The Forty-Ninth Canto is an anachronism, reflecting back on Pound’s earlier, imagist poems and on his translations from the Chinese. The lines and stanzas mostly depict a leisurely (though not indolent) rural life.

Autumn moon;  hills rise about lakes
against sunset
Evening is like a curtain of cloud,

This is very much reflective of Pounds “wet black bough” period than it is of what we have read so far.

It’s often beautiful, though sometimes also a little trite sounding, and very different from the dense, political, and historical Cantos we have been reading.

Eighty percent of more of this Canto is all about banking and finance (again). It opens up thusly:

And if money be rented
Who shd pay rent on that money?

But instead of using this to jump off into a philosophical or historical poetics, he seems to just dropping historical names, places, and dates (Martin Van Buren, the Horn, 1926) without pulling it all together into a coherent and enjoyable whole.

Fortunately, he makes it all worthwhile with his final, gorgeous stanza.

Falling Mars in the air
bough to bough, to the stone bench
where was an ox in smith’s sling hoisted for shoeing
where was spire-top a-level the grass yard
Then towers, high over chateau –
Fell with stroke after stroke, jet avenger
bent, rolled, severed and then swallowed limb after limb
Hauled off the but of that carcass, 20 feet up a tree trunk,
Here three ants have killed a great worm. There
Mars in the air, fell, flew.
Employed, past tense; at the Lido, Venezia
an old man with a basket of stones,
that was, said the elderly lady, when the beach costumes
were longer,
and if the wind was, the old man placed a stone.

This one has Pound’s knowledge of classical literature in full bloom – including a reference to Tiresias.

I mention him/her (Tiresias spent seven years as a woman, according to Greek mythology, in addition to being the seer who identified the truth behind the prophecy that so baffled Oedipus) because Tiresias was prominent in Eliot’s The Wasteland. Pound was heavily involved in the editing and revising of that poem and one wonders if Pound had anything to with his insertion into the poem – or whether Eliot’s inspirational use of that classical figure inspired Pound to include him.

However, compared to Tiresias, more of the poem is devoted to references to Odysseus, though the overall feel is more pastoral than epic. In fact, the overall feel reminds me more of Virgil’s Georgics than Homer. The style is very much in keeping with nineteenth and early twentieth century translations of classical literature.