Perhaps it is my limited understanding of Chinese history. I know where incidents in the Italian renaissance fit into the larger story of western civilization. I cannot say that I understand how events in Chinese history fit into a larger narrative.

But, to make some vaguely useful comment on this particular Canto, he shows some particular enmity towards the eunuch or the ‘castrat.’ They seem especial villains here.

Seeing as how Pound rarely wrote of love or intimacy, it seems odd that these figures would be the target of such prominent dislike. Unless he was uncomfortable with sexuality and eunuchs reminded him of sex by the very absence of theirs.

I can’t say. Truly I don’t know enough about his personal history here to say with anything like certainty.

The Fifty-Sixth Canto, even more than in earlier ones, juxtaposes depictions of history (still Chinese) with American slang: licked ’em, swat, gimcracks, damned rascals, etc.

One line that stuck out for me was this:

And litterati fought fiercer than other men to out the mogul

Was this how Pound saw himself? A ‘litterati’ (sic) standing against the ‘mogul?’

And who were the mogul?

The illiterate and uncultured hoi poli?

Or are these moguls the moguls of finance? The bankers and financiers Pound blamed for so many ills?

This Canto is very much like the previous one – a history of Chinese rulers with a focus on economics (viewed from the top, of course – no Marxian social history for Pound). In fact, it picks up with the other one left off: LIV ended at 756 a.d. and this one picks up at 805 a.d.

I am beginning to see some sense in how Pound arranges his stanzas here. To a limited extent, the Canto is broken into stanzas that represent incidents or mini-themes within it.

Much of the economic discussion is about taxes.

He also throws in some little futurisms – at least relative to the topic of medieval Chinese history – such as:

Y TSONG his son brought a jazz age HI-TSONG

I’ll admit it. This Canto is intimidatingly long. Fifteen pages isn’t much for a piece of prose, but for a dense work of poetry on a topic I know little about…

The topic is, much as before, Chinese history. One of the conceits (also used in Canto LIII) is to put in the margin the date at which an event or conversation occurred. More than a thousand years are covered.

Pound is playing with lines much more than in the past: with length and indentation. I won’t say it is random because I will play with indentation myself and it is not random for me, but what gives it meaning is not form, so far as I can tell, but the unique artistic, literary, and historical inclinations of Pound himself.

He also plays a lot with capitalization. The names of rulers are typically in all caps, but he also throws a few curves our way. For example, the one time he also capitalizes ‘OUT’:

a.d. 444, putt ’em OUT

‘OUT’ takes on the form of something pun-ish because, we also have ‘OUEN TI’ and ‘OU TI.’

There is also what could be a pun in the line:

Then OU went gay and SUNG ended.

I don’t know for certain this is a pun, because I don’t know if  ‘out’ was used to refer to making one’s homosexuality public when Pound wrote this one. Certainly, if it was, we would have to consider this a bit of word play by the poet.

We also see Pound using at a times kind of rat-a-tat-tat style that I associate with movies from the 30s and 40s – a hyper stylized rendition of the speech patterns from an old gangster movie.

We still see a lot on the development of financial instruments, taxes, and payments, but less so than in the past. Like some of his earlier meditations on Renaissance Italy, we read a lot about the uses of power – and in my reading, what I see as abuses of power. Particularly the discrepancies between how a peasant or ordinary citizen experiences government policies and how an emperor imagines his policies will act out in the world at large.

The Fifty-Third Canto might be the longest yet (twelve pages) and, at first glance, appears almost like an academic chapter, filled with Chinese characters, references to figures from the history of China.

Woven within a sort of history of Chinese rulers (and other figures, as well, but it is hardly post-colonial historiography that Pound practices), is another tale, that of the development of accounting techniques (like using knotted rope to record figures) and early money (metal disks, pierced in the middle so that they can be strung onto a string). Within also are admonishments to rulers on how govern effectively and justly.

And MOU-OUANG said:
                 ‘ as a tiger against me,
                          a man of thin ice in thaw
aid me in the darkness of rule’ 

While I won’t pretend to offer a definitive meaning (particularly since it is a fragment taken out of a much larger whole), I simply want to draw attention to that Asian style of writing – which, as I have noted before, should perhaps be better described as ‘style of English translations of Asian literature.’

As noted earlier, this begins a new section of The Cantos, though I can’t say whether this was a determination made by Pound or by the publishers at New Directions. Judging by the notes (warning?) that open this new section, we are entering into some Cantos heavy on the poet’s Chinese phase.

Know then:
             Toward summer when the sun is in Hyades
Sovran is Lord of the Fire
                  to this month are birds.
with bitter smell and with the odour of burning
To the hearth god, lungs of the victim
              The green frog lifts up his voice
                  and the white latex is in the flower

It goes on for some time in such a fashion. I would rather think of this passage, and similar transcendent and lyrical passages throughout, than on the most explicitly anti-semitic line yet, which occurs early in the Fifitieth Canto and which I don’t intend to repeat here.

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.