I have been skimming the posts on canto 81 with considerable interest. It is
refreshing to see people attempting to crack an interpretive crux-of which
there are many in the Cantos. I cannot attempt to take account of the
various suggestions already offered, but my interest was sufficiently
aroused to take another look at canto 81.
 I don't say anything about the green casque in the following. I do lean
heavily to the notion that Pound is speaking of the vanity of others. I
believe that he does not primarily mean conceit or self-satisfaction, but
rather vanity as that which is incapable of fulfilment, as in "the vanity of
human wishes." Such an interpretation is strongly supported by the lines:

    Pull down thy vanity
    Thou art a beaten dog beneath the hail,
    A swollen magpie in a fitful sun,
    Half black half white
    Nor knowst'ou wing from tail
    Pull down thy vanity
    How mean thy hates
    Fostered in falsity,

Surely his point is that those of whom he speaks don't know their ass from
their elbow, and are swollen with a false pride in their knowledge and
competencies-in contrast to his own wisdom and omnicompetence. He adds
praise for his own behaviour as well considered, and even effective-as the
work of any true artist for knocking on doors and the like.

    Centaurs appear only three times in the Cantos, and each time the
meaning is rather obscure. The first occurrence is in a very obscure
passage, which closes Canto IV:

 Père Henri Jacques would speak with the Sennin, on Rokku,
 Mount Rokku between the rock and the cedars,
 Polhonac,
 As Gyges on Thracian platter set the feast,
 Cabestan, Tereus,
 It is Cabestan's heart in the dish, Vidal, or Ecbatan, upon the gilded
tower in Ecbatan
 Lay the god's bride, lay ever, waiting the golden rain.
 By Garonne. "Saave!"
 The Garonne is thick like paint,
 Procession,---"Et sa'ave, sa'ave, sa'ave Regina!"---
 Moves like a worm, in the crowd.
 Adige, thin film of images,
 Across the Adige, by Stefano, Madonna in hortulo,
 As Cavalcanti had seen her.
 The Centaur's heel plants in the earth loam.
 And we sit here ...
 there in the arena ...

 I know of no satisfactory gloss on these lines. I gave an interpretation of
them in A Light from Eleusis, but remained tentative, as I still do. In any
case, here he associates "the Centaur" with Mary as represented in a
garden-a common renaissance iconographical arrangement which combines the
virgin mother with pastoral imagery, thus associating her with pagan brides
of God, such as Danaë--whom Zeus visited as a shower of gold. A complicating
factor, is that in an uncollected letter to his father, Pound associated the
procession in honour of the Virgin with  superstition. I cite the letter of
1919 in Eleusis (Note 52. Pp. 293-4):

 The worms of the procession had three large antennae, and I hope to develop
the motive later, text clearly states that this vermiform object circulated
in the crowd at the Church of St. Nicholas in Toulouse. Not merely mediaeval
but black central African superstition and voodoo energy squalling infant,
general murk and epileptic religious hog wash with chief totem being
magnificently swung over whole.

The "chief totem" is the Christ Child. This letter suggests that Pound was
not in 1919 very respectful of the Catholic worship of the Madonna and
child, and implies that the "Madonno in hortulo" is a synecdoche for
superstition. However, we also know that Pound liked to stress the pagan
sources of Catholic worship, so perhaps the Virgin in the garden somewhat
escapes his censure. That hypothesis is strengthened by the his placing this
pastoral Virgin in Cavalcanti's vision. However, it is not clear how this
reading illuminates the centaur's heel planted in the earth loam.
 Terrell cites Pound's remark in the "Serious Artist" on Centaurs, and it is
helpful, for it sets out the standard interpretation of the Centaur as a
creature bridging the human and animal worlds-one therefore closer to the
pastoral and metamorphic pagan world celebrated in canto II:
"Poetry is a centaur. The thinking word-arranging, clarifying faculty must
move and leap with the energizing, sentient, musical faculties. It is
precisely the difficulty of this amphibious existence that keeps down the
census record of good poets." ("The Serious Artist," Literary Essays 52)
 We know that Pound thought that artists were the true prophets, in the
religious sense as spoke-persons for the divine, and this passage suggest
strongly that the centaur was for him, a kind of synecdoche for the artist
as one bridging the sentient and mental realms-hence his foot planted in the
earth loam, perhaps preparatory to a leap above the earth.

 The next occurrence of centaurs is not until the Pisan Cantos, near the end
of canto 79:

 We have lain here amid kalicanthus and sword-flower
 The heliads are caught in wild rose vine
 The smell of pine mingles with rose leaves
 O lynx, be many
 of spotted fur and sharp ears.
 O lynx, have your eyes gone yellow,
 with spotted fur and sharp ears?

 Therein is the dance of the bassarids
 Therein are centaurs
 And now Priapus with Faunus
 The Graces have brought
 Her cell is drawn by ten leopards

This is another "garden" passage, celebrating the pagan world of gods first
articulated in Canto III:

 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,

That the centaurs are placed in that world, supports my hypothesis that they
are synecdochic of the artist, who is sensitive to both the sentient and the
mental worlds-who is, in short, a visionary.
 So, when we come to the line in canto 81, "The ant's a centaur in his
dragon world", readers of the Cantos are primed to read "centaur" as a
synecdoche for the visionary artist. But that doesn't make any very obvious
sense. How is the ant an artist in his dragon world, and how are we to
interpret "dragon world"? Though dragons do turn up a half dozen times or so
in the Cantos, none of the occurrences appear to be synecdochic im the
manner of centaurs. So there is little help there.
 As centaurs are conventional figures of "natural wisdom," so ants are
conventional figures of industry and cooperation, since they are social
animals like bees, divided into a queen, workers, and warriors. But none of
these attributes are shared with centaurs-or with artists. It would make
sense to interpret the comparison as drawing attention to their halfway
status between a social animal and a solitary one-like the dragon.
 Such an interpretation seems a little  forced to me, and a poor yield from
such a striking line. However, it is supported by Pound's frequent return to
Dante's sense of humans as social or friendly animals in the latter cantos-
a "compagnevole animale." He begins it with the remark,

   Dant' had it,
   Some sense of civility
   & from Avon (whence they do not suspect it)
   As in "dragons' spleens",
   or "a pelting farm", (93/645)

The appearance of dragons in this passage may or may not be pertinent.
Terrell identifies the dragons spleens as from Shakespeare's King John, and
the "pelting farm" from Richard II. It's not clear to me what the cited
passages have to do with civility. They sound more like jingoism and rash
adventurism to me. Perhaps we can take dragons to be synecdochic for savage,
bloody passion-certainly that is what Chatillon in King John means by the
phrase. The "pelting farm" passage alludes to a lack of attachment to the
soil-indeed, the King John passage also bespeaks an adventurism that
reflects a weak attachment to one's native soil, and a rapacious attitude to
the property of one's neighbours. Such a characterization of the English is,
of course, historically accurate for he period of the so-called hundred
years war, which was really 100 years of English raiding of French towns and
estates.
 Pound's point seems to be  that both Dante and Shakespeare had some sense
of civility, as he explains a little lower down:

   The Bard of Avon mentioned the subject,
   Dante mentioned the subject,
   and the lit profs discuss other passages
   in abuleia
   or in total unconsciousness (93/648)

However, he may mean that Both Shakespeare and Dante mentioned it, but on
opposite sides of the fence. It is worth remembering that Pound was
virulently anti-British from about 1932, and remained so for the rest of his
life. His point here might well be to contrast the British bard with the
Italian epic poet.
 If all of the foregoing is taken together, we can attempt once again to
read, "the ant's a centaur in his dragon world." Now we have the dragon as a
synecdoche for savage rapacity, and the ant as a conventional synecdoche for
a social animal

    "Not political", Dante says, a
    "compagnevole animale"
    Even if some do coagulate into cities
     polis, politike
    reproducteur,
    contribuable. Paradis peint
    but meaning to plough (93/663)

But we still have the puzzle of the ant being represented as equivalent to
the centaur-a half-way creature like a mermaid or Leucothea. Perhaps the ant
is half-way between civility and savagery, whereas the dragon-like the
English-is purely savage. This reading is very much the one I offered above,
without the support of the later dragon references. It is the best I can do.
I believe others have offered a similar reading, but without the contextual
support I have offered.


Leon Surette
English Dept.
University of Western Ontario
London, Ont.
N6A 3K7