tim,
    yer right,...pardon the lapse.
clearly god like everything is always dual -
apollonian/dionysian, jehovah/jesus.

and its certainly a recognition-event poem,
but as such it signals the arrival in the speaker
of the lyrical, not religious, sensibility,
...the heightened sense (wonderfull-ness) of the simple,
unmediated, sensual moments of the circumambient existential present.
pure lyricism, haiku, embedded in longish stretches
of rhetoric, is ep's poesis
...so i agree with carrol cox,  his paganism is stilted, effect....
...and that, finally, he's not a poet of the grande narrative (religion,
myth, archetype, allegory,...)



bob


----- Original Message -----
From: Tim Romano <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Wednesday, June 14, 2000 7:32 AM
Subject: Re: Pound myth and religion


> Bob,
> One could certainly relate The Tree to Yeat's Leda and the Swan or
> Veronica's Napkin, or to poems by Graves, or to films by Cocteau. Not
> because of any influences, however, but simply because they're all about
the
> same kind of liminal experience.
>
> Eliot is "religious" in the western smitten-by-guilt augustinian
tradition.
> Pound was a pagan. How can we speak of the Anglican religion and the
> religions of Bali? The word encompasses a wide range of practices and
> beliefs.
>
> This is not a poem that celebrates the "carnal" but rather the semi-divine
> nature of humanity (the gods must be "_kindly_ entreated"); the "elm-oak"
> alludes to the halves of the soul, the other quotations I adduced will
bear
> this out.
>
> Tim