Burt's observation certainly forces one to reconsider!
I don't usually consider EP, in the Cantos, as a poet
much given to Empsonian ambiguities of language, but
this passage seems to me to be very special in this
regard.  The ambiguities, for me, become inescapable.
You cannot deny the *conflicting* meanings of "casque,"
nor even that the primary meaning of "casque" is a
literal helmet--nor the irony of Pound's using the
French word for helmet in relation to the French Paquin.
I will also add another little annoying possibility in
relation to the ant.  There is, you all know, the creature
called the army ant.  It moves in large hordes from place
to place.  It's also called the "legionary ant."

So put all that in your double-barrelled pipe and smoke it.

==Dan

At 11:56 AM 8/23/00 -0400, you wrote:
>I haven't been following the "green casques" thread very closely, and
>I've erased a good many messages, so someone may have made this point
>already.  But the association of the green casques with army helmets
>seems to me totally wrong. I have always associated the "Paquin"
>passage with the final lines of Canto LXXX, five pages previous:
>
>as the young lizard extends his leopard spots
>    along the grass-blade seeking the green midge half an ant-size
>[then five lines about London]
>and if her green elegance
>    remains on this side of my rain ditch
>    puss lizard will lunch on some other T-bone
>
>sunset grand couturier.
>
>We have here an association of "green" with "elegance," and Paquin was
>in fact a couturier. A midge is a small fly, and its closed wings might
>look like a "casque."  But I also think that Carroll Terrell is correct
>in association the green casque with the cocoon from which the wasp
>emerges, in Canto LXXXIII.
>
>Burt Hatlen
>
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