Tim Romano wrote:
> How, then, do you interpret the line in its first appearance in the poem?
> It's used twice. The poem juxtaposes two (very different?) imperialist
> acts:
>
> IN THE NAME OF GOD THE MOST GLORIOUS MR. D'ARCY
> is permitted for 50 years to dig up the subsoil of Persia
>
> ...
>
> PLEASING TO CARTHEGINIANS: HANNO
> that he ply beyond pillars of Herakles
> 60 ships of armada to lay out Phoenician cities
>
> The first seems to be simple exploitation of natural resource.
No -- the race for Persian oil was one of the sources of World War
I. A very modern kind of imperialism was involved. There's almost
a full column of references to Iran in the Index to Lenin's *Collected
Works*.
> The latter
> seems to be a founding, a spreading of civilization. To lump them together
> seems to overlook the distinction Pound was trying to make.
But the distinction (if there is one) could not be made without first lumping
them together. And at least off hand the repeated line would seem to
join rather than separate the two explorations. I've never checked, but
I would think it probable that Zaretsky would have been involved in
Persian oil -- and I presume Morgan and Zaretsky are the "same" in
Pound's demonology.
>
> Carrol Cox's "imperial clutter" might be applied to the "seignieurial
> splendours" (read vain trappings ) of the first example of
> empire("haberdashery, clocks, ormoulu, brocatelli, tapestries, unreadable
> volumes bound in tree-calf, half-morocco, morocco, tooled edges, green
> ribbons, flaps, farthingales fichus, cuties, shorties, pinkies et
> etera") ---but desire to escape that clutter of vanities is not a
> satisfactory explanation of the force of the line "Out of which things
> seeking an exit" the second time it is used in the canto.
Perhaps it is my merely personal response, but it seems to me Canto 40
in many ways echoes Canto 29. Both do end with a thrust out beyond
the towers of Hercules, and the "And lest it pass with the day's news /
Thrown out with the daily paper" has, for me, a similar "feel" to "Out of
which things seeking an exit." In both cantos there are various kinds of
clutter (not all of it negatively judged) climaxing with a burst into a
cleanly cut "beyond":
Went on into darkness,
Saw naught above but close dark,
Weight of ice on the fuselage
Borne into the tempest, black cloud wrapping their wings . . .
(Canto 29, 139)
Could it be that with all his venom against clutter Pound also
(and in this he would have been correct) saw it as an essential
part of "civilization" but a part from which one had to periodically
"escape"? He does, after all, always return to the clutter,
and in Canto 41 it is the "Boss's" focus on creativity ("but what will
you / DO with that money?") that cuts through the clutter of the
Morgans et al.
> And the first use
> of the line makes me question your interpretation that it refers to an
> "aesthetic moment". "Exit" is too negative in its connotations, I think, for
> it to convey such a meaning.
I don't know about the "aesthetic moment," but how is "Exit" negative
in its connotations? It is one of the most common images of the poem
it seems to me. It comes back repeatedly until the very end:
Flaccus' translator wore the crown
The jew and the buggar dragged it down:
Devil in dung-cart" Gondemar
And Raleigh's head on King James' platter"
"That the dead will not fawn to advance themselves"
1621, December eleventh.
So that Dante's view is quite natural:
this light
as a river,
in Kung; in Ocellus, Coke, Agassiz
[rei], the flowing
this persistent awareness
(Canto 107, 782)
It is even there, parodied and with a sneer, in
She held that a sonnet was a sonnet
And ought never to be destroyed,
And had taken a number of courses
And continued with hopes of degrees and
Ended in a Baptist learnery
Somewhere near the Rio Grande.
(Canto 28, 135-6)
Again a merely personal reaction: these seem to me among
the most poignant lines in the poem.
Carrol Cox
>
>
> Tim Romano
>
> En Lin Wei wrote:
>
> > Tim Romano asks about the phrase "seeking an exit."
[snip]
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