Introduction 17three solemn half notes
their white downy chests black-rimmed
on the middle wire
periplumPound begins by recalling his German teacher at the University of
Pennsylvania, forty years before, one Richard Henry Riethmuller,
author of Walt Whitman and the Germans(1966), an identification I owe
to Roy Harvey Pearce. Riethmuller (Pound got the spelling wrong) had
contrasted Whitman’s fame in the professor’s native Denmark to the
bard’s supposed obscurity in the America of 1905, a contrast that leads
Pound to a recall of Whitman’s “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking.”
Whitman’s poem is an elegy for the poetic self so powerful that any other
poet ought to be wary of invoking so great a hymn of poetic incarnation
and disincarnation. Whitman’s “O troubled reflection in the sea! / O
throat! O throbbing heart!” is revised by Pound into “O troubled
reflection / O throat, O throbbing heart,” with “in the sea” omitted.
These are the last two lines of the penultimate stanza of the song of the
bird lamenting his lost mate:
O darkness! O in vain!
O I am very sick and sorrowful.
O brown halo in the sky near the moon, drooping upon the sea!
O throat! O throbbing heart!
And I singing uselessly, uselessly all the night.Canto 82 rather movingly has shown the incarcerated poet studying
the nostalgias of his early literary life, while meditating upon the
unrighteousness of all wars. A vision of the earth now comes to him, in
response to his partly repressed recall of Whitman’s vision of the sea.
Marrying the earth is Pound’s counterpart to Whitman’s marrying the sea,
both in “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” and in “When Lilacs Last in
the Dooryard Bloom’d,” and both brides are at once death and the mother.
“Where I lie let the thyme rise,” perhaps repeating William Blake’s similar
grand pun on “thyme” and “time,” is a profound acceptance of the reality
principle, with no more idealizations of a timeless order. Whitman returns
from the dead even more strongly in the closing lines of Canto 82, where
Pound lies down in a fluid time “strong as the undertow / of the wave
receding,” which invokes another great elegiac triumph of Whitman’s, “As
I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life.” The two song-birds of “Out of the