The Cantos

[Benny Bunter]

I read somewhere that Blake's Marriage of heaven and hell is the first example of free verse in English, no idea if that's true though, a lot of academics tend to talk a lot shit a lot of the time, evidently

 

[catalog]

i've been reading the odd few lines here and there over the last few weeks... not really got a lot to say except they are interesting as they go, but not quite for the reason i thought they would be.

i never, for one, realised how interested he was in chinese history, i'm reading at random in the main but there's loads of tales about who did what.

i like his terse style, it feels very straightforward and readable, generally. of course I'm not getting every allusion and i've nt read any guides, sort of wanted to get a feel for it as it's own thing first.

was interested in his choice of abbreviations - cd and wd for example. feels like he's reaching towards his own way of expression, his own system a bit. there's a lot of patterns in it becoming visible.

 

[sus]

He was recalling efforts to spring Basil Bunting from a Paris jail: "...And the officer learning that I was a man of letters, and concerned with the welfare of another man of letters, produced from his pocket a poem of his own, with the lady's name running in acrostic down the initial letters, and when I had read it said in a tone of apology, 'Ça plait beaucoup aux dames'." ...[A long silence, the head thrown back, the eyes closed. Then, starting suddenly forward:] "Sometimes the guards ask me... to write poems... for them to give their sweethearts." "And do you?" "Why, yes!"

 

[version]

Canto III​

I sat on the Dogana’s steps
For the gondolas cost too much, that year,
And there were not “those girls”, there was one face,
And the Buccentoro twenty yards off, howling, “Stretti”,
And the lit cross-beams, that year, in the Morosini,
And peacocks in Koré’s house, or there may have been.

Gods float in the azure air,​

Bright gods and Tuscan, back before dew was shed.
Light: and the first light, before ever dew was fallen.
Panisks, and from the oak, dryas,
And from the apple, mælid,
Through all the wood, and the leaves are full of voices,
A-whisper, and the clouds bowe over the lake,
And there are gods upon them,
And in the water, the almond-white swimmers,
The silvery water glazes the upturned nipple,

As Poggio has remarked.​

Green veins in the turquoise,
Or, the gray steps lead up under the cedars.

My Cid rode up to Burgos,
Up to the studded gate between two towers,
Beat with his lance butt, and the child came out,
Una niña de nueve años,
To the little gallery over the gate, between the towers,
Reading the writ, voce tinnula:
That no man speak to, feed, help Ruy Diaz,
On pain to have his heart out, set on a pike spike
And both his eyes torn out, and all his goods sequestered,
“And here, Myo Cid, are the seals,
The big seal and the writing.”
And he came down from Bivar, Myo Cid,
With no hawks left there on their perches,
And no clothes there in the presses,
And left his trunk with Raquel and Vidas,
That big box of sand, with the pawn-brokers,
To get pay for his menie;
Breaking his way to Valencia.
Ignez de Castro murdered, and a wall
Here stripped, here made to stand.
Drear waste, the pigment flakes from the stone,
Or plaster flakes, Mantegna painted the wall.
Silk tatters, “Nec Spe Nec Metu.”

The Cantos Project - Companion to III

The Cantos Project is dedicated to the research of Ezra Pound's long poem The Cantos

ezrapoundcantos.org