon: Fran,oise d'Aubigne, Marquise de M. , 1635? 1719, first the mis? tress and later the second wife of Louis XIV of France. A Woman of wit and wisdom.
Exegeses
LL,Motive, 121-123; CE,Ideas, 148. 149; DD, Sculptor, 171? 172; EH, Approaches, 340-347, 376? 377; HK, Era, 132? 133, 155? 156, 489-492; Peck, Pai, 1? 1, 3-36; Achilles Fang, "Materials for the Study of Pound's Cantos," Ph. D. dissertation, Harvard University,
1958, Vols. ]], Ill.
1. Zeus . . . bosom: Divine power abides in nature and manifests itself through the green world of Ceres (Demeter), the goddess of corn, the harvest, and fruitfulness.
2. Taishan: [74:46].
3. Cythera: Aphrodite, the planet Venus.
4. Hay . . . desaparacen: S, "Here is much Catholicism / . ,. and very little religion / . . . I believe that kings disappear. "
5. Padre Jose: [77:45].
6. Dolores: [37:61]. Perhaps the girl who told the young Pound to eat bread in 1907.
7. Come pan . . . : S, "eat bread, boy. " A recurrent phrase [80: 10].
8. Sargent: [80:352]. Perhaps the girl in Sargent's 1891 painting "La Carmencita" is Dolores [Fang, Ill, 136].
9. Velazquez: [80:292].
10. Museo del Prado: The Spanish National Museum [80: IS].
11. peseta: Spanish monetary unit, similar to Italian lira.
12. Bowers: Claude Gernade B. , 1879? 1958, American historian and diplomat, ambassa- dor to Spain, 1933? 1939. Pound praised his historical study Jefferson and Hamilton in a number of places and wrote to him in 1938. Bowers's letter in reply, dated May 10, 1938, mentions "the atmosphere of incre-
dible hate" in Spain [NS, Life, 352].
13. London reds: During the time of the
Spanish Civil War, Moscow considered the collective security of the Allied nations to be
more important than any other issue. They wanted Britain, France, the U. S. , and the Soviets to stand firm against the Nazi-Fascist threat. To that end, it was official policy not to upset the Western democracies by spon- soring worldwide revolution. Thus, at the ti9'le of the people's revoiution against Fran- 10 and the Falangists in Spain, there were several Red or Communist groups. Some joined the fight against Franco, but because of the Moscow line, some were actually fighting on the side of Franco. The two
groups were represented among the Marxists in London and the U. S. Some English units left for Spain to join the battle, as did the Abraham Lincoln Battalion from the United States. But some, following the Moscow line meticulously, would not expose the agents of Franco working in London [George Or- well, Homage to Catalonia, Boston, Beacon Press, 1962].
14. Franco: Francisco F. , 1892? 1975, Span. ish general and dictator who was victorious with the help of Germany and Italy in the Spanish Civil War.
15. Alcazar: Alcazar de San Juan, town in central Spain which Pound visited in 1906. He lists it as one of the Islamic monuments that gave "a sense of man and of human dignity yet unobliterated" [GK, 53]. Ironi? cally, it was the bloody siege of Alcazar that Franco said won the war for him.
16. Eso es . . . muerto: S, "that is mourning, Ha! / my husband is dead. "
17. locanda: I, "inn. "
18. Cabranez: Prob. Dr. Augustin Cabanes, 1862-1928, author of some 60 volumes, in?
Glossary
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 452
81/518-519
81/519-521
453
Pound's criticism, agreeing with Bard, was that in novels and poetry ordinary people such as bakers and innkeepers were made to sound like people of wit and wisdom.
30. Te cavero . . . a te: I, "I'll cut your guts out / [and I] yours" [1O:21J. Highly idio- matic and strong talk in the language of the people.
31. Mencken: H. L. M. , 1880-1956, Ameri- can editor, author, critic, and philologist with whom Pound corresponded for years. Pound was much impressed with a remark of his and mentions it often: "Nevertheless, I believe that all schemes of monetary reform collide inevitably with the nature of man in the mass. He can't be convinced in anything less than a geological epoch" [GK, 182J.
32. Some cook . . . : [54: 14J.
33. 'Ivl'~ . . . "vap",: H, "Little wheel . . . . . man to my house. " The first word should be Iv'Y~ and the accent on 1roTt should be grave. The line occurs in Theocritus, "Idyll 2"
[Loeb, The Greek Bucolic Poets, 26J. The complete line is a refrain repeated 10 times as a magic spell worked by a young maid to draw her lover) who has taken up with an~ other) back to her.
34.
Benin: The city and river in S Nigeria, whence Frobenius collected masks and arti~ facts.
35. Frankfurt: The German city in which the Frobenius Institute is located and where many cultural objects from Africa were housed. Pound's indirect way of saying that the black soldier who made his table was as handsome as any his race ever produced.
36. Kuanon: [90:29J.
37. And at first . . . : The next several lines
derive from Santayana's Persons and Places, which Pound prob. read in manuscript some- time in 1940 [L, 331, 333J. Santayana was born in Spain and tells of his first impres~ sions of Boston, where he arrived at age 9: "my eye . . . was caught by symbols ofY an- kee ingenuity and Y ankee haste . . . . I was fascinated by the play of those skeleton
disgusted by such a
wheels . . .
land, generally following the last lines of a laisse.
44. Althea: Intended to evoke the Lovelace poem, "To Althea from Prison," which says "And my divine Althea comes / To whisper at the grates. " Pound has no such visitor.
45. libretto: Just as Canto 75 is the musical score of Janequin, so the climactic pages of Canto 81 are given a musical label to under- score the extraordinary musical cadences de~ liberately evoked in one of the major climac- tic statements of the poem.
46. Lawes: Henry L. , 1596-1662, the En- glish musician and composer noted for his masques and airs for voice. But he did not write for the crowd, as Pound knew: "Lawes and Campion will not gather 10,000 ground- lings. Not in our time" [GK, 155J. Lawes set Waller's "Go, Lovely Rose" to music
[Espey, Mauberley, 98J.
47. Jenkyns: John Jenkins, 1592-1678, En- glish composer and musician to Charles I and II. He composed many fancies for viol and organ.
48. Dolmetsch: [80:197J. Arnold D. The Dolmetsch foundation (! 928) was founded to encourage interest in old music. Pound celebrates his work often [GK, 71, 248;LE, 431-440J.
49. Hast 'ou . . . shade: The 4 lines derive from the 3d stanza of Ben Jonson's "The Triumph of Charis," which goes: "Have you seen but a bright lily grow, / Before rude hands have touched it? / Ha' you marked but the fall 0 ' the snow / Before the soil hath smutched it? / Ha' you felt the wool 0' the beaver? Or swan's down ever? "
[74:504J.
50. Waller: Edmund W. , 1606-1687, the En- glish poet who wrote: "Go, lovely Rose. " Pound glances at this poem in his "Envoy" to Mauberley.
51. Dowland: John D. , 1563-1626, Irish composer and lutanist. Pound mentions his lute compositions [GK, 151J.
52. Y our eyen . . . susteyne: From Merciles Beaute, attributed to Chaucer.
53. Ed ascoltando . . . : I, "and listening to the gentle murmur. " Pound told HK: "Not a quotation, merely author using handy language. ' ,
54. new . . . eyes: Image of reflected divini- ty, with sexual overtones as the sacred vision (inluminatio coitu [36: 13J) becomes more urgent and pervasive here and in many later cantos [Peck, Pai, 1-1 J.
55. hypostasis: Here divinity of the object as object in itself, not as container for a spirit that might come or go.
56. Ed)w,: H, "knowing" or "seeing. " Part of a verb which in context and some of its forms may mean either "know" or "see. " Pound's source is debatable, because the word is pandemic. Since Pound was a devo- tee of the Pre-Sacratics (in particular the Pythagoreans) and kept John Burnet's Greek Philosophy at hand, he may have noticed the extenqed discussion Burnet gives to 'E[oo, and E[ofj as "figures" (in the sense of "forms") deriving from the "boundless" or unformed. Earlier thinkers had thought of air as a sort of "mist. " But Pythagoras was the first to conceive of abstract space in which forms had to exist to be seen and known. This line of thought led to the con- clusion that all things that are are numbers. "The early Pythagoreans represented num- bers and explained their properties by means
of dots arranged in certain 'figures or pat- terns'" [Burnet, 52J. The most famous fig? ure is the tetraktys. )t, as are all other figures or patterns, is an eiooc:;. Etowc:;, as participle substantive, would give us "shape, figure, or being apprehensible to the eyes and mind (seeing or knowing). "
57. Learn of the green world: Or in other words: "See the lilies of the field, they toil not neither do they spin; yet I say unto you Solomon in all his glory is not arrayed like one of these. "
58. Paquin: A Parisian couturier [80:434; WB,Pai, 11? 3, 444J.
and I was
dirty ramshackle pier for a great steamship
line" [Santayana, Persons and Places, I, 134].
38. Santayana: [80:49J.
39. Muss: Mussolini. He affected a populist image by cultivating localisms of the pro- vince he came from.
grief . . .
[These passages from Santayana were identi- fied by Carol H. Cantrell in a MS submitted to Paideuma. J
41. George Horace: G. H. Lorimer, 1868- 1937, American journalist and editor-in- chief of the Saturday Evening Post (1899- 1936), and a neighbor of the Pounds at Wyncote.
42. Beveridge: Albert Jeremiah B. , 1862- 1927, U. S. senator (1899-1911), a supporter of Theodore Roosevelt and an organizer of the Progessive party in 1912. He made an inspection trip to the Philippines in 1899. He refused to discuss or write about the trip because "he was saving his observations for the speech he planned to make as his initial bow to the Senate" [Bowers, Beveridge and the Progressive Party, 112J . All others failed to get an interview with the senator but Lorimer went to Washington and succeeded by persistence: "The spring and summer of
1900 found Beveridge feverishly at work. He had agreed with George H. Lorimer . . . to write six articles in the imperialistic vein, on his experiences in the Philippines" [ibid. , 131]. Thus, to be accurate Pound's "three articles" should read "six" [Fang, II, 68J .
43. AOI! : [79:109J. A noise perhaps of la- mentation) picking up from the idea of grief in preceding lines: Aoz' occurs 172 times in the Oxford manuscript of Chanson de Ro-
40. the
about his aunt's grief at the death of her daughter, that it "was violent, but violent only by fits, as when each new visitor came to condole with her, and she had to repeat the whole story, with appropriate floods of tears, sobs, and lamentations" [ibid. , 127J.
climax:
Santayana
wrote
? ? ? 454
59. The green casque: The "bottle" from which Madam La Vespa is born [83:72].
60. "Master thyself . . . ": Paraphrase of the rhythm of Chaucer's "Subdue thyself, and others thee shall hear" from the "Ballade of Good Counsel" [Speare, 1].
61. Blunt: Wilfred Scawen B. , 1840-1922, poet, diplomat, politician, world traveler, and defender of home rule for India, Egypt, and even Ireland, for which he became the first Englishman to go to prison. In the Lon- don years, Pound thought highly of Blunt and sent some of his poetry to Harriet Mon- roe, saying, "the Blunt stuff, glory of the name etc. ought to build up our posi- tion . . . " [L, 34]. On Jan. 18, 1914, a com- mittee of poets including Yeats, Masefield, Pound, and several others "presented to Wil-
81/521-522
fred Seawen Blunt 'in token of homage' a
82/523-524 455 Glossary
CANTO LXXXII Sources
EP, CON, 22; Aeschylus, Agamemnon; Morris Speare, The Pocket Book of Verse, 1940 [Speare]; Petrarch, Sonetti e Canzoni,
Fano, 1503.
Background
EP, "Salve a Pontifex;" ALS, 63; SP, 227; L, 7, 55, 62, 65,
80-83; LE, 269-270, 274-275;ABCR, 48; The Cambridge History of English Literature, Vol. XII [CHEL] ; Edmund Gosse, The Life of A. C. Swinburne, London, 1917 [Gosse, SWInburne]; Dafne Fielding, Those Remarkable Cunards, New York, Atheneum, 1958 [DF, Cunards] ;Dial, vol. 71, Aug. 1921; Rudolph Hirsch, Printing, Selling, and Reading, 1450-1550, Wiesbaden, 1967; H. Price, Fifty Years of Psychical Research, New York, Arno Press, reprinted 1975.
Exegeses
Knox, Pai, . 3-1, 77-78; LL, Motive, 118-120; EH, Approaches, 338-350; WB, Rose, 95-156; HK, Era, 486-488; Achilles Fang, "Materials for the Study of Pound's Cantos," Ph. D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1958, Vol. II [Fang].
1I. EMO~ . . . : H, "my husband . . . hand. " Clytemnestra [Agamemnon, 1404- 1406] says: "This is Agamemnon, my hus- band, dead by my right hand, and a good job" [cf. LE, 269-270].
12. hac dextera mortus: [dextra mortuus] : L, "dead by this right hand. " Pound, in comparing the Thomas Stanley Greek and Latin editions of the play, cites these lines.
13. Lytton: It was not Lytton but Lady Gregory's husband, Sir William Gregory, who first saw Blunt in the bullring. In 1862, at a bullfight in Madrid, Sir William was "struck by the extraordinary good looks of the young matador . . . and asking who he was, heard that he was an attache from the English Embassy, Wilfred Blunt" [Lady Gre- gory's preface to Blunt's diaries, cited by Fang, U, 163].
14. Packard: Frank Lucius P. , 1877-1942, Canadian author of such books as Greater
carved . . . by the brilliant Gaudier-Brzeska. . . ," So
reliquary
sculptor,
wrote in Poetry [vol. 3, no. 4. , March 1914, 220-223]. Edith Finch [Wilfred Scawen Blunt1 J reporting on a visit made to Blunt by Pound and Aldington says that Pound said: "I am trying to persuade them both into some kind of sanity, . . . Where there is neither decency nor art . . .
