I suspect this will become a pattern, but once again, I am understanding less of what Pound is saying. And I am not taking the time really study up on the references he drops nor to translate all the lines written in Italian, French, and ancient Greek.
But despite it all, without such labors, one also finds passages of great transcendence:
And the life goes, mooning upon bare hills;
Flame leaps from the hand, the rain is listless,
Yet drinks the thirst from our lips,
solid as echo,
Passion to breed a form in shimmer of rain-blue;
But Eros drowned, drowned, heavy-half dead with tears
For dead Sicheus.
I’m also seeing more and more contrapositions of the ancient and medieval past with contemporary language and objects (jazz, for example, rears its head).
“mooning” reminds me of a Jorge Luis Borges story (forget the title, of course) about a language in which there are no nouns, only verbs. thus, “the mooning rose in the nighting” (or something like that).
good stuff here
There is some wonderful stuff here. Like a lot of folks, I fell in love with some of those early Imagist poems we found in our high school English textbooks, but the Cantos has page after page on which you can thousands of stanzas and lines equivalent to his “In a Station of the Metro.”