Erik,
In what we might call 'mythic' or 'Ovidian' metamorphosis, the process of
change is ultimately arrested: human beings become new creatures whose
achieved forms manifest an essential psychological truth about the human
beings undergoing the change.  For Pound, metamorphosis IS the illuminated
and illuminating final form in which the mythic process ends, though as you
say, he does attempt to in re-enacting the experience:
 
> These
> transformations, for Ovid and the young Pound, attempt to capture or
> mimic the transformation as it is taking place; possibly like a vortex?
 
The Cantos are often mimetic on this plane.
 
When Pound became politicized by the war, he found the Heraclitean notion of
flux to be an apt philosophical metaphor for cultural and political
decadence and decay.  Heraclitus said that in dry places the soul is wisest
and best --far from the indefinite muddy edge of the river. Pound prized the
well-defined, the clean line, the "sculpture of rhyme."
 
Tim Romano
 
Erik Volpe wrote:
 
> Tim,
> Pound's magic moment or moment of metamorphosis seems at first Ovidian,
> but from what you are saying sounds more like Heracleitus by the time
> Hugh Selwyn Mauberley is written? Possibly the difference in the
> transformation that takes place in early poems like The Tree from the
> flux which is presented in   Mauberley symbolizes Pound's turn from
> romance poet to political poet. "The poet writes about love and not
> about the empire": what happened to that? Heracleitan flux seems to be
> what Pound later was trying to sculpt form from. Pound wished to stop
> this motion or river, quite the antithesis of a "metamorphosis" that
> occurs with no intention of pausing for anyone, let alone a poet. >
>
>