OK, back to
Lord God of heaven that with mercy dight
Th' alternate prayer wheel of the night and light
Eternal hath to thee . . . .
I am at work, and do not have any sources here. I will bring _A Lume Spento_
in tomorrow. But, as I recall (perhaps imperfectly), "dight" goes with night
and light, as does "eternal". "Hath" belongs between "mercy" and "dight". In
gross paraphrase, it is an invocation to: God, who has, in your mercy,
clothed [dressed, appointed, annointed, created for, written for, ... ]
yourself [in] the progenitive duality of light and night, which process is
eternal, , , ,
Then follows a plea to let his words etc.
[An aside: To throw in another bit of Asiana, re the revolving wheel of
light and night, consider the Yin and Yang symbol. It is a stylized image
of two fish in a garden pond spinning and spinning, in their constant
alternation representing all dualities--and thereby unity. (Pretty cool, I
think. And, contrary to what is usually thought, it does not represent a
static balance--it is just caught in a moment, like a high-speed
photograph--the symbol is wildly kinetic.) This is, again, something that
Pound may have known by 1908, although I find that rather more farfetched
than a knowledge of the term "prayer wheel". BUT, is it not interesting or
even helpful to have at mind when discussing the second line?]
I don't think that he is offering himself up to oblivion, but trying to
make a splash in eternity; brief but intense. (The sea has always been a
symbol of eternity, which he has explicitly brought into the poem already,
and a graph of day and night would result in a sine wave pattern--a surge.
Ditto the graph of a spiral. But my earlier comment about spirals was a bit
of a tangential gyre.)
Chris Booth
> ----------
> From: Milton
> Reply To: Ezra Pound discussion list of the University of Maine
> Sent: Tuesday, May 19, 1998 5:54 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: re grace before song lines 1-3
>
> >As a beginning, are you familiar with what prayer wheels are? (i.e.,
> Tibetan
> >Buddhism, although I have seen similar in temples in Taiwan.) This may be
> >your sticking-point (Harold Bauer's term, but I've always loved
> >it.)...."night and light" are night and day, and a reference to the
> >revolution of the Earth, prayer-wheel-like.
>
> A couple more quibbles: A general question, really<considering this is
> the first poem of the first book, how early on can we say with certainty
> that Pound was aware of Eastern ideas and culture and expressed his
> interest in his writings? If I'm not deceived, Fenollosa and all that
> jazz came well after Lume<but were there other roots? Not to credit all
> of Pound's Eastern fascinations to Fenollosa, but it's a convenient
> reference point for a greenhorn like me.
>
> >Prayer-wheels are vertically mounted cylinders that rotate easily on
> their
> >axes, usually painted an auspicious red color, I believe, that are spun
> >while monks--or the faithful--pray. The idea is that as they spin the
> prayer
> >is lifted upward toward heaven. This spiralling motion notion was
> important
> >in Tibetan Buddhism, and through the absurdities of theosophy reached
> Willy
> >the Spook Yeats, as in "perne in a gyre". [Sailing to Byzantium.]
>
> Another question: what's the relation of this spiralling motion, the
> rotation of the earth, and the power of God behind it all with the
> subsequent imagery of oblivion and momentary beauty (via raindrops in the
> sea surge etc.) in the rest of the poem?
>
> >[BTW, Dight: think about the relationship with DICHT (Basil Bunting,
> >DICHTEN=CONDENSARE) and the latin origins of the word, _dictare_, to
> compose
> >(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 =
> 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. <
> 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/
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