> Cameron McWhirter wrote> > > > I read those lines and i see Pound, dusty and depressed, sitting on the > floor of his barbed cage in the Pisan DTC. He's waiting for his execution on treason > charges and he's staring at a small anthill. I agree with that. There was surely an anthill close to E.P. cage. One of the main points of the Pisan section it is in my opinion "division" of motifs, sentences and lines into 2 subsections, which I call "high" and "low" . What do I understand by that ? . To the first I count Pounds quotations from another books, his references to the historical events or famous people or mythological creatures, his reminiscences of paintings by Del Cosa or Cosino Tura) and so on . To the "low" phrases belong for example : birds sitting on the barbed wire, lizards, ordinary remarks made by japanese prisoners or guardians and quotations from daily newspapers (Time magazine). So by those words :"high" - "low" I understand a typical opposition. Additionally, reader does'nt know about certain events happening around E.P. those days. As a working poet I would like to point exactly on this, because not everything connected with considered line ("ant's a centaur in his dragons world") as I believe can be explained using rational, logical mind. And there were probably 2 important events connected with anthill, described in Pisan section which can be anyway deduced from the poem. Both of them are commented in the following lines " as a lone ant from a broken ant-hill " from the wreckage of Europe, ego scriptor I think that someone, probably soldier one day simply STEPPED into this ant-hill and destroyed it and this event impressed Pound so much , that image of the broken anthill serves here as a symbolical description of Europe in the year 1945. One of the ants probably was found by poet in his papers, or on the floor of the cage day, or two days later after destruction of anthill and poet has begun to indentify himself with her. Certainly that had to be "male" ant :-) , thats why he wrote "HIS dragons world".) So the ant. Now leaving for a while word "centaur" I would like to jump into "dragons world" and present my impressions connected with this : First : it looks that we can consider the word "dragon" in a couple of different cultural contexsts. Context, which I would like to call "germanic" uses this word as a symbol or synonym of something highly dangerous and wild. Those are for example well known Tolkien stories, phantazy movies , swedish sagas. Perception and understanding of this word in another cultures is totally different. For Chinese people "dragon" is a symbol of wisdom and pride, it is their I would say "one of the most favorit animals :-)", probably symbol of China as well. In my own, slavic cultural contexst "dragon" has completely another meaning, maybe hard to belive but true : it is simply childlish. Yes, this word connects in my mind with stories for children, eventually with something funny, nice, warm, but anyway not with something highly dangerous or proud at all. "Dragons world" as I believe must to be considered in germanic cultural contexst and serves here once again as description of Europe in the year the World War has ended. As a side effect of the above I would like to say that NOT everything written in one language "works" in the another. Finally centaur. Thats poetical vision I think. For me the most important in that vision is the rapid switch from something very small to something very big (in our case - ant compared to centaur). Mr Tim Romano used argument of Gulliwer and Lilliputians and this is the track I would like to follow. Because it is impossible to separate centaur from the rest of the phrase I would like to join everything I said earlier with the whole plausible picture : The ant E.P. sees himself as an ant) is centaur (someone bigger, greater, I would'nt hesitate to use words someone "more important" than the rest of the citizens of the "broken anthill"- so I'm now pretty close to prof. Pearlman's "puff up" interpretation.) But here once again we have to consider germanic cultural context, legends about Giants, (which I know from my own silesian mythology -all those stories about Rubenzahl, Fliess and Lord of the Mountains - which all of them were Giants, always in comparison to someone very, very small.) So it's hard to say why, but nevertheless this rapid switch of size remains for me the most important, considering the whole image. So the resume : ant (E. P. ) is a centaur (Giant, der Riese, ) in his dragons world (ruins of European cywilization in 1945). Maybe it is a little bit to much simple but pay attention please that NOT HUMBLE at all. So - from this point it is now comprehensible why poet wrote "pull down thy vanity" in the next line and started disscusion with himself : can I write like that ? Am I really "more important"? "Is that true ?" - pull down thy vanity - becomes the constant answer, but the whole line shows, that he already suspected that he may belong to the small society of writers who will represent us, all of us - people living in XX century to the future generations. Now rhetorical question : how many writers who worked in let's say VI century do we remember right now. And how many from XIII cent. ? I mean - writers every reader of literature knows. It will be decided certainly in the future , whom those people will want to read and who will become "immortal" in the literary meaning of this word. But anyway I strongly belive it is possible to make certain suggestions, even right now. :-) And one more thing. This interaction between "high" and "low" in Pisan Cantos not always can be easily comprehensible, because Pound was having probably "eastern" sense of the equality of all events, so thats why using "high" key for the explanations of "low" events produces misunderstandings. Pawel Karwowski UJ student Cracow 21.03.99