Cela ne sert que pour donner courage
à ceux qui n’en ont pas de tout
So Salzburg reopens
10 Qui suona Wolfgang grillo
Po viola da gamba
one might do worse than open a pub on Lake Garda
so one thinks of
Tailhade and “Willy” (Gauthier-Villars)
15 and of Mockel and La Wallonie... en casque
de crystal rose les baladineswith the cakeshops in the Nevsky
and Sirdar, Armenonville or the Kashmiri house-boats
en casque de crystal rose les baladines
20 messed up Monsieur Mozart’s house
but left the door of the new concert hall
So he said, looking at the signed columns in San Zeno
“how the hell can we get any architecture
when we order our columns by the gross?”
25 red marble with a stone loop cast round it, four shafts,
and Farinata, kneeling in the cortile,
built like Ubaldo, that’s race,
Can Grande’s grin like Tommy Cochran’s
“E fa di clarità l’aer tremare”
30 thus writ, and conserved (or was) in Verona
So we sat there by the arena,
outside, Thiy and il decaduto
the lace cuff fallen over his knuckles
considering Rochefoucauld
35 but the program (Café Dante) a literary program 1920 or
thereabouts was neither published nor followed^24Perhaps the ¤rst thing to observe is that although the point de repère for
this passage, as is the case for the Pisan Cantos in general, is the poet’s actual
situation at war’s end in the prison camp in the hills above Pisa—its location,
situation, inmates, and guards—direct treatment of the thing never occurs.
The ¤rst line, with its gently comic prosopoeia, chiding the cricket, as the
guards have presumably chided the poet, not to “sing after taps,” is compli-
cated by the introduction of the Italian word for cricket, grillo. The words
have the same referent, but their meaning is not simply identical, because the
Pound, Duchamp, and the Nominalist Ethos 51