> 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.