Unlike Leon, who reads the passage as Pound criticizing others who don't
know their "asses from their elbows", I read this passage as a
self-assessment, half apology, half apologia. On what grounds?

1.
                As a lone ant from a broken ant-hill
    from the wreckage of Europe, ego scriptor.        (C76)


2.  "master thyself"  --  the central idea of this passage ... the self is a
dual nature-- the master-self and the unruly-self.  The self who sees with
right reason and the self that cannot see through Vanity .

This idea is reinforced by the other symbols of duality in the passage, most
notably, the magpie, "half black half white". We saw the same idea in action
in "Dr. Williams' Position", by the way:

                "He was able to observe national phenomena without
necessity for constant vigilance over himself, there was no instinctive
fear that if he forgot himself he might be like some really unpleasant
Ralph Waldo..."

3.  The poet summons up the shades of Lawes and Jenkyns; they are his
judges, and ask him:

                Hast 'ou fashioned so airy a mood
                    To draw up leaf from root
                Hast 'ou found    a cloud     so light
                    As seemed  neither mist  nor shade?


4.  Then "resolve me".   Logopeia here draws attention to the self-duality
again. See 2 above.

5.  The passage is homiletic in tone.  The theme of the homily: "The ant's a
centaur in his dragon world."
The minister is not without guilt...and yet it is his prerogative to throw
stones...as long as some of them fall on his own head.  "Vanity" as Leon
rightly points out, is to be understood in the context of western homiletic
tradition. In its broadest meaning, Vanity is the belief that Man can do or
create anything which endures or which has meaning that can stand the test
of Time,  arrogant anthropocentrism:

                       ...... it is not man
Made courage, or made order, or made grace.

Only the wider perspective saves man from such vanity.  The ant's a centaur
only in "HIS" dragon world... that is, only from his own point of view.  A
wider view shows it to be a rather piddling small creature.  And yet Man is
endowed with Will and Intelligence and has therefore an obligation to Act in
spite of his puniness in the scope of creation:

            "But to have done instead of not doing
                         this is not vanity"

Hamlet's question, resolved.  "Whether 'tis nobler..."


Tim Romano