....among other things.  I came up with an alternate idea of the grammar
of these lines, maybe more farfetched but to my mind still marginally
plausible:
 
>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, , , ,
 
This slowly becomes clear.  But how 'bout this: "with mercy dight" as
adjectival phrase describing "Lord God" and "hath" as main verb, not
auxiliary for present perfect of dight.  (By this I mean dight as an
adjective and not as a past participle: dight with mercy in unaltered
diction.) Hence the sentence becomes in equally gross paraphrase: Big G,
you who are dressed [adorned, composed, etc. etc.] with mercy and have
to/for yourself the "prayer wheel" of light and darkness.......and so on
yonder.  Is this plausible?  It seems weaker, though, now that I think of
it----God as dressed/adorned (at least in the most obvious sense) with
mercy, not existing as mercy itself; and God as having/possessing the
"prayer wheel", whatever that particular unicorn may be, and not having
"composed" or "created" it, not "the great aesthete" but just sort of a
collector of oddities.  But the grammatical possibility is there, tho it
weakens the pome.
 
>[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?]
 
Is the suggestion of the light/dark imagery then meant to be incorporated
into the imagery of the bright drops "Evan'scent mirrors every opal one"
disappearing into the dark sea CONVERSELY the effort of the artist
disappearing into the insufferable life of the bourgeois‹?  Thus its
sudden, transient brightness becoming part of the necessary duality of
yin-yang with the dark oblivion of the sea and producing‹well not
producing maybe, but the artist holding up his end of the bargain, and
the songs serving their "purpose".  To give up the light before they
disappear.
 
At least the very rushed, hasty-email kind of way I'm putting things
together.  My last few posts haven't been extremely well-thought out, I
know.  And my thanks to Mr. Booth for slowing me down a bit and getting
the words right.  But I would be interested in hearing anyone else's
thoughts on this poem as well as any of Pound's other early work.  For
the most part, really, other than babbling about grammar, I'm interested
in how Pound recreated the SOUND of verse, since in so many cases that's
what I find so compelling.  The harmonic structure remains even if we
ignore what I'll hastily call the "thought-content".  Peter Makin's
section in "Pound's Cantos" on Pound's imitation of Yeats' versification
and sound-patterns I found especially difficult and intriguing.  For
discussion, then, perhaps: How much of Pound's verse can we ascribe to
the tradition of Swinburne/'Nineties Decadents/Yeats etc. and how much is
it possible to pin down as his own forging?  And secondly, more
generally, is it possible (or these days, I guess, even conceivable) for
a poet to rationally approach creating the sound-complex of his work as
microscopically as Makin analyzes it (that is, vowel by vowel, syllable
upon syllable, ply o'er ply)?  I'm concerned with this matter in
particular because as a poet I'm trying to find some basis to the real
craft of verse, sound/meter/whatever you like to call it.  Before any
meaning is there, there has to be SOUND.  So how far should a poet go
into those depths?  Or is it unlearned, instinctual as well as by the
habits of reading and the sort of language we're used to hearing/reading?
 
I realize these are incredibly large questions but I am trying to broaden
the conversation so that it doesn't get lost in the specifics of syntax
and imagery in one short poem in A Lume.  Any thoughts would be
profoundly and almost tearfully appreciated.
 
And thank you again to Mr. Booth for another thoughtful post.
 
Cheers to all ye silent ones, 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
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