Canto1 by Ezra Pound
... is something missing. It can be interpreted as a first part of an invocation, which is also a prerequisite of a traditional epic poem, since it was omitted at the beginning Pound might have found it reasonable to place it somewhere in the course of the poem, this apostrophe might have been used also for the sake of its melody, it does not sound English, native speakers not knowing Latin can hear only music grow out of it, since the meaning of the word maybe the less likely to direct the reader’s attention. It is in accordance with Pound’s aesthetic theory: he distinguished three kinds of poetry: logopoeia, poetry of ideas, phanopoeia, poetry of images and melopoeia, when words are charged over and above their plain meaning with some musical property. The aim of melopeia is to lull or distract the reader from the exact sense of the language. It is the poetry on the borders of music. Pound was also a composer of several pieces of music, including the opera The Testament of Francois Villon. He considered the knowledge of music necessary for a poet (Schaffer 129-131). String of Latin phrases are woven into the texture of the poem further as well “Cypri munimenta sorrita est” ( she rules over the mountains of Cyprus ) creating a kind of mystery “Arcanum” as Pound called it. Aphrodite is depicted in color images; dominantly the adjective golden is used in reference to her, it occurs three times within five lines, it can symbolize light which is the end point of the movement of the poem, however this bright image is mingled with traces of darkness, Aphrodite’s eyelids are dark. The last lines of the poem are overcrowded with brightness and glittering and this visionary image is enlarged with further color associations such as “oricalchi” (brass), it suggests power and omnipotence. Even the name Argicidia means bright appearance. The ending of the Canto I is full of light, brightness and glittering as opposed to the darkness “sunless dead and […].. joyless regions” and gloomy mood of the previous part of the poem. Latin is not the only language that is mixed into the Canto, there can be found traces of the earliest English poetry represented by the “Seafarer”, the choice is perhaps not accidental, Pound translated this Anglo-Saxon poem in 1911 and its themes are so close to Odyssey as well it describes a voyage too. Canto I has the characteristics of an Anglo-Saxon poetic diction e.g. four-beat alliterative line: “To Pluto the strong, and praised Proserpine”. The language and rhythm of Pound’s own Seafarer translation can be felt in the Canto mixed with Renaissance Latin and modern American. As we see overlayering of languages is characteristics of the poem according to it, there are also as many different voices: Homer, Virgil, Divus, Georgius Datona, the Anglo-Saxon bard and Pound. We can see more clearly in this structure Pound’s essential method, which is cultural overlayering (Kearns 19-21). As Kearns put it, it is a Greek tale told with a mixture of Greek and Latin names, the Anglo-Saxon coloration of diction and rhythm, a modern interjection. The aim of such overlayering is to create a new whole, yet each of its ingredients retains something of its own identity, its own language and flavor. (Kearns 21). The compositional method of Pound is like a piece of music, it has its melody own rhythm and polyphonic character the elements of which are blended but not melted into an organic whole, they remain clearly distinguishable. Pound introduces a lots of themes into the poem: exploration, passion, history, myth, beauty, as we have seen from a wide range of sources. It presents Odysseus, the great Greek warrior of the Trojan War descending into the world of dead, right after he and his comrades had left Circe, they are sailing to consult the blind soothsayer Tiresias, thus they go there with a purpose in their minds seeking some intellectual enlightenment. The tone of the narration is mournful “Heavy with weeping” the place itself is described in a gloomy tone as well “Covered with close-webbed mist, unpierced ever /With glitter of sun-rays” Pound gives us such a “life-like” image of the Kimmerian lands that we can see it visionary, it is achieved by usage of condense combinations of words, which are capable of evoking instant associations in our minds. This effect is strengthened with alliterate usage of sibilant consonants: “Sun to his slumber, shadows o’er all the ocean”. These images are fragmented but nonetheless powerful. We can see that not only the language is fragmented but also the images and the whole narration as well. After describing the journey the narrative moves on giving details of the sacrifice, it begins with scarifying food according to the tradition. It can be interpreted at two levels, the most obvious is as a pagan sacrifice or it can also be seen as an allusion to Corpus Christi, wine and flour (bread) as a symbol of Christian sacrifice peeping out from later times, proving Pound’s view on history, according to which we do not know the past in chronological sequence. Christianity is woven into paganism. Cataloguing the dead souls as if he made a flash cross section of mass of people who had died during the passage of time. They are depicted as threatening, bloodthirsty ghosts. “Dark blood flowed in the fosse” Blood carries a double meaning here, it is the blood of sacrificed animals and at the same time it is the blood of victims, blood that was shed in vain since it flows in the fosse indicating the futility of the whole efforts. The images of the dead appear as if we watched a sequence of painting in a gallery, accompanied with feeble and sometimes strong rhythms of music of words. This part of the poem lacks of syntax “Battle spoil, bearing yet dreary arms”. Only meaning bearing elements remained, all the linking words are left out, underlining the references of the nouns and the heaviness of the verbs “Slaughtered the herds, sheep slain of bronze”. This line is full of action and movement. The words deliberated from their extra elements begin to affect on the reader with a terrible force, viewing images is accelerated, rapid flashing of pictures appear to us, including Odysseus’ “Keeping off the impetuous impotent dead”. At this very moment sudden change of pace occurs. Vivid passages are changed by an elegiac scene, with Elpenor, one of their comrades who died amid the struggles and was unburied. Odysseus discovers him among the dead, he is unmourned and bides him “remember me, unwept, unburied”. The narration is interrupted with a dialogue, full of personal emotions, grief above the lost friend, Odysseus is to undertake the work of mourning, then once again a shift of tone appears “And Anticlea came, whom I beat off”. Anticlea is Odysseus’ mother, and strangely enough, Odysseus seems to ignore her, even he does not want her to approach, it is more important for him to hear Tiresias’ foretelling, who is able to speak only after drinking the blood, which might mean that we can make conclusions for the future only on the basis of knowing the past, using the past in our purposes, infiltrating it through ourselves, blood in this case might function as a complex symbol of what had been so far, the blood of living creatures who shape the history. After the soothsaying the recurrent image of Anticlea appears again as if giving a frame to the foretelling, although we do not know anything about the details of the possible encounter between the mother and son. Up to this point the poem reads with a great ease as a translation of Homer’s description of Odysseus’ voyage, however, it is extremely difficult to guess without any background knowledge the significance of the following lines: “Lie quiet Divus”. If we do not know that Pound found Andreas Divus’ Renaissance translation of the Odyssey in Paris bookstall together with the florid translation of Homeric hymns to the gods by a Cretan translator, we are not able to understand the mechanism of juxtapositions of such fragments. This phrase “Lie quite Divus” is homage to the translator, whose work was stolen by Pound, Divus might have arisen from the grave as Elpenor and thus Pound tells him to rest in peace. As we have seen Pound’s method was to put into verse a condensation of history, an accumulation of facts. This makes his poem not simply a sequence of past events the lack of logical connection between the selected facts. His method is to juxtapose facts hoping that some insight will be born from this union. The poem can be interpreted as an extension of the ideogrammic method. This method is the result of Pound’s studying of Chinese characters, which he discovered in Ernest Fenolosa. Pound was fascinated by the new way of looking at things that the observation of ideograms allowed him to discover, e.g. one of his favorite Chinese ideograms was sun plus moon, resulting in the meaning bright, brightness, in Pound’s opinion ideograms can transmit energy in a way that no other means can (Kearns 5-6). As he wrote in Guide to Kulchur: The ideogrammic method consists of presenting one fact and then another until at some point one gets off the dead and desensitized surface of the reader’s mind, onto a part that will register. (Quoted in Kearns 7) Thus in the ideogram, concrete images could come together to configure an idea. Image in Pound’s interpretation is “that which presents an intellectual complex in an instant of time” (Quoted in Makin 30). The Cantos consist of innumerable smaller ideograms, which form larger ideograms of single Cantos (Kearns 6). Thus Pound’s Cantos are vast, complex ideograms with disparate elements, which can be interpreted subjectively using one’s heart, mind and imagination. It gave us an idea of interpreting Canto I as an extension of Pound’s ideogrammic method. There are two basic images in it: Odysseus and Aphrodite, the male and the female origin resulting a union, it can refer to an ancient pattern of genesis, creation. As far as the form of the Cantos is concerned there are critical debates. They are said to lack form in the traditional literary sense. Shaffer suggests to measure them against musical forms, especially that of the fugue (Shaffer 140). Alexander assumes that their form is imitative of the flux variety of life, which is an open form but it is still a form, however a flexible one. The cohesion that connects the canto and the sequence of cantos is the unity of the author’s mind (Alexander 126-128). It is also difficult to identify precisely the genre of Cantos, they do not seem to have one particular genre definition, its genre is eclectic just like Pound’s aesthetic is, at the same time it is pluralistic and almost all inclusive. Alexander tried to define its genre in the following way: Mystical narrative, epic dimension, at times they are also drama, satire, documentary, catalogue, sermon, reportage, lyric, diary, meditation, descriptive set-piece, blast and blessings, hymn, elegy, eclogue, asides, doodle, history notes, epigram, abstract, essay, paradigm, peroration, fanfare (Alexander 125). We could see that even the introductory Canto I includes almost all these generic characteristics, reflecting the complexness of Pound’s “project”. It begins as an epic poem with the necessary in medias res beginning, goes on with descriptive parts of the details of the voyage and the land of the dead, interrupted with lyric and elegiac passages with Elpenor, ending as a praising hymn to Apohrodite. Canto I can be considered as a prelude to the sequence of the later Cantos, foreshadowing the themes, methods of composition, pinpointing fragments from history, it is the origin the “genesis” of the other Cantos just like the Bible begins with “genesis” Pound’s creation follows this pattern as well, as we tried to argue in the course of the discussion, it is an ideogram of “genesis”, the beginning of all. The aim of this essay is to investigate Pound’s Canto I in terms of its traditional, mythological elements and images. The Cantos were begun in 1915 and were continued throughout Pound’s life. Canto I is an introductory, presenting the speaker as the explorer, an Odysseus figure. The word canto is an Italian word meaning song; it has been used since Dante to designate the major sections of a long poem like the Divine Comedy or Byron’s Childe Harold etc. Pound had his own theory of myth, he believed that Greek myth arose when someone having passed through delightful psychic experience tried to communicate it to others and found it necessary to screen himself from prosecution. Speaking aesthetically, the myths are explications of mood: you may stop there, or you may probe deeper. (Pound quoted in Witemeyer 23) There is a double emphasis on experience and impersonality, which seems to be an important element of poem making in Pound’s opinion. Thus the poet cannot tell his experience in the fist person, he must “screen himself from persecution” as Pound put it. It makes it necessary for the poet to wear masks. Pound finds the language incapable of expressing this experience hence the need for creating myths (Witemeyer 24-25). Odysseus, the first person speaker of the Canto, can be considered Pound’s mask, and his identification with him has cultural significance, but these mythological patterns can operate as metaphors and models through which Pound views the complexity of history (Alexander 143-144, 160). The ideas of experience and impersonality are extremely important to Pound’s poetic theory. By experience he meant not only physical experience but also that of mood. He juxtaposed outside and inside experience in his poetic theory, which repeats his basic method i.e. the ideogrammic method. The first Canto begins in medias res, a convention of the epic poem, begins with a conjunction to illustrate the fragmenting nature of the sequence of the Cantos, it can also demonstrate the fluidity of the mass of materials he had to deal with, the end can function as a melting material that makes all the fragments a unity a complex vision of history. Pound himself remarked that we do not know the history in chronological sequence, ( via Kearns 21). It is the task of a reader to interpret them to draw the conclusion. The poem can be read at one level as a translation of Divus Latin “out of Homer”. Thus Pound begins his epic in the middle of another, more historical epic. There were a lot of poets who used this ancient source i.e. Odyssey in their own purposes as an emblem or icon for expressing an idea, e.g. Tennyson in his “Ulysses” making the Greek traveler and explorer the emblem of seeking for knowledge, but to use this secondary source was unusual and exceptional, practically the first 67 lines are translation of Andreas Divus Justnopolitanus’ translation of the XI. Canto of Odyssey. The question arises why it was necessary for Pound to rely on such sources and what can be the significance of this choice. The most obvious answer to this question is that Pound bought a book in Paris containing the above mentioned work of Divus and some hymns written to Aphrodite in translation of Georgius Datona. The later fact can also explain the juxtaposition of Odysseus and Aphrodite in the Canto as well. Alexander suggests that Divus had helped him to see Homer without a Victorian halo. (Alexander 143). Another possible interpretation can be the combination of the above i.e. Pound wanted to see the past through a double filter to better see the present. It is sometimes difficult to decide why one thing stands next to or near another, for instance, why should Pound stop the narrative about Odysseus and switch on the image of Aphrodite. He indicates this sudden shift by a fragmented line consisting only of a word “Venerendam”, which is an epithet of Aphrodite in Latin, it means respectable. Pound found it more expressive to use this Latin adjective, he gave us only this world in the line indicating that it is ellipted, there is something missing. It can be interpreted as a first part of an invocation, which is also a prerequisite of a traditional epic poem, since it was omitted at the beginning Pound might have found it reasonable to place it somewhere in the course of the poem, this apostrophe might have been used also for the sake of its melody, it does not sound English, native speakers not knowing Latin can hear only music grow out of it, since the meaning of the word maybe the less likely to direct the reader’s attention. It is in accordance with Pound’s aesthetic theory: he distinguished three kinds of poetry: logopoeia, poetry of ideas, phanopoeia, poetry of images and melopoeia, when words are charged over and above their plain meaning with some musical property. The aim of melopeia is to lull or distract the reader from the exact sense of the language. It is the poetry on the borders of music. Pound was also a composer of several pieces of music, including the opera The Testament of Francois Villon. He considered the knowledge of music necessary for a poet (Schaffer 129-131). String of Latin phrases are woven into the texture of the poem further as well “Cypri munimenta sorrita est” ( she rules over the mountains of Cyprus ) creating a kind of mystery “Arcanum” as Pound called it. Aphrodite is depicted in color images; dominantly the adjective golden is used in reference to her, it occurs three times within five lines, it can symbolize light which is the end point of the movement of the poem, however this bright image is mingled with traces of darkness, Aphrodite’s eyelids are dark. The last lines of the poem are overcrowded with brightness and glittering and this visionary image is enlarged with further color associations such as “oricalchi” (brass), it suggests power and omnipotence. Even the name Argicidia means bright appearance. The ending of the Canto I is full of light, brightness and glittering as opposed to the darkness “sunless dead and […].. joyless regions” and gloomy mood of the previous part of the poem. Latin is not the only language that is mixed into the Canto, there can be found traces of the earliest English poetry represented by the “Seafarer”, the choice is perhaps not accidental, Pound translated this Anglo-Saxon poem in 1911 and its themes are so close to Odyssey as well it describes a voyage too. Canto I has the characteristics of an Anglo-Saxon poetic diction e.g. four-beat alliterative line: “To Pluto the strong, and praised Proserpine”. The language and rhythm of Pound’s own Seafarer translation can be felt in the Canto mixed with Renaissance Latin and modern American. As we see overlayering of languages is characteristics of the poem according to it, there are also as many different voices: Homer, Virgil, Divus, Georgius Datona, the Anglo-Saxon bard and Pound. We can see more clearly in this structure Pound’s essential method, which is cultural overlayering (Kearns 19-21). As Kearns put it, it is a Greek tale told with a mixture of Greek and Latin names, the Anglo-Saxon coloration of diction and rhythm, a modern interjection. The aim of such overlayering is to create a new whole, yet each of its ingredients retains something of its own identity, its own language and flavor. (Kearns 21). The compositional method of Pound is like a piece of music, it has its melody own rhythm and polyphonic character the elements of which are blended but not melted into an organic whole, they remain clearly distinguishable. Pound introduces a lots of themes into the poem: exploration, passion, history, myth, beauty, as we have seen from a wide range of sources. It presents Odysseus, the great Greek warrior of the Trojan War descending into the world of dead, right after he and his comrades had left Circe, they are sailing to consult the blind soothsayer Tiresias, thus they go there with a purpose in their minds seeking some intellectual enlightenment. The tone of the narration is mournful “Heavy with weeping” the place itself is described in a gloomy tone as well “Covered with close-webbed mist, unpierced ever /With glitter of sun-rays” Pound gives us such a “life-like” image of the Kimmerian lands that we can see it visionary, it is achieved by usage of condense combinations of words, which are capable of evoking instant associations in our minds. This effect is strengthened with alliterate usage of sibilant consonants: “Sun to his slumber, shadows o’er all the ocean”. These images are fragmented but nonetheless powerful. We can see that not only the language is fragmented but also the images and the whole narration as well. After describing the journey the narrative moves on giving details of the sacrifice, it begins with scarifying food according to the tradition. It can be interpreted at two levels, the most obvious is as a pagan sacrifice or it can also be seen as an allusion to Corpus Christi, wine and flour (bread) as a symbol of Christian sacrifice peeping out from later times, proving Pound’s view on history, according to which we do not know the past in chronological sequence. Christianity is woven into paganism. Cataloguing the dead souls as if he made a flash cross section of mass of people who had died during the passage of time. They are depicted as threatening, bloodthirsty ghosts. “Dark blood flowed in the fosse” Blood carries a double meaning here, it is the blood of sacrificed animals and at the same time it is the blood of victims, blood that was shed in vain since it flows in the fosse indicating the futility of the whole efforts. The images of the dead appear as if we watched a sequence of painting in a gallery, accompanied with feeble and sometimes strong rhythms of music of words. This part of the poem lacks of syntax “Battle spoil, bearing yet dreary arms”. Only meaning bearing elements remained, all the linking words are left out, underlining the references of the nouns and the heaviness of the verbs “Slaughtered the herds, sheep slain of bronze”. This line is full of action and movement. The words deliberated from their extra elements begin to affect on the reader with a terrible force, viewing images is accelerated, rapid flashing of pictures appear to us, including Odysseus’ “Keeping off the impetuous impotent dead”. At this very moment sudden change of pace occurs. Vivid passages are changed by an elegiac scene, with Elpenor, one of their comrades who died amid the struggles and was unburied. Odysseus discovers him among the dead, he is unmourned and bides him “remember me, unwept, unburied”. The narration is interrupted with a dialogue, full of personal emotions, grief above the lost friend, Odysseus is to undertake the work of mourning, then once again a shift of tone appears “And Anticlea came, whom I beat off”. Anticlea is Odysseus’ mother, and strangely enough, Odysseus seems to ignore her, even he does not want her to approach, it is more important for him to hear Tiresias’ foretelling, who is able to speak only after drinking the blood, which might mean that we can make conclusions for the future only on the basis of knowing the past, using the past in our purposes, infiltrating it through ourselves, blood in this case might function as a complex symbol of what had been so far, the blood of living creatures who shape the history. After the soothsaying the recurrent image of Anticlea appears again as if giving a frame to the foretelling, although we do not know anything about the details of the possible encounter between the mother and son. Up to this point the poem reads with a great ease as a translation of Homer’s description of Odysseus’ voyage, however, it is extremely difficult to guess without any background knowledge the significance of the following lines: “Lie quiet Divus”. If we do not know that Pound found Andreas Divus’ Renaissance translation of the Odyssey in Paris bookstall together with the florid translation of Homeric hymns to the gods by a Cretan translator, we are not able to understand the mechanism of juxtapositions of such fragments. This phrase “Lie quite Divus” is homage to the translator, whose work was stolen by Pound, Divus might have arisen from the grave as Elpenor and thus Pound tells him to rest in peace. As we have seen Pound’s method was to put into verse a condensation of history, an accumulation of facts. This makes his poem not simply a sequence of past events the lack of logical connection between the selected facts. His method is to juxtapose facts hoping that some insight will be born from this union. The poem can be interpreted as an extension of the ideogrammic method. This method is the result of Pound’s studying of Chinese characters, which he discovered in Ernest Fenolosa. Pound was fascinated by the new way of looking at things that the observation of ideograms allowed him to discover, e.g. one of his favorite Chinese ideograms was sun plus moon, resulting in the meaning bright, brightness, in Pound’s opinion ideograms can transmit energy in a way that no other means can (Kearns 5-6). As he wrote in Guide to Kulchur: The ideogrammic method consists of presenting one fact and then another until at some point one gets off the dead and desensitized surface of the reader’s mind, onto a part that will register. (Quoted in Kearns 7) Thus in the ideogram, concrete images could come together to configure an idea. Image in Pound’s interpretation is “that which presents an intellectual complex in an instant of time” (Quoted in Makin 30). The Cantos consist of innumerable smaller ideograms, which form larger ideograms of single Cantos (Kearns 6). Thus Pound’s Cantos are vast, complex ideograms with disparate elements, which can be interpreted subjectively using one’s heart, mind and imagination. It gave us an idea of interpreting Canto I as an extension of Pound’s ideogrammic method. There are two basic images in it: Odysseus and Aphrodite, the male and the female origin resulting a union, it can refer to an ancient pattern of genesis, creation. As far as the form of the Cantos is concerned there are critical debates. They are said to lack form in the traditional literary sense. Shaffer suggests to measure them against musical forms, especially that of the fugue (Shaffer 140). Alexander assumes that their form is imitative of the flux variety of life, which is an open form but it is still a form, however a flexible one. The cohesion that connects the canto and the sequence of cantos is the unity of the author’s mind (Alexander 126-128). It is also difficult to identify precisely the genre of Cantos, they do not seem to have one particular genre definition, its genre is eclectic just like Pound’s aesthetic is, at the same time it is pluralistic and almost all inclusive. Alexander tried to define its genre in the following way: Mystical narrative, epic dimension, at times they are also drama, satire, documentary, catalogue, sermon, reportage, lyric, diary, meditation, descriptive set-piece, blast and blessings, hymn, elegy, eclogue, asides, doodle, history notes, epigram, abstract, essay, paradigm, peroration, fanfare (Alexander 125). We could see that even the introductory Canto I includes almost all these generic characteristics, reflecting the complexness of Pound’s “project”. It begins as an epic poem with the necessary in medias res beginning, goes on with descriptive parts of the details of the voyage and the land of the dead, interrupted with lyric and elegiac passages with Elpenor, ending as a praising hymn to Apohrodite. Canto I can be considered as a prelude to the sequence of the later Cantos, foreshadowing the themes, methods of composition, pinpointing fragments from history, it is the origin the “genesis” of the other Cantos just like the Bible begins with “genesis” Pound’s creation follows this pattern as well, as we tried to argue in the course of the discussion, it is an ideogram of “genesis”, the beginning of all. The aim of this essay is to investigate Pound’s Canto I in terms of its traditional, mythological elements and images. The Cantos were begun in 1915 and were continued throughout Pound’s life. Canto I is an introductory, presenting the speaker as the explorer, an Odysseus figure. The word canto is an Italian word meaning song; it has been used since Dante to designate the major sections of a long poem like the Divine Comedy or Byron’s Childe Harold etc. Pound had his own theory of myth, he believed that Greek myth arose when someone having passed through delightful psychic experience tried to communicate it to others and found it necessary to screen himself from prosecution. Speaking aesthetically, the myths are explications of mood: you may stop there, or you may probe deeper. (Pound quoted in Witemeyer 23) There is a double emphasis on experience and impersonality, which seems to be an important element of poem making in Pound’s opinion. Thus the poet cannot tell his experience in the fist person, he must “screen himself from persecution” as Pound put it. It makes it necessary for the poet to wear masks. Pound finds the language incapable of expressing this experience hence the need for creating myths (Witemeyer 24-25). Odysseus, the first person speaker of the Canto, can be considered Pound’s mask, and his identification with him has cultural significance, but these mythological patterns can operate as metaphors and models through which Pound views the complexity of history (Alexander 143-144, 160). The ideas of experience and impersonality are extremely important to Pound’s poetic theory. By experience he meant not only physical experience but also that of mood. He juxtaposed outside and inside experience in his poetic theory, which repeats his basic method i.e. the ideogrammic method. The first Canto begins in medias res, a convention of the epic poem, begins with a conjunction to illustrate the fragmenting nature of the sequence of the Cantos, it can also demonstrate the fluidity of the mass of materials he had to deal with, the end can function as a melting material that makes all the fragments a unity a complex vision of history. Pound himself remarked that we do not know the history in chronological sequence, ( via Kearns 21). It is the task of a reader to interpret them to draw the conclusion. The poem can be read at one level as a translation of Divus Latin “out of Homer”. Thus Pound begins his epic in the middle of another, more historical epic. There were a lot of poets who used this ancient source i.e. Odyssey in their own purposes as an emblem or icon for expressing an idea, e.g. Tennyson in his “Ulysses” making the Greek traveler and explorer the emblem of seeking for knowledge, but to use this secondary source was unusual and exceptional, practically the first 67 lines are translation of Andreas Divus Justnopolitanus’ translation of the XI. Canto of Odyssey. The question arises why it was necessary for Pound to rely on such sources and what can be the significance of this choice. The most obvious answer to this question is that Pound bought a book in Paris containing the above mentioned work of Divus and some hymns written to Aphrodite in translation of Georgius Datona. The later fact can also explain the juxtaposition of Odysseus and Aphrodite in the Canto as well. Alexander suggests that Divus had helped him to see Homer without a Victorian halo. (Alexander 143). Another possible interpretation can be the combination of the above i.e. Pound wanted to see the past through a double filter to better see the present. It is sometimes difficult to decide why one thing stands next to or near another, for instance, why should Pound stop the narrative about Odysseus and switch on the image of Aphrodite. He indicates this sudden shift by a fragmented line consisting only of a word “Venerendam”, which is an epithet of Aphrodite in Latin, it means respectable. Pound found it more expressive to use this Latin adjective, he gave us only this world in the line indicating that it is ellipted, there is something missing. It can be interpreted as a first part of an invocation, which is also a prerequisite of a traditional epic poem, since it was omitted at the beginning Pound might have found it reasonable to place it somewhere in the course of the poem, this apostrophe might have been used also for the sake of its melody, it does not sound English, native speakers not knowing Latin can hear only music grow out of it, since the meaning of the word maybe the less likely to direct the reader’s attention. It is in accordance with Pound’s aesthetic theory: he distinguished three kinds of poetry: logopoeia, poetry of ideas, phanopoeia, poetry of images and melopoeia, when words are charged over and above their plain meaning with some musical property. The aim of melopeia is to lull or distract the reader from the exact sense of the language. It is the poetry on the borders of music. Pound was also a composer of several pieces of music, including the opera The Testament of Francois Villon. He considered the knowledge of music necessary for a poet (Schaffer 129-131). String of Latin phrases are woven into the texture of the poem further as well “Cypri munimenta sorrita est” ( she rules over the mountains of Cyprus ) creating a kind of mystery “Arcanum” as Pound called it. Aphrodite is depicted in color images; dominantly the adjective golden is used in reference to her, it occurs three times within five lines, it can symbolize light which is the end point of the movement of the poem, however this bright image is mingled with traces of darkness, Aphrodite’s eyelids are dark. The last lines of the poem are overcrowded with brightness and glittering and this visionary image is enlarged with further color associations such as “oricalchi” (brass), it suggests power and omnipotence. Even the name Argicidia means bright appearance. The ending of the Canto I is full of light, brightness and glittering as opposed to the darkness “sunless dead and […].. joyless regions” and gloomy mood of the previous part of the poem. Latin is not the only language that is mixed into the Canto, there can be found traces of the earliest English poetry represented by the “Seafarer”, the choice is perhaps not accidental, Pound translated this Anglo-Saxon poem in 1911 and its themes are so close to Odyssey as well it describes a voyage too. Canto I has the characteristics of an Anglo-Saxon poetic diction e.g. four-beat alliterative line: “To Pluto the strong, and praised Proserpine”. The language and rhythm of Pound’s own Seafarer translation can be felt in the Canto mixed with Renaissance Latin and modern American. As we see overlayering of languages is characteristics of the poem according to it, there are also as many different voices: Homer, Virgil, Divus, Georgius Datona, the Anglo-Saxon bard and Pound. We can see more clearly in this structure Pound’s essential method, which is cultural overlayering (Kearns 19-21). As Kearns put it, it is a Greek tale told with a mixture of Greek and Latin names, the Anglo-Saxon coloration of diction and rhythm, a modern interjection. The aim of such overlayering is to create a new whole, yet each of its ingredients retains something of its own identity, its own language and flavor. (Kearns 21). The compositional method of Pound is like a piece of music, it has its melody own rhythm and polyphonic character the elements of which are blended but not melted into an organic whole, they remain clearly distinguishable. Pound introduces a lots of themes into the poem: exploration, passion, history, myth, beauty, as we have seen from a wide range of sources. It presents Odysseus, the great Greek warrior of the Trojan War descending into the world of dead, right after he and his comrades had left Circe, they are sailing to consult the blind soothsayer Tiresias, thus they go there with a purpose in their minds seeking some intellectual enlightenment. The tone of the narration is mournful “Heavy with weeping” the place itself is described in a gloomy tone as well “Covered with close-webbed mist, unpierced ever /With glitter of sun-rays” Pound gives us such a “life-like” image of the Kimmerian lands that we can see it visionary, it is achieved by usage of condense combinations of words, which are capable of evoking instant associations in our minds. This effect is strengthened with alliterate usage of sibilant consonants: “Sun to his slumber, shadows o’er all the ocean”. These images are fragmented but nonetheless powerful. We can see that not only the language is fragmented but also the images and the whole narration as well. After describing the journey the narrative moves on giving details of the sacrifice, it begins with scarifying food according to the tradition. It can be interpreted at two levels, the most obvious is as a pagan sacrifice or it can also be seen as an allusion to Corpus Christi, wine and flour (bread) as a symbol of Christian sacrifice peeping out from later times, proving Pound’s view on history, according to which we do not know the past in chronological sequence. Christianity is woven into paganism. Cataloguing the dead souls as if he made a flash cross section of mass of people who had died during the passage of time. They are depicted as threatening, bloodthirsty ghosts. “Dark blood flowed in the fosse” Blood carries a double meaning here, it is the blood of sacrificed animals and at the same time it is the blood of victims, blood that was shed in vain since it flows in the fosse indicating the futility of the whole efforts. The images of the dead appear as if we watched a sequence of painting in a gallery, accompanied with feeble and sometimes strong rhythms of music of words. This part of the poem lacks of syntax “Battle spoil, bearing yet dreary arms”. Only meaning bearing elements remained, all the linking words are left out, underlining the references of the nouns and the heaviness of the verbs “Slaughtered the herds, sheep slain of bronze”. This line is full of action and movement. The words deliberated from their extra elements begin to affect on the reader with a terrible force, viewing images is accelerated, rapid flashing of pictures appear to us, including Odysseus’ “Keeping off the impetuous impotent dead”. At this very moment sudden change of pace occurs. Vivid passages are changed by an elegiac scene, with Elpenor, one of their comrades who died amid the struggles and was unburied. Odysseus discovers him among the dead, he is unmourned and bides him “remember me, unwept, unburied”. The narration is interrupted with a dialogue, full of personal emotions, grief above the lost friend, Odysseus is to undertake the work of mourning, then once again a shift of tone appears “And Anticlea came, whom I beat off”. Anticlea is Odysseus’ mother, and strangely enough, Odysseus seems to ignore her, even he does not want her to approach, it is more important for him to hear Tiresias’ foretelling, who is able to speak only after drinking the blood, which might mean that we can make conclusions for the future only on the basis of knowing the past, using the past in our purposes, infiltrating it through ourselves, blood in this case might function as a complex symbol of what had been so far, the blood of living creatures who shape the history. After the soothsaying the recurrent image of Anticlea appears again as if giving a frame to the foretelling, although we do not know anything about the details of the possible encounter between the mother and son. Up to this point the poem reads with a great ease as a translation of Homer’s description of Odysseus’ voyage, however, it is extremely difficult to guess without any background knowledge the significance of the following lines: “Lie quiet Divus”. If we do not know that Pound found Andreas Divus’ Renaissance translation of the Odyssey in Paris bookstall together with the florid translation of Homeric hymns to the gods by a Cretan translator, we are not able to understand the mechanism of juxtapositions of such fragments. This phrase “Lie quite Divus” is homage to the translator, whose work was stolen by Pound, Divus might have arisen from the grave as Elpeno...