This one is another attempt to merge Pound’s historical interest in finance with what I have been referring to as the poetic (which is an amazingly inadequate and problematic term to be using in this context. does using it this way suggest, for example, that the work of Kenneth Goldsmith is not ‘poetic’ and hence not poetry? should I used another phrase, like lyrical? but that word also is problematic, too, isn’t it?). Certainly it is more successful than many such efforts.

The second stanza has the first instance of a word, which appears in various forms throughout, and which I have identified as key:

FIXED in the soul, nell’ anima, of the Illustrious College
They had been ten years proposing such a Monte,
That is a species of bank–damn good bank, in Siena

To me, the key word is “Monte” (which also appears as ‘mount’ and ‘mont’).

I think that this is actually intended to reference the word ‘mountebank,’ which of course means a financial swindler or fraud, which naturally follows from Pound’s opinion of the world of finance and banking.