BOOKS
455
score-of a
motif
like Jonson's "Have you seen.. . ?" or "Have you
marked... ?" constitutes one of the large-scale rhythms that ride
through the
Cantos
in our experience of them when we read many of
them at a time, and fast." This is how the
Cantos
should be read,
according to Davie, and the best preparation for reading the poem is to
train the ear to respond to motifs, cadences, rhythms. Davie hopes to
rid the poem of its offensive matter by alerting its readers to the true
poetry of motif, idiom,
concetto.
Pound's true imagination makes
fictions as a composer makes rhythms and motifs; his false imagination
resorts to what other, lesser men have made for purposes mainly
impure.
It
would be easy
to
say that Davie's argument is ingenious, and to
damn it in that praise. Obviously he wants to redeem a poem which, in
many of its manifestations, he thinks beyond redemption. He is
embarrassed by those pages in which Pound's suburban vulgarity
pretends to be the highest refinement of manners. But he loves the
poem and wants to save it from its vulgarity. Hence his recourse to
Upward, to transfer the prestige of ideas to acts of the mind which
make their presence felt long before they have achieved the good or bad
fate of fixity.
In
the chapter on rhythms in the
Cantos
Davie shows how
motifs work. He takes Ben jonson's poem, "Her Triumph," one of the
lyrics from
A Celebration of Charis
("Have you seen but a bright lily
grow?" ) and attends to its presence in Cantos 47, 74, 80, 81, and 110.
The demonstration is beautiful, a true critical perception, mind-work
in tune with ear-work. We hear the motif as it comes and goes through
the later
Cantos.
But Davie has not shown why such events are
important, or what value we should ascribe to them. I cannot see,
therefore, how his argument differs from the common advice of those
who tell us to attend to the sounds of the
Cantos
and ignore the sense. I
deliberately put the case crudely: in a statelier version we would be
advised
to
find Pound's poetry not in his opinions, convictions, and
political sentiments but in his craft, his intermittently released sensibil–
ity, the music of his verse. Davie's new vocabulary seems to me to make
essentially the same case, but in much more impressive philosophic
terms.
Music: in
Ezra Pound: Poet as Sculptor
we read a great deal about
sculpture, sculptural form, and so forth , and the presiding book was
Adrian Stokes's
The Stones of Rimini
(1934). The new book has
nothing
to
say of those matters; Upward has displaced Stokes; music
has replaced sculpture. There is no talk of Brancusi, Gaudier-Brzeska,
the form emerging from its matrix, the distinction between carving and
