That Pound might not have had the Eastern background yet to significantly
weave in a Buddhist or Confucian conceit may be so, but the fact remains
that a "prayer wheel" is a term dating from 1814 (according to my Webster's
10th here at work), and it is a term that would have been familiar to
missionaries, students of philosophy, theology, Asia, geography, readers of
National Geographic, travel literature, etc., etc. Pound had not yet hit on
his Asian vein, but lets give him credit for having a decent vocabulary and
the general knowledge that an educated young man with a curiosity about the
world would have had in his day.
 
It is a not uncommon fallacy to assume that a writer's knowledge about a
subject was tabula rasa before a certain period in the writer's development.
It seems absurd to me that Pound could not have used a common phrase that
would have been as in the realm of general knowledge in his day as it is
now, only because we would like to catagorize its use under "E.P.: Asian
Reference". It doesn't have to be a mature Eastern reference, but an
appropriate phrase for an image.
 
I don't have a copy of the poem here, but if the line does indeed run as
 
   Th' alternate prayer wheel of the night and light
 
then it is a prayer wheel. A prayer wheel is a prayer wheel, and was so in
his day.
 
What is the liklihood that Pound would have coined a phrase already in use?
 
!!!!!!!!!!
 
Although I am still quite comfortable with what I said above, a trip to the
OED fished up this treasure under _prayer wheel_:
 
   2. A wheel set with bells and fastened to the ceiling of a chapel,
       formerly used for divination in connexion with masses or
       other devotional services.
 
       1897 _Daily News_ 26 July 5/1   Even now in Brittany
       a kind of prayer wheels are kept in churches and set
       spinning by the devout.
 
Hmmm. Perhaps Brittany is located somewhere between Lhasa and Kathmandu? [_A
Lume_ and _Cathay_?]  ;-)
 
> ----------
> From:         Robert E. Kibler
> Reply To:     Robert E Kibler
> Sent:         Tuesday, May 19, 1998 6:30 PM
> To:   [log in to unmask]
> Subject:      Re: re grace before song lines 1-3
>
> >
> 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
> [log in to unmask]
>
>                 fortunatus et ille, deos qui novit agrestis,
>                 Panaque Silvanumque senem Nymphasque sorores.
>