Now Ezra Pound on the poetic image: "...a radiant node or cluster;...what i can, and must perforce, call a VORTEX, from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing.
A patterned integrity accessible to the mind; topologicallly stable; subject to variations in intensity; brought into the domain of the senses by a particular interaction of words."in decency one can only call it a vortex.....Nomina sunt consequentia rerum"
For the vortex is not the water but a patterned energy made visible by the water.
A patterned energy made visible by the water. Pound did not chance upon such a conception lightly. Patterns made visible has occupied him when he wrote in 1912 of "our kinship to the vital universe, to the tree and the living rock," having "about us the universe of fluid force, and below us the germinal universe of wood alive, of stone alive": man being "chemically speaking... a few buckets of water, tied up in a complicated sort of figleaf," but capable of having his thoughts in him "as the thought of the tree is in the seed." "energy creates pattern"
...Thirty years later, in Pisa he closed the 74th canto with a double image ofpatterned energy: the magnet's "rose in the steel dust" and the fountain's sculptured flow through which passes renewing water, tossing a bright ball. The same passage mentions the winds Zephyrus and Apeliota, moving energies so stable they have names, and cites Verlaine's comparison of the soul's life to the fountain's....