Week 18: Pound's Pisan Cantos - cursory notes

[cf notes on earlier Cantos]

Images - sensory - the smells - mint under the tent/ sausages etc...
These act as fragments of sense in what otherwise seems to me a rather nonsensical series of poems...

[Remember, Mussolini has just been hanged - this is the end of a dream, when he is somewhat despised for his politics and his actions during a time he was doing what he thought was right, or fitting. (Maybe "meet" is the right term here.)]

cf Canto 2 -> Metamorphosis.
Rhyme -> situational/ historical/ social/ linguistic ...
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Dynamic context of the images, a series with light put through them - like the cinematograph.

Images of eyes/ viewing: Athena with owl's eyes, Aphrodite with almond eyes. This all links in to the insect world (the wasp, the ant)
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Libretto from Canto 81: "thy vanity" "what thy lovest well"
- a lyrical impulse behind all this. (resurgance of the self)
- the tradition uplifting, a heritage to be salvaged.

cf Elizabethan songwriters - madrigals

"eidos" - totality of experience, awareness of knowing.

"to have with decency' - Wilfrid Blunt - a "fine old age" - embodiment of the tradition

last 2 lines: slightly prosaic - to stop the music?

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Canto 82: views, birds on a wire
- the immediacy and actuality of death "at 3om for an instant"
- a theme is struck - going back to past experience, but given the chance, he'd do it again.
- death of Agamemnon/ cf death of Shelley - drowned, weighed down with a copy of Keats' poetry in his pocket...

September 8 - Molly Bloom's birthday - day of the Virgin Mary... 3pm - when Jesus died...

cf Whitman, drowning, rhythm of the sea...

Gaia terra - sinking into the mother earth

Cthonic - of the earth (cf H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulu 'mythos')