Dear Poundians, I have been much interested in the tone leading of the vowels idea, especially in relation to Pound's rhythm. In my view, what is important is that Duncan sees both tone-leading or vowel music and rhythm as providing temporal organization. We tend to read vowel music as a kind of ear candy but Duncan and Pound focus on its capacity to organize time. As best as I know, the passage where Duncan talks about tone leading is a discussion of the Pisan Cantos in "The H. D. Book: Chapter 4" *Tri-Quarterly* 12 (Spring 1968): 82. The passasge reads: "That one image may recall another, finding depth i the resounding is the secret of rime and measure. The time of a poem is felt as a recognition of return in vowel tone and in consonant formations, of pattern in sequence of syllables, in stress and in pitch of a melody, of images and meaning. It resembles the time of a dream, for it is highly organized along lines of association and impulses f contrast towards the structure of the whole. The same impulse of dream of peom is to provide a ground for some form beyond what we know, for felling 'greater than reality.'" The important passage in "I Gather the Limbs of Osiris" occurs in section X: "The preceding paragraphs have had to do with rhythm; the other limb of melody is the pitch and ptich variation, and upon this our sole query is to be whether there is in speech, as there is i music, 'tone-leading.' We know that certain notes played in sequence call for other notes, for a 'resolution,' for a 'close'; and in setting words to music it is often the hunger for this sort of musical apparatus that leads the musician away from the rhythm of the verse or makes him drag out the final syllables. What I want to get at is this: in the interpreting of the hidden melody of poetry into the more manifest melody of music, are there in the words themselves 'tone-leadings'?" Pound goes on in his discussion of Arnaut Daniel to suggest that there are such tone-leadings and that Arnaut is a particularly good example of the practice. Hope this helps, Ellen Stauder