Finished the Fifty-First Canto and yet not even a quarter of the way finished!

This one is equal parts glorious and frustrating. It opens thusly:

Shines
in the mind of heaven   God
who made it
more than the sun
in our eye.
Fifth element; mud; said Napoleon 

The rare, explicitly religious reference (though the Cantos have been chock full of references to popes and priests, they appear more in their temporal capacity than spiritual) then almost immediately knocked down by the ‘mud’ and ‘Napoleon’ line.

Almost immediately following, he goes on a tirade about usury or ‘usura’ (he wields the latter almost as if it were the name of some Greek deity. as when he writes I am Geryon twin with usura). Throughout though, he uses strongly archaic language – like a pre-Raphaelity poem – and some hints of a back to the land aesthetic. Much of it is beautiful. Like some other sections, I am reminded of nineteenth century translations of classical Greek and Roman poets.

He ends with a disconcerting switch to what we might call ‘Pound’s Chinese style.’ The next to last line reads very much like a line from one of Pound’s translations from the Chinese: in the eel-fishers basket

Then, he ends the Canto – and also this section of Cantos, for a new one, LII-LXXI, begins after this – with the (I assume) Chinese character shown in the photograph. Any one understand its meaning or provenance?

Revolution ‘ said Mr Adams ‘ took place in the
            minds of the people
            in the fifteen years before Lexington ‘ ,

I take this opening stanza to be a reference to John Adams and the American Revolution, but the entire rest of the Canto is about Italy (there is a reference to Marengo, and famous early victory by Napoleon in Italy, so I take the years referenced to be the very early nineteenth century, though other references, such as to the Medici, counter that – but who ever said a poem had to be chronologically consistent?) and finance and frankly I do not understand how these first lines fit in with the whole.

He gets more ‘normal’ towards the end, but the first half of the Fiftieth Canto has Pound playing a great deal with different line indentations.

Sadly, we also see this line:

Pius sixth, vicar of foolishness, no Jew God
wd. have kept THAT in power.

Arguably, this is the most explicitly anti-semitic line to appear yet.

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.