The Sixteenth Canto has some shifts in tone and meaning within it. The section opens up with a continuation of the earlier focus on the degradation and infection of the body:

And I bathed myself with acid to free myself
                  of the hell ticks,
Scales, fallen louse eggs.

It then seems to return to a focus on Renaissance Italy (Sigismundo reappears), but then it becomes clear that the real subject has become the First World War. He name drops Wyndham Lewis and Earnest Hemingway and Pound’s friend, the sculptor Henri Gaudier who died in the war.

The put Aldington on Hill 70, in a trench
               dug though corpses
With a lot of kids sixteen,
Howling and crying for their mamas,

There are long stretches in French, including the tragic phrase: “Liste officielle des morts 5,000,000”.