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By Root 814 0

a religious poet. His cautions against abstraction in art serve the spiritual ends of the work; they are not merely advice on style. An Italian country priest once turned a corner of the temple of St. Francis in Rimini—the temple erected by that hero of the Cantos, Sigismondo Malatesta—to find the poet bowing to the stone elephants carved in the side of the building rather than to the “altar furniture.” Pound was an idolater in the old sense: he put himself in the service of images. One of the most remarkable things about the Cantos is Pound’s ability to convey a sense of the undivided light in concrete speech:

rain beat as with colour of feldspar

in the gloom, the gold gathers the light against it

with a sky wet as ocean / flowing with liquid slate

Such light is in sea-caves

e la bella Ciprigna

where copper throws back the flame from pinned eyes, the flames rise to fade in green air.

And in old age:

When one’s friends hate each other

how can there be peace in the world?

Their asperities diverted me in my green time.

A blown husk that is finished

but the light sings eternal

a pale flare over marshes

where the salt hay whispers to tide’s change …

While teaching in Indiana, long before he had discovered Chinese written characters, Pound wrote to William Carlos Williams: “I am interested in art and ecstasy, ecstasy which I would define as the sensation of the soul in ascent, art as the expression and sole means … of passing on that ecstasy to others.” In an essay on the art of fiction Flannery O’Connor once wrote that “the world of the fiction writer is full of matter”; fiction is an “incarnational art,” she says, full of “those concrete details of life that make actual the mystery of our position on earth.” I imagine Pound would have broadened the stroke: all art is incarnational, full of matter, and for the same reason, to make actual the mystery. Pound is right: some knowledge cannot survive abstraction, and to preserve this knowledge we must have art. The liquid light, the nous, the fecundity of nature, the feeling of the soul in ascent—only the imagination can articulate our apprehension of these things, and the imagination speaks to us in images.

Confucius (or Kung Fu Tseu, as Pound usually has it) first appears in Canto 13. For the question of “Kungian order” the important lines are these:

And Kung said, and wrote on the bo leaves:

If a man have not order within him He can not spread order about him;

And if a man have not order within him

His family will not act with due order;

And if the prince have not order within him He can not put order in his dominions.

“The principle of good is enunciated by Confucius,” Pound had explained in his magazine, The Exile. “It consists in establishing order within oneself. This order or harmony spreads by a sort of contagion without specific effort. The principle of evil consists in messing into other people’s affairs.”

Clark Emery speaks of a “tension” in the Cantos between Eleusinian fecundity and Confucian order, but I am not sure it is immediately apparent why any such tension should exist. Fecundity is not without order. Order inheres in all that is fertile in nature, and the liquid light of the nous, Pound tells us, induces order in those who perceive it.

This liquid is certainlya

property of the mind

nec accidens est but an element

in the mind’s make-up …

Hast ′ou seen the rose in the steel dust

(or swansdown ever?) so light is the urging, so ordered

the dark

petals of iron we who have passed over Lethe.

In art and in human affairs there is a force corresponding to that which has given swansdown its beauty, and that force is virtù (“in the light of light is the virtù,” says the same Canto). Just as electromagnetism induces order in a pile of iron filings, so virtù induces order in the works of man. And like the magnet, or so the image leads us to believe, this virtù creates order by its presence alone, “by a sort of contagion without specific effort.”

At this point, however, we