I had trouble with the Twenty-Second Canto.

It opened up with stanzas that seemed to discuss the intersection of finance and military and the costs of war. There’s also an interesting visual:

NO MEMBER OF THE MILITARY
OF WHATEVER RANK
IS PERMITTED WITHIN THE WALLS
OF THIS CLUB

The above stanza was within a cartouche designed to look like a sign hanging as if from a nail.

But then… a reference to a rabbi.

Knowing as one does Pound’s anti-semitic views, any mention of rabbis tends leave one feeling sick in the stomach.

The Twenty-First Canto is mostly another segment from Renaissance Italy, again with the obsession of accounting and financial relationships.

But then, he manages to insert something like this:

And the sea with tin flash in the sun-dazzle,
                                      Like dark wine in the shadows.
” Wind between the sea and the mountains”
  ‘The tree-spheres half dark against sea
                                      half clear against sunset,
The sun’s keel freighted with with cloud,
And after that hour, dry darkness
Floating flame in the air, gonade in organdy,
Dry flamelet, a petal borne in the wind.
Gigneti kalon.
Impentrable as the ignorance of old women.

Dazzling stuff. I notice that much of his most gorgeous writing is about the sea. Did he merely find it particularly inspiring or is there something more to it?

The Twentieth Canto is a beautiful piece of work. Along with gloriously and beautifully poetic passages, it is also rife with depictions of a man’s (Pound’s?) idyllic life in Europe, interacting with intellectuals, artists, and generally with a crowd of interesting friends. In between are references to Odysseus and to his lover Circe (are these metaphors for the journey of Pound and his contemporaries or “flashbacks” to the ancient world?).

In the sunlight, gate cut by shadow;
And then the faceted air:
Floating. Below, sea churning shingle.
Floating, each on invisible raft

The Nineteenth Canto is very odd. It revolves around a coal mining enterprise (as is Pound’s wont, the emphasis is not on the actual business of removing coal from the ground, but on the financing and upstairs activity) and an entrepreneur with a thick, uneducated sounding (to my ears) accent:

And he said: I gawt ten thousand dollars tew mak ’em,

There are also some references to Marx and what I think are references to the revolutionary tendencies of Russian immigrants. This being Pound, one has to wonder – are we to suppose these Russian immigrants are also Jewish?

Not terribly poetic, but one feels like it’s part of some important story about the evolution of the twentieth century, but that one can’t quite understand it or see the whole picture yet.

The Eighteenth Canto opens with Marco Polo describing the use of paper money and letters or credit in Kublai Khan’s empire, which reminds me of that wonderful book by Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities.

The rest is dedicated to describing incidences of manufacturing – plus a funny little anecdote about Napoleon.

Though lacking in lines that are traditionally poetic, I very much enjoyed reading this Canto though I couldn’t tell you why or what it is that appealed to me.

The Seventeenth Canto is a beautiful poem. It opens with the wonderfully evocative line, “So that the vines burst from my fingers.” For the first time thus far, Pound has almost written a pastoral poem (not strictly speaking, “pastoral” as being about shepherds, but more like Wordsworth’s The Excursion or Virgil’s Eclogues). He even manages to write about man-made structures in the loving terms usually reserved for nature.

”                    There, in the forest of marble,
”                    the stone trees — out of water —
”                    the arbours of stone —
”                    marble leaf, over leaf,
”                    silver, steel over steel,
”                    silver beaks rising and crossing,
”                    prow set against prow,
”                    stone, ply over ply,
”                    the gilt beams flare of an evening”