The Eighth Canto is by far my least favorite of those I have read so far. The style is neither particularly interesting nor inventive and the content is 95% just some lazy recitations of incidents from the political and military history of the Italy during the Renaissance. Next, please.

I suspect this will become a pattern, but once again, I am understanding less of what Pound is saying. And I am not taking the time really study up on the references he drops nor to translate all the lines written in Italian, French, and ancient Greek.

But despite it all, without such labors, one also finds passages of great transcendence:

And the life goes, mooning upon bare hills;
Flame leaps from the hand, the rain is listless,
Yet drinks the thirst from our lips,
                   solid as echo,
Passion to breed a form in shimmer of rain-blue;
But Eros drowned, drowned, heavy-half dead with tears
                  For dead Sicheus. 

I’m also seeing more and more contrapositions of the ancient and medieval past with contemporary language and objects (jazz, for example, rears its head).

I’m not ashamed to admit that I understand less and less as we move on (and we are only a tiny fraction of the way through the Cantos).

The Sixth Canto features references to Eleanor of Aquitaine and her first husband, King Louis II of France (as did the Fifth Canto) and to her husbands’ (she had three – including King Henry II of England) and children’s (including King Richard I, Coeur-de-Lion, of England) relationship to the Outremer and the Crusades, including to Acre, the last of the cities held by western Crusaders to fall.

In fact, insofar as I comprehend this, it seems to be entirely about the fascinating life of Eleanor.

Pound is starting to hit his stride here, with the archaic and arcane mixtures one expects: Ancient Rome, Greece, and Egypt mixed with Italy and even a little bit of medieval England. But we don’t yet see those stanzas or turns of phrase that simply blow your mind yet.

I did, though, appreciate the lines:

Is smothered beneath a mule,
                      a poet’s ending. 

The Fourth Canto begins to truly look like what one expects of the Cantos. Though the lines often seem to refer to some sort of narrative, they rarely refer to the same narrative.

This is where we see Pound’s obsession with words as individual objects and his use of words for their qualities, in and of themselves, rather than, necessarily, in relation to each other (as in coherent sentences, stanzas, or paragraphs).

He also starts digging deeper into his bag or erudition. For example, referring to the church at “Poictiers” – “Poictiers” being an old English way of spelling the French town of Poitiers.

And, for the first time, he starts mixing Chinese names and influences from Pound’s own studies and translations of Chinese poetry.

The Third Canto consists of the first person musings about the fall of “Myo Cid” (or “Mio Cid” – literally, My Lord; refers to the great Spanish hero of the Reconquista, El Cid).

Though writing about a Spaniard, the person musing is clearly in Italy. To me, this Canto reads as if it has moved away from the distancing mythologizing of the first two. I was struck by the strong impression that the “I” was truly Ezra Pound himself and that Myo Cid was a personal metaphor for some hero of his that suffered an undeserved fall from grace.

Much like the First Canto, the Second Canto reads like an section of a narrative poem (though, as befitting the Second Canto, it reads as if a little further along into the story than the First). But it does not necessarily read as a continuation of the “narrative” implied in the First Canto.

The Second is also, dare I say, more character driven. It is also more explicitly about a journey of some sort. To my eyes, it reads more like an Odyssean tale – someone returning after years away from home, both older and wiser than when he left.

Formally, Pound has yet to do anything particularly innovative or experimental and his references are primarily to that birthplace of Western culture, Ancient Greece. Challenging to read? Yes. But not yet beyond the pale.

You would hardly expect what will follow based on reading the First Canto. Drawing on Greek mythology (including the two-sexed Tiresias who so prominently featured in T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland). Based on the First Canto, you would think that the Cantos were an epic, mythologized narrative. Specifically, the story of a journey, such as those taken by Odysseus, Jason, Aeneas, and Orpheus. But the Cantos, as you probably know, are anything but a narrative.