>
I would be surprised if the "prayer wheel" refers to anything Buddhist/Tibetan
so early in pound's career. there are other possibilities--I know D. H.
lawrence, for example, writes about the 'cry of the peewit and the wheel of the
stars." May have been a common expression in first two decades of 20th. Pound
had touched upon Eastern poetry before Fenollosa--he had read Gile's book on
Chinese poetry, and Judith Gautier's Book of Jade, among other precious 19th
century translations. There had also been a general Eastern influence in art,
from Van Goh to Whistler, the effect is registered on canvass. Further,
one of Pound's first friends in london, Lawrence binyon, was curator of the
Eastern arts collection at the British Museum. So Eastern culture was again in
the air in the last decades of 19th, and early 20th, and Pound was aware of it.
But if an image such as this early prayer wheel were to have its origins in the
East, it would probably have been accompanied by other tell-tale Eastern
images. Pound's early poems follow the years during which he had carefully
imitated styles of poets whom he thought to be great. Good recent sources for
early Asian influence on him is Zhaoming Qian's book to that effect, as well as
Mary Patterson Cheadle's book on Pound's Confucian Translations.
HTEN=3DCONDENSARE) and the latin origins of the word, _dictare_, to com=
pose
>(create) or dictate, in conjunction with the word _light_ on the next
>line--an important word in Pound--and its Genesis resonances. Dight also
>meant to ordain or equip, and a "dighter" was a poet. Etc. Hmmm....]
Being a student of German, I pretty much smack my forehead in shame at
this point.....Yikes! But thank you for pointing it out! Dichter =3D
dighter. So essentially on the basis of etymology and rhyme Pound brings
together the notion of poetic/theologic creation with the notions of
night and light as antagonistic life-animating aesthetic forces etc. =8B
there's more here than I even thought of before. Still, I would ask what
the connection is with the rest of the poem, and the imagery of offering
oneself into a sort of oblivion. Maybe the eternal spiralling exchange
of "Night and light" can be read as a foil to the once-and-done-with
disappearance of rain into sea, word into silence, art into indifference,
etc. But I'm only conjecturing.
Also I would still quibble over the third line, in getting down to the
basic roots of grammar: the meaning up to the end of line 2 is clear, and
I read "that with mercy dight" etc. as a relative clause, but what's the
connection with "Eternal hath to thee"? What's the object of "hath"; why
is it eternal (or possibly clipped "eternally")? What is going on,
grammtically speaking, in this line?
Thank you, Mr. Booth, for your very helpful suggestions.
Cheers, Michael Kicey
_________________________________________________
"you love in spite of, not because of"
-Lucas Klein
_________________________________________________
Michael Kicey
F&M #836
Franklin and Marshall College
PO Box 3220
Lancaster PA 17604-3220
email: [log in to unmask]
net: http://acad.fandm.edu/~M_Kicey/
phone: 717.399.6747
_________________________________________________
Robert E. Kibler
Department of English
University of Minnesota
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fortunatus et ille, deos qui novit agrestis,
Panaque Silvanumque senem Nymphasque sorores.
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