Gold and Gloom in Ravenna: On a Line in Ezra Pound’s Cantos

Abstract

This essay examines the significance of Ezra Pound’s visits to Ravenna, Italy, in the early 1920s by considering the function of one image that occurs in several slightly different forms in A Draft of XXX Cantos (1930): “in the gloom, the gold gathers the light against it.” It is suggested that this line perfectly encapsulates the tension between revelation and concealment exhibited throughout The Cantos. Hugh Kenner’s reading of it as an allusion to Pindar is developed here as exemplary of a certain lyrical obscurity that frequently subordinates visual clarity to nonsemantic sound patterning. The combination of “gold” and “gloom” is explored through the visual effects of the church mosaics of Ravenna, and I propose a possible source for the image itself in an inscription of twenty Latin hexameters in the Archbishops’ Chapel there that celebrates the power of mosaic to capture light and to set it free. The image disappears from The Cantos after 1930, and I suggest that its place is taken by Guido Cavalcanti’s “Donna me prega,” a poem that Pound describes as “a sort of metaphor on the generation of light.” Examining the two translations Pound made of this text, I conclude that he underplays Cavalcanti’s pessimism so as to present the Canzone as a summative expression of “dark” illumination even as he celebrates the poet’s apparent intention “to convey or to interpret a definite meaning.”