Prefiguring Cantonic Time: Temporal Categories in the Collected Shorter Poems of Ezra Pound

Abstract

The significance of time as one of the underlying organizational principles of Pound's Cantos is widely recognized in terms of Bergsonian simultaneity, Odyssean nostalgia, temporal vortices, and historical imperatives that are caught `on the barb of time'. (1) Rather than seeing a continuity between such elements and Pound's earlier poetry, Peter Nicholls argues that the temporal schemata of The Cantos represent a radical shift in Pound's treatment of time and relates this shift to his discovery of Japanese drama in the papers of Ernest Fenollosa: `These Noh plays suggested to Pound a structural conception of time which would allow him to progress from the momentary intuitions of Imagism to the complex and extended structures of The Cantos.' (2) The contrast here between the miniaturism of the strictly imagist poems and the epic canvas of The Cantos is convincing in structural terms, but prompts enquiry as to whether the poetic significance of time in The Cantos is in fact radically different or if the temporal categories in the earlier poetry in some way prefigure Cantonic time. The most explicit pronouncement concerning time in The Cantos occurs in Canto 74 in the context of the cage at Pisa: `Time is not, is the evil, beloved | Beloved the hours brododaktulos' (p. 458). A considered interpretation of these lines is required if we are to characterize Cantonic time effectively. In his seminal discussion of time in The Cantos, which takes its name from Pound's own phrase, Daniel D. Pearlman comments on these lines: `Coupled with this moral assertion that is evil is the metaphysical assertion that Time is not', (3) a reading that requires a fairly convoluted philosophical elaboration to explain the obvious contradiction: how can time be evil, if it does not exist? Pearlman's interpretation is based on the assumption that `Time is not' is a syntactically complete entity with an existential form of the verb `to be'. This is the generally accepted reading, affirmed, for example, in Alfredo Rizzardi's powerful Italian translation: `Il Tempo non e, il Tempo e il male, mio amore' where the translation of `beloved' as `mio amore' rules out any other interpretation. (4) Unlike Pearlman (and Rizzardi) I read `beloved' as the complement of a copular form of the verb `to be', `Time is not beloved', which is parenthetically interrupted by `Time is the evil'. The second line, `Beloved the hours brododaktulos', by means of a rhetorical chiasmus then provides a condensed contrast between unbeloved (capitalized, abstracted) and the beloved hours of a `rosy-fingered' Homeric dawn with which it is juxtaposed. This reading not only circumvents the apparent contradiction in the text but also embodies two of the most important temporal aspects of Pound's thinking: revulsion at the irredeemable ravages of time and celebration of the caught moment cherished. The occurrence of `Time is the evil' at Pisa is a reprise from Canto 30: its context there is reinforcement of the notion of redemptionless time. The pronouncement is instantiated by the case of Pedro of Portugal whose wife Ignez was murdered in a court intrigue. Pedro later had her body exhumed and paid court to by `the Lords in Lisboa' (pp. 147-48). Commenting on Ignez's first appearance, in Canto 3, Carroll F. Terrell notes that she represents `the overlapping of the past into the present, a discrepancy between the fine image held in the mind and the actual fact of the rotting corpse from the past, as may occur when time, for a mind like Pedro's, has stood still'. (5) Ignez is effaced by the inexorable passage of time. While Pedro's strategy for evoking the past is a madness none of us would want to be driven to, Terrell's remarks remind us that time redeemable in the mind, the power of memory, is central to any discussion of time's significance in Pound's poetry. Pedro's exhumation of Ignez is a temporally displaced reenactment of the past exemplifying the larger temporal dislocations of The Cantos which Nicholls attributes to the influence of such reenactments in Japanese drama. …