On May 3, 1945, two years after a federal grand jury indicted him for treason, Ezra Pound was taken prisoner by Italian partisans and handed over to the United States Counter Intelligence Corps in Genoa. Several weeks later, he was transferred to the U.S. Army’s Disciplinary Training Center near Pisa, where he was held first in a steel cage and later in a tent in the medical compound. Here, on a yellow pad turned sideways, Pound began writing The Pisan Cantos, the first and longest of which leaps between descriptions of the center, remarks about contemporary politics, observations of the natural world, and memories of Pound’s youth. The poem feels driven, unrelentingly purposeful, but at the same time chaotic, driven by forces beyond the will. Any immediate evidence of structure, any sense of direction on which readers might model their own, is buried under the sheer onslaught of material. “Perhaps one thing we shouldn’t lose sight of,” says the psychologist Adam Phillips, “is just how reassuring the whole idea of excess can be.”
Is this poem excessive or restrained?
O Rose, thou art sick.
The invisible worm,
That flies in the night
In the howling storm:
Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy:
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.
These thirty-four words contain forty-one syllables, and, like every poet I’ve discussed, Blake wants us to experience the linear unfolding of these syllables in a particular way: every line of “The Sick Rose” contains two stressed syllables.
The invisible worm,
That flies in the night
In the howling storm
Sometimes two unstressed syllables intervene between the stressed syllables (“flies in the night”), sometimes only one (“howling storm”). And sometimes the line is made exclusively of Germanic monosyllables (“Rose, thou art sick”) while at other times the line includes a multisyllabic Latinate word (“invisible worm”), making the intervening unstressed syllables move more quickly, less punchily. The anapest “thou art sick” sounds completely different from the anapest “-ible worm.”
This elegant dance of pattern and variation becomes itself a kind of pattern; we expect to keep hearing it. But at the end of the poem Blake disrupts our expectations. Each of the final three lines features a disyllabic Latinate word paired with a Germanic monosyllable (“crimson joy,” “secret love,” “life destroy”), and because our ears are so used to hearing the lilting intervention of unstressed syllables between the stresses—
Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy
—our ears want to hear the next lines this way:
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.
But we can’t hear the lines that way. Because the first syllable of the word secret receives more stress than the second (“secret”), its long vowel sound preceded by a cluster of mouth-filling consonants, a third stressed syllable has muscled its way into the line and plunked itself down beside another stressed syllable—no intervening unstressed syllables, no lilt.
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.
To hear this violation of the pattern, the two stressed syllables placed violently side by side (“dark secret love”), is to know that no matter what “The Sick Rose” seems to say about that nasty worm destroying the pretty rose, Blake is completely in favor of dark secret love. For the poem doesn’t simply describe this attraction to the dark, the disruptive, the demonic; the sound of the syllables makes us feel it. And then we want to feel it again.
“The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom,” said Blake in “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.” Does the metrical variation in the penultimate line of “The Sick Rose” represent a moment of excess (from excedere, to go beyond) or a moment of restraint (from restringere, to draw back)? As I mentioned at the beginning of this book, restraint may seem merely banal, an unexamined trust of limitation, and excess may seem obvious, an unexamined romance with transgression—except inasmuch as a particular work of art creates the context in which a particular aesthetic choice becomes a virtue. Blake’s poem enacts this paradoxical economy through sublimely ordinary means: a variation from an established pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables.
The Pisan Cantos enacts this economy not only on the microscopic level of prosody but also in the grandest terms of structure, simultaneously establishing and obliterating the context in which transgression becomes meaningful. Throughout Canto 74, the first of The Pisan Cantos, Pound offers a variety of metaphors for the poem’s wayward accumulation of detail. He dismisses general concepts that “cannot be born from a sufficient phalanx of particulars,” suggesting that the task of his poem is to provide such a phalanx. “By no means an orderly Dantescan rising / but as the winds veer,” he admonishes, suggesting that the phalanx of particulars cannot be organized by the hierarchies familiar to us from centuries of Western thought. “As the winds veer in periplum,” he elaborates, associating our readerly voyage not with the bird’s-eye perspective of a conventional map but with the periplum, the shipboard view of how the shoreline appears as it is encountered incrementally in time. Neither should we mourn the loss of any centralized perspective. “Le Paradis n’est pas artificiel,” he intones, recalling Baudelaire: whatever we know of paradise we know from the disjointed world of particularity itself—“it exists only in fragments unexpected excellent sausage, / the smell of mint, for example.”
All these metaphors are reassuring, since they suggest that we’re supposed to feel disoriented as we move forward through the poem, overwhelmed by the unruly accumulation of particulars. They suggest that the poem’s waywardness is not simply a reflection of the chaotic conditions under which it was written but also the embodiment of a concertedly antihierarchical worldview. But the longer we read, the more dissatisfying these metaphors become. They justify the poem’s highly disjunctive texture, but they don’t help us actually to negotiate that texture. Many other poems are far longer than Canto 74 (Whitman’s “Song of Myself” is almost twice as long), but the length of Canto 74 feels dauntingly excessive because the poem’s material exceeds the grasp of its gathering metaphors. The metaphors urge us to enjoy the fragmented multiplicity of human experience, but instead we feel uneasy, disoriented—as we’d feel in “The Sick Rose” if every line contained the kind of highly charged metrical variation that distinguishes its conclusion. In such a poem, variation no longer feels disruptive; over time, readers become inattentive to the very thing that most demands their attention.
Pound suspects that his readers will feel this way.
I don’t know how humanity stands it
with a painted paradise at the end of it
without a painted paradise at the end of it
the dwarf morning-glory twines round the grass blade
Faced with an indigestible glut of information, readers may find the lack of any organizing teleology (“without a painted paradise at the end”) as oppressive as the overbearing force of teleology (“with a painted paradise at the end”), and they are left only with one of the poem’s nearly infinite array of meticulously rendered particulars: “the dwarf morning-glory twines round the grass blade.” As it is for Whitman, the up-close concentration on things of this world is at once revelatory and emptying, the simultaneous discovery of infinity and mortality.
Pound never relaxed in his devotion to poetic compression, and in contrast to the dilated passages in Eliot’s Four Quartets, The Pisan Cantos is distinguished everywhere by an unrelenting density of language. It’s hard not to hear the majority of the eleven syllables in this line as stressed syllables: “the dwarf morning-glory twines round the grass blade.” Subsequent lines add an even greater semantic charge to this sonic density by juxtaposing a phrase in Latin (“great night of the soul”) with references to the Crucifixion, the middle passage, and a litany of the names of fellow prisoners in the Disciplinary Training Center. The phalanx of particulars accumulates with a disorienting swiftness.
The dwarf morning-glory twines round the grass blade
magna NOX animae with Barabbas and 2 thieves
beside me,
the wards like a slave ship,
Mr Edwards, Hudson, Henry
Any reader might be forgiven for giving up at this point, since almost every line of Canto 74 demands a meticulous attention, diverting its readers from the increasingly unmanageable task of seeing the poem whole.
But if we turn to Canto 75, the second and shortest of The Pisan Cantos, we find something different. Following the 842 lines of Canto 74, this canto contains just 7 lines of verse followed by 124 measures of a musical score, written out by hand. The score is a twentieth-century transcription for violin of Francesco da Milano’s sixteenth-century transcription for lute of Clement Janequin’s “Song of the Birds,” a polyphonic motet for four voices. The score reduces the multiple voices of polyphony to a single voice, replacing sung syllables with pure sound, while simultaneously offering a visual equivalent of an experience that (as we find out later in The Pisan Cantos) Pound had every day he was incarcerated.
8th day of September
f f
d
g
write the birds on their treble scale
Magpies, their downy white chests rimmed in black, continually repositioned themselves on the wires surrounding the Disciplinary Training Center, as if to create the musical score of their own singing. This image is seductive: following the cacophonous multiplicity of Canto 74, it answers our desire for lyric singularity—the song is what it means. But to say that Pound aspired to the immediacy of birdsong in The Pisan Cantos does not do our experience of the poem justice, since Pound is not suggesting that he would compose a well-made lyric if only he could. “The Sick Rose” may seem restrained compared to The Pisan Cantos, but it is excessive in relationship to itself.
This discomfort with the parameters of the lyric is essential to the lyric, and Pound is by no means the only poet to feel it.
The vastest earthly Day
Is shrunken small
By one Defaulting Face
Behind a Pall—
This poem by Emily Dickinson sets life against death, vastness against smallness, infinitude against finitude: the death of even one person reduces the earth. But Dickinson was not content with piety, even though most reading editions of her poems might suggest in this case that she was. As I’ve mentioned, Dickinson often offered several choices for certain words in her poems: the “vastest earthly Day” might be “shrunken” small, but it might also be “shriveled” or “dwindled.” More provocatively, it might be “chastened.” To imagine that the earth is “chastened small” by “one Defaulting Face” is to grant that small face an astonishing agency, and Dickinson recognizes the astonishment by wondering if the face should be not “defaulting” but “heroic,” larger than life or death.
The vastest earthly Day
Is chastened small
By one heroic
Face that owned it all—
This version of the poem is no more authoritative than the one I quoted earlier. Like Pound, Dickinson is of two minds about a singular poetic voice, and the versions of her poem that I’ve constructed from her variants make choices that Dickinson herself declined to make: the first version laments the finitude of every human being, however insignificant, and the second version insists that an extraordinary human being may exceed her finitude, chastening the earth. But while the poem is anxious not to choose between these alternatives, preferring to equivocate, this anxiety itself suggests a preference for an imagination that wants to own it all. The poem is discontent with its own parameters, and Dickinson’s refusal of the limitations of conventional publication allowed her to preserve this desire to exceed herself.
Because all poems are formal mechanisms, forged from the limited resources of the language, all poems are bound up in this dilemma: like the mortal beings who make them, poems want to exceed the restraints without which they could never have existed in the first place. But not all poems embody this dilemma as aggressively as The Pisan Cantos does. Years before he knew he was sick, Keats expressed “fears that I may cease to be / Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain,” and throughout The Pisan Cantos the space of the teeming brain is figured as a six-foot-by-six-foot steel cage. Pound had nothing from which to make his poem except the contents of his own mind—memories, opinions, regrets, dreams—and he feared he was losing his mind. In a sense, this is all the material any poet ever has, and if Pound’s situation feels poignant, it is because the situation so viciously literalizes the precariousness of any act of imaginative creation. The poem’s excess, like any poem’s excess, is driven by the wish not to die; but because the wish is experienced in such a primal form, the poem dramatizes its romance with excess excessively. Like any human being, but unlike most poems, The Pisan Cantos asks for more than it deserves.
This is why a satisfying reading of Canto 74 may neither turn away from the poem’s unmanageable excess nor pretend to have encompassed it. We may neither ignore Pound’s gathering metaphors nor pretend that they account fully for his need to set down on the page everything he sees, thinks, and remembers. Pound first began to organize longer poems through the juxtaposition of tones in the early “Villanelle: The Psychological Hour,” as we’ve seen, and throughout Canto 74 he lurches wildly among a variety of radically different tones, from harangues about contemporary politics and economics on the one hand—
and in India the rate down to 18 per hundred
but the local loan lice provided from imported bankers
so the total interest sweated out of the Indian farmers
rose in Churchillian grandeur
—to reverent observations of the natural world on the other.
and there was a smell of mint under the tent flaps
especially after the rain
and a white ox on the road toward Pisa
as if facing the tower,
dark sheep in the drill field and on wet days were clouds
in the mountain as if under the guard roosts.
A lizard upheld me
the wild birds wd not eat the white bread
from Mt Taishan to the sunset
From Carrara stone to the tower
and this day the air was made open
for Kuanon of all delights
Linus, Cletus, Clement
Some of these passages are immediately explicable and some are not, and even the most transparently lyrical passages are larger, more far-reaching than they seem. Our sense of Pound’s heterogeneous spiritualism, rising from his reverence for the natural world, is sharpened once we know that Taishan is a sacred mountain in China, that Kuanon is the Japanese name for the Chinese goddess of mercy, and that Linus, Cletus, and Clement are Roman church fathers. But is our reading of the poem at large assisted by the knowledge that in 1925 Winston Churchill, acting as chancellor of the exchequer, returned British currency to the gold standard, reducing the value of one hundred Indian rupees to eighteen pence? The life of The Pisan Cantos inheres not in any of these discrete moments as such but in the way in which the poem twists and turns from one moment to another, fastening to the page the work of a mind desperate to compose itself out of nothing. “Enough is so vast a sweetness,” said Dickinson, “I suppose it never occurs.” And when a poem is driven by the desperate wish to exceed the boundaries of human mortality, then too much can never be enough.
Still, it’s one thing to find oneself sympathizing with Keats on his deathbed and another to find oneself sympathizing with a fascist anti-Semite in a cage. This is why The Pisan Cantos must also try our sympathy by resisting all conclusions, churning up more clutter than a mind could possibly deploy. And when the poem does rise to moments of lyric clarity, pure birdsong, it is crucial that we feel not simply their isolated power. Which is more excessive, more arrogant, the lyric moments or the chaotic effusions of language that overwhelm them? Poems as unmanageable as The Pisan Cantos ask us to ponder such questions, but so do poems as composed as “The vastest earthly Day”—not because these poems are in different ways about the wish to transcend the limitations of human finitude but because they are made of language.
Consider some language from “The French Revolution,” one of the first poems Blake wrote in a version of the long, seven-stress line that would distinguish his unwieldy prophetic works, Milton and Jerusalem. One of the architects of the revolution, the Abbé de Sièyes, is describing how the rising voice of the people will liberate every immortal soul from the shackles of heaven, and the sentence is a contest of verbs: against the forces that would seal, close, bind, enslave, and depress stands a new force that would break, swell, raise, and expand.
When the heavens were seal’d with a stone, and the terrible sun clos’d in an orb, and the moon
Rent from the nations, and each star appointed for watchers of night,
The millions of spirits immortal were bound in the ruins of sulphur heaven
To wander inslav’d; black, deprest in dark ignorance, kept in awe with the whip,
To worship terrors, bred from the blood of revenge and breath of desire,
In beastial forms; or more terrible men, till the dawn of our peaceful morning,
Till dawn, till morning, till the breaking of clouds, and swelling of winds, and the universal voice,
Till man raise his darken’d limbs out of the caves of night, his eyes and his heart
Expand.
Because Blake’s ears were so used to hearing the syntax of English poetry organized in lines of five stresses (“to break the pentameter, that was the first heave,” said Pound in Canto 81), the seven-stress line felt like a strategic excess, a refusal of restraint that’s meant to embody the revolutionary fervor the poem also describes: “The millions of spirits immortal were bound in the ruins of sulphur heaven.”
But after we’re accustomed to the sound of the long line, Blake exceeds the terms of his own excess, making it feel in the context of this particular poem like a restraint, just as the two-stress line feels like a restraint in “The Sick Rose.” This especially long line sounds like it contains seven stressed syllables only because it exists in the context of other seven-stress lines—
Till man raise his darken’d limbs out of the caves of night, his eyes and his heart
—and the dramatic enjambment with which it concludes delivers us to the most important verb in the sentence.
Expand.
The syntax of this statement is very plain, boldly declarative (“his eyes and his heart / Expand”), but we feel its wild force because the statement is delivered to us by a long complex sentence in which the independent clause is preceded by a sequence of dependent clauses (“when the heavens were seal’d,” “the terrible sun clos’d,” “the moon / Rent”) that conspire with the line length in order to throw enormous weight on the concluding verb.
Expand.
We experience this sentence as expansion, as excess, because it is so rigorously curtailed by patterns of repetition—rhythmic patterns, syntactical patterns, rhetorical patterns.
In a short lyric poem by Blake, Dickinson, or Pound, whether we call the poem formal or free, we tend to hear those patterns immediately, and part of Pound’s mission in The Pisan Cantos is to deny us any immediate recourse to such patterns, asking us to live in the long and often frustrating task of discovering them—and then rediscovering them after they’ve been swept away. Blake’s long poems stand somewhere between these two extremes. But in any case the act of discovering patterns in art never happens instantaneously; it happens over time, even if the time lapse is very small. In that lapse, we feel excess consorting strenuously with restraint. And if the lapse is very large, we tend to call the poem excessive, and if it is small, we tend to call the poem restrained.
Keats once remarked that poems should surprise us with a “fine excess,” a formulation that juxtaposes two Latinate words: fine (from finis, the end or limit) and excess (from excedere, to go beyond the limit). The formulation is boldly paradoxical—a limited limitlessness, a finite infinitude, a mortal immortality—but it is also accurate. For whatever else it is, the poem is the words on the page, and its drama of excessiveness is played out within the circumscribed arena of the linguistic medium, over which the poet has complete control. Chaos, like order, is in art a concertedly crafted illusion. So if, like the human beings who make them, poems want to exceed the restraints without which they could never have existed in the first place, then actually to exceed those limitations is to cease to exist. A poem cannot be excessive if is it not also fine.