• 1 In “Canto XCIX,” for example, we find “that all converge as the root” (708). See also Kenner 535 on (...)
• 2 See Nicholls, “Unsettling the Wilderness: Susan Howe and American History.” Coyle 226 observes simi (...)
• 3 On this, see Silkin 144.

1In view of the ever growing quantity of books about The Cantos it is notable that Thrones continues to attract little systematic comment. While the sequence might be taken to represent Poundian techniques at their most radical, Thrones is actually the part of the poem that even Poundians like least. In the following pages I want to consider the particular problems presented by this late section of The Cantos and their relation to the larger issue of the poem’s ending, an issue which is, of course, fraught with paradox. For at just the point where we might expect a certain “convergence” in Pound’s materials,1 the poem branches out into new and complex territories. Thrones begins with Paul the Deacon’s 8^th-century history of the Lombards in Italy, moves to Byzantium through the medium of the so-called Eparch’sBook of Leo the Wise, switches then to China via The Sacred Edict of KangHsi, and from “Canto C” shifts between nineteenth-century American history, the landscapes of the Na Khi, and ends with three cantos quarried from the Institutes of Thomas Coke. It is not surprising that early readers found the sequence obscure and all but unreadable. Yet I would suggest that Thronesis hardly less problematic now, and that the extensive work since carried out on Pound’s sources by Carroll Terrell, David Gordon, James Wilhelm and others, has had the effect less of clearing the ground for analytic comment than of leaving the sequence tagged and labelled, the work of reading somehow complete before we begin. Indeed, this particular sense of closure, of the text seemingly diminished by annotation, might be thought to distin­guish the sequence from earlier parts of the poem. For the first time, perhaps, a return to the sources often fails to satisfy. To be sure, we can reconstruct Pound’s readings, tracing most of the items of his text to their usually remote originals. At the same time, though, Pound’s habit of ellipsis and decontextualisation is now so extreme that it does not so much invite this work of recovery as make a countervailing claim for the autonomy of his own text. Pound’s way of “writing through” other texts here is less methodical as it is less hospitable to forms of narrative, and as a result it tends to employ the source text to gen­erate a poetic text that often retains only tenuous links to its original. The didac­tic impulse has hardly diminished, but it now informs a radical reconstruction of the source which might even seem to prefigure the way in which a contemporary poet such as Susan Howe uses historical materials, combining unrelated details often pages apart in a new constellation that asserts a problematic inde­pendence from the source.2 And Pound’s rhythm of presentation is also different in these Cantos. Where Section: Rock-Drillhad continued to make use of the open, extended measures of the Pisan sequence, balancing syntactically end-stopped lines against the larger period of an unfolding sentence,3 Thrones often works in smaller units of rhythm and tends to move at a slower, more emphatic pace, stressing the declarative shape of the line and frequently exploiting a heavily marked caesura as a definitional device.

• 4 Mary de Rachewiltz 607 suggests that “Canto XCVI”is written “in parallel” with Dante’s Justinian ca (...)
• 5 Pound’s 1959 commentto James Laughlin, that he had “forgotten what or which politic she ever had. C (...)

2I will return to this reformulation of the poem’s measure, a word which lives a rich double life in the pages of Thrones, but first I want to consider Pound’s way of presenting historical materials in the new sequence. As usual here, it is often easier to specify his larger purpose than it is the function of the local detail. At least we can see from cantos XCVI and XCVII that Thrones opens by surveying an extended period of time that begins with the Romans and ends with the fall of Constantinople in 1204. “Canto XCVI” sets out from the col­lapse of the Roman Empire, attempting to gauge whether the Roman wisdom of law and government could survive the turn to a new religion and the inva­sions of Italy by barbarian armies. The Eastern Empire, and its auratic capital Byzantium, now occupies centre stage since it exemplifies for Pound the codifi­cation of Roman law and the maintenance for close to a thousand years of the old currency ratio of silver to gold.4 The persistence of Roman values speaks also, in a deliberately muffled way, for Pound’s continuing commemoration of Mussolini’s state, with the idealised city of Byzantium enshrined, by extended quotation from the Eparch’s Book, as the locus of economic regulation and measure.5 While Thrones is concerned to chart what Pound terms “the slide of Byzantium” (XCVI 672), we learn from “Canto XCVIII” that Byzantium was nonetheless “rather more durable” than even ancient China in its control of money and interest rates (708). So if Rome has fallen, Byzantium may survive as a partly disembodied form within Pound’s poem—ultimately it will provide that still point for which the poem and poet yearn, the still point which is at once the most transparent expression of justice and one of the poet’s own imagined resting places. In “Canto CX” we shall duly read of “Byzance, a tomb, an end,/Galla’s rest, and thy quiet house at Torcello” (794).

• 6 The Latin text of Paul’s Historyis contained in Patrologia Latina, J.P. Migne, ed.,vol. 95, cols. 4 (...)

4The Emperor Constans II has been waging war against the Lombards with the aid of Roman followers, but, says Paul, “when he found that he could accom­plish nothing against the Langobards, [he] directed all the threats of his cru­elty against his own followers, that is, the Romans” (Paul the Deacon 22 ₃).6 As an act of vengeance, Constans despoils the Roman Pantheon, stripping the roof, as Pound notes, and sending back all kinds of loot to Constantinople. Not content with this, Constans moves into Sicily where he sells large numbers of the population into slavery to satisfy tax demands. But retribution is on its way, and in 668 Constans is slain in his bath by one of his own servants.

• 7 Cf. Noel Stock’s “Introduction”to Pound Impact xiv: “the New Age traced the recession of power, awa (...)
• 8 Confucius 269. See also LXXIX 500.

8This allegorising tendency is closely bound up, of course, with Pound’s increasingly conflicted sense of history-as-conspiracy The plots whose working we discern within the myriad detail of the text are shrouded in secrecy, and Pound often imagines them as sites of decadent and degraded practices: as he puts it in the earlierABCof Economics, “the place of control is a dark room back of a bank, hung with deep velvet curtains. No one must see what happens” (SP 207). Elsewhere we have “‘THE recession’ Orage said/‘OF power’/to the dark inner room” (Versi Prosaici), and it is this idea of the veiling of power as it “recedes” into the shadows which obsesses Pound at this point in The Cantos.7Yet while his own poem is grounded in a deep desire for clarity and illumina­tion, for “the manifest and not abstract” (639), as he takes it from Dante’s Con-vivio (IV. 16.10) in “Canto XCIII,” the mystique of displaced or hidden power actually informs much of the writing in Thrones. In fact, the idea of an abstract and absent principle of causality becomes increasingly important in the late cantos, and it presents itself in two curiously contradictory forms. On the one hand, a violence is done to the syntax of the source-text so as to produce an opacity that speaks more eloquently about theprinciple of occluded meaning than it does about the actual matters at hand. Interestingly, this occurs most often when Pound is dealing with American history where the pressure of secrecy is, in his view, greatest, and where his own redaction—as if by reflex-produces the maximum of syntactical contortion. We can already find examples of this in the Adams Cantos, and the tendency runs through Rock-Drilland into Thrones which contains lines like this: “Not that never should, but if exceeding and/no one protest/will lose all your liberties” (C 727). Even as Pound wants to expose the malign forces at work in history his language recoils from direct statement, characteristically beginning in medias res, giving the verb, and holding back the subject. Formulations such as this encode a deep anxiety, twisting lan­guage against itself and withholding that which it yearns most to deliver. It is almost painful to observe Pound surrendering himself to a rebarbative idiom that will, quite definitely, not “Get the meaning across and then quit” (LXXXVIII 595), as he takes the principle of “discourse” from the Analects.8 Indeed, survey­ing the “historic black-out” (LXXXIX 609), Pound goes on to quote Lenin to illustrate his own predicament: “ Aesopian language (under censorship)/where I wrote Japan you may read Russia ” (609). Pound’s internalisation of censor­ship after Pisa as self-censorship leads to a habit of deferral in the writing, to a holding back of grammatical elements which would make a statement imme­diately intelligible. To give a relatively trivial example, but one that recalls many others, almost as a signature: “‘L’adoravano’ said the sacristan, Bari/‘come Santa Lucia’/So it, a stone cupid, had to be stored in the sacristy” (CV 760).

• 9 See Coyle 231 for the idea that “the statistics check the mythopoeic.”

9Yet this use of an idiom which promises insight only to postpone or with­hold it is contrasted with another linguistic register which seems to offer a kind of absolute transparency of expression. This, rather surprisingly, is the lan­guage of monetary exchange, a language of quantity and equivalence which in Thrones stands in stark contrast to the atomised opacities of the textual “his­tory” that provides its context. Pound, of course, had always enjoyed quoting statistics and the device was part of the anti-poetics which had shaped the early parts of the poem. In Thrones, however, his preoccupation with quantitative values entails much more than a mere device, providing a major thematic strand which takes the place of narrative. Why should this be a defining feature of the last major sequence? Partly because Pound seems to have discovered the work of Alexander Del Mar in 1950—a discovery which, according to Humphrey Carpenter (798) seemed momentous enough for him to resume work on The Cantos. While allusions to Del Mar’s work feature briefly in Rock-Drill, it is not, however, until Thrones that Pound makes extensive use of Del Mar’s History of Monetary Systems, with “Canto XCVII,” as Mchael Coyle has shown, incorpo­rating a “numismatics” into the poem which makes its language different from that of preceding sections.9 Yet what is remarkable about this new interest— and this is something not fully acknowledged in Coyle’s important discussion of the canto—is that Pound actually has very little time for the etymological dimension of numismatics or for the inscriptions and symbolic images carried by coins. In fact, in cases where Del Mar describes the design of a coin, Pound generally ignores it, even when it is as appropriate to his purpose as, for exam­ple, the description of a coin as “stamped with the rayed effigy of the sovereign-pontiff, that is to say, he was represented surrounded with a halo of light” (Del Mar 50).

• 10 Coyle 234 notes that “By the time of his work on Thrones, Pound was treating semantic value as thou (...)
• 11 See Eastman 7, 118-19. In the old Faber text, the line read “2 doigts to a boodle, one bawbee: one (...)
• 12 In this respect, the circularity of the monetary equation confirms a tendency that emerges in Pound (...)
• 13 See Del Mar 37-8: “So long as money was governed by law, it was the whole number of coins, reduced (...)

11“[F]or more than thirteen centuries,” says Del Mar, “the gold coins of the Empire, East and West, were struck exclusively by the Basileus” (Del Mar 71), and it is the absolute and sacred nature of this authority that renders money a mere sign rather than a thing in itself. “Value,” writes Del Mar, “is not a thing, nor an attribute of things: it is a relation, a numerical relation, which appears in exchange. Such a relation cannot be accurately measured without the use of numbers, limited by law and embodied in a set of concrete symbols, suitable for transference from hand to hand” (Del Mar 7). Value thus begins to assume an absolute form because it can be expressed unambiguously in numerical terms,10 and Pound’s attraction to this form of expression has some curious reverberations in the writing of Thrones. Take the example of doits and boodles. Pound’s source is a footnote in Del Mar’s book which reads as follows: “The term merk is still used by the Scots. In their ancient scale of moneys there were 2 doits (fingers) to a boodle, 2 boodles to a plack, 3 placks to a bawbee, and 13 1/3 bawbees, or 160 doits, to the merk” (HMS 258 n.i). Why does Pound allude to this footnote? It is given no explanatory context as it appears in “Canto XCVII,” and the impatient reader is likely to wonder whether the “Rooseveltian dung-hill” of the next line, with its allegedly muddy thinking about economics, might not actually be the best place for this bit of antiquarian jetsam. But there is worse to come, for if, as we might now think, Pound is offering this numis­matic curiosity as an example of some ideal ratio he could have taken more trou­ble to get it right. Yet, as Barbara Eastman has shown in her study of the text of The Cantos, this unimportant line went through a whole series of errors and variations, the rate of doits to boodles and bawbees fluctuating erratically from one printing to another.11 The text, to be sure, is notoriously unstable, but beyond this the errors and corrections make us ask even more pointedly what purpose the line was meant to serve. If precision was not the issue here, why did Pound bother with this item in the first place? Most readers would proba­bly say that the line is inconsequential, just another example of a self-indulgent antiquarianism which is much in evidence in these late cantos. After all, to be told that two unknown quantities are equal to each other is to be told nothing. It is zero-degree information which the busy mind can do without. It might have been different if Pound had pursued the etymological implications of the terms (“doits”, fingers, “boodle”, from the Dutch boedel, estate or possession, “bawbee”, from base metal, bullion—nummulary terms that might seem to retain the trace of local experience). As we have it though, the line refuses that possibility, and the form of x to y, “2 doits to a boodle,” makes the process of definition a profoundly circular one.12 Of course in one sense this is precisely the point, since, for Pound, coins are signs or tokens whose signifying function is determined by the fact that they mean nothing more than their fixed relation to the whole sum of coins in circulation; value, as Del Mar is at pains to empha­sise, is determined by the sum of coins rather than by the sum of metal.13

• 14 See Jarvis 166, quoting Adorno, Negative Dialectics: “The name of dialectic says no more to begin w (...)
• 15 Compare Sieburth152-3: “Much of Pound’s monetary theory can be understood as an attempt to eliminat (...)
• 16 Compare Sohn-Rethel 49 on “value”:“The termby itself, as value in exchange, has no thought content (...)

12Here we can begin to see why the idea of ratio is so important to the opening of Thrones, for it supports a form of abstract thinking we might not expect to find in The Cantos. “Ratio” does more than “rhyme” in Pound’s thinking with the principle of “right reason” adduced in earlier parts of the poem, and connoting balance and equity; less obviouslyit also announces an ideal of absolute identity which the centrifugal movements of The Cantos had until this final sequence quite consistently refused. Pound, we recall, had always been keen to oppose what he called in the Cavalcanti essay any “attempt to unify different things, however small the difference” (LE 185). In the monetary world, how­
ever, two doits “are” a boodle in a way that equates subject and predicate precisely as two sides of the same coin. And this transparent relation has a degree of generality which it was the avowed function of the ideogram to exceed. In defining the word “red,” for example, the ideogram containing “rose,” “cherry,” “iron rust” and “flamingo” instigates multiple displacements away from any simple identification of subject and predicate (Pound compares the process to that of the biologist “when he gets together a few hundred or thousand slides” [ABCR 22]—my emphases). In other words, the ideogrammic method seems
to offer resistance to an identificatory mode of thinking that would subsume objects to concepts, and it does so by expressing a kind of remainder which always exceeds the process of adequation.14 By way of contrast, the expression “2 doits to a boodle” leaves no remainder and produces only a moment of rei-fied identity in which being—the “is” of equivalence—can express itself only as quantity (as Georg Simmel puts it, the quality of money “consists exclusively in its quantity” [259]). What is interesting, though, is that Pound’s use of the ratio-form exemplifies a desire, increasingly powerful in these last cantos, to abolish social complexity in the name of some sovereign act of performative utterance: as in “that 6 4/5^th pund of bread be a farden” XCVII/685 ; my emphasis). And crucially, this formula of absolute equivalence cancels any mediating third term—“get rid of the middle man,” it seems to say, very much in the spirit of the injunction to get rid of the usurious Jews who allegedly insert themselves in the space between the sovereign-pontiff’s legally sanctioned coinage and the labouring people.15 In functioning as the “general equivalent,” in Marx’s phrase, money thus seems to efface social contradictions by assimilating everything to one quantative measure of differentiation.16

• 17 Sieburth 144 describes Pound’s roll-call of coinages as “Joycean nomanclatter” and concludes that “ (...)

13Yet this ideal of absolute social transparency, which Pound will increasingly discover in feudal societies like that of the Na Khi, is also a kind of nonsense. And it is curious that, excepting the sacral ratio of gold to silver, the archaic monies memorialised in Thrones take on an almost farcical character. Pound has fun with his bawbees and boodles, his scats and his scads, not to forget his “olde Turkish grouch” (XCVI672) where “old” acquires a terminal “e” not in the source just in case we miss the point. There is a fitful comedy here which deliberately casts money in a nonsensical light (and it is contagious: as I write this essay I keep hearing “2 doits to a boodle” as “pop goes the weasel,” another bit of nonsense which is also, like many nursery rhymes, about money and measure).17 Of course, in perceiving the comic potential of money, Pound is not alone. Marx put it like this:

• 19 See Pound quoting Confucius: “I have reduced it all to one principle” (GK 15).

14For Marx, it is the choice of a socially useless commodity such as gold to express value created by human labour that is absurd. Up to a point Pound would agree, but where Marx attempts to translate “congealed” value back into processes of time and work, Pound is left with his tautologous ratios, where one thing is equivalent to another simply because authority has declared it to be so. The resulting abstractness of his sense of social relations now insinuates itself into the deepest structures of the poem. If, as I suggested earlier, the method of assemblage here becomes less ideogrammic than allegorical, it is because the ideal of absolute transparency works to devalue the particular in relation to the general principle—or ratio—which it exemplifies. Pound suddenly seems more interested in what things represent than in what they are, and this is reflected in the apparent randomness of his textual choices and in the rapidity with which he moves between different items. Something significant has happened to the device of definition which has always been so important to his poetics. For where Cavalcanti’s great canzone, with its intricate formal and conceptual “musicality” was once the exemplar of “precise definition,” we find in Thrones an insistent emphasis on mere correspondance or adequation, a kind of inert lex­icography which parallels the circularity of monetary ratios: “an askos is a leatherbag” (676),“muz apattern/fai laws kungi public/szui private” (708), “high-woodis called saltus” (772), “Copeis ahill/dene: avalley” (786), and so on. And somewhere in this absolutely simplified correspondence Pound strives to discern some sign of social connection: so, in “Canto XCIX,” from the Sacred Edict, “Gt. is gt… Little is little;/With friends one is one/2 is 2” (719), and later “Law: reciprocity” (722), the two terms yoked together by the “monetary” colon. Is Pound, like Confucius, attempting now to reduce everything to “one principle”?19 The recurrence of the abstract money-form in these cantos suggests, I think, not that Pound wants everything reduced to quantity, but rather that he is seeking a kind of radical simplicity that will result from correspondance and identity rather than from difference.

• 20 When Richard Lion heart was taken prisoner, his ransom was paid by melting down plate which was mad (...)

16The tone of the lines is hard to gauge: Pound’s allusions to Del Mar (as in “Caxton or Polydore”) are stubbornly opaque without help from the source, and the pretty but rather pointless word-play with “Bacchus” and “abacus” is disconcertingly elided with an ominously uninflected reference to Henry the Third’s massacre of the Jews.20 Then Pound’s eye is caught by a passage in Del Mar which describes the practice of extending monetary measures to “the pound weight, used for the assize of bread” and to “the subdivisions of the agrarian acre” (Del Mar 213) This in turn triggers a play on the Greek word prosodos meaning both “a song sung with accompaniment” and “revenue” or “rent.” Liddell and Hart’s lexicon, from which Pound probably derived his double definition, cites book 3 of Herodotus’ History for an example of the full Greek phrase which Rawlinson in the edition used by Pound translates as “the yearly tribute” (II481). This ideal measure, invoking a natural rhythm and periodicity, is then contrasted abruptly with the changing—metathemenon—of the currency after the doge of Venice, Enrico Dandolo, sacked Constantinople in 1203.

• 21 In glossing the passage in question, Rabaté 227 remarks that “The complicated account of these meas (...)
• 22 For a discussion of Pound’s early prosody and melopoeia, see Nicholls,“The Swinburne Nexus.”

17It is difficult to know how seriously to take Pound’s thinking here given the erratic fluctuations in emotional tone, but the lines in question have a pivotal function in reminding us that his practice of naming and defining in the open­ing pages of Thrones has so far led not at all to what we might think of as a live and moving verse measure, but has shown instead a certain verbal viscosity which is remote indeed from any song-like “prosody.” I am reminded, in fact, of what Walter Benjamin says of baroque allegory, that its language “was heavy with material display. Never has poetry been less winged” (200). In short, the prominence given to formulations of identity and equivalence has so far proved fundamentally anti-prosodic, effectively laying to rest any possibility that “quan­tity” might be an authentic bridging term between verse scansion and money21 For while money is “exclusively determined by quantity” (Simmel 279), the prosody to which this “nummulary grammar” is allegedly “moving” is one which, as we can see from earlier cantos, has so far been preoccupied with modes of perception and feeling that can not be simply or absolutely defined. This is why in the famous visionary sequences, such as “Canto XVII,” objects are presented precisely, but in a curious movement of distantiation are some how withheld, situated at a certain remove: “Nor bird-cry, nor any noise of wave moving” (76), and in one of Pound’s favourite locutions we have the “Sand as of malachite” (but not of malachite), “the turf clear as on hills under light” (77) and “Sound: as of the nightingale too far off to be heard” (XX 90). Clearly realised as this landscape is, it contains something else, something that seems to lie just out of range, something that complicates and perhaps undermines the kind of clarity at which the writing seems to aim. It is, if you like, that remainder which escapes predication, and it is in Pound’s early poetics the prop­erty of a utopian measure which designedly loosens our connections to clear meanings and to the monetary values that, in Thrones, will suddenly be taken to exemplify their absolute expression. This remainder is melopoeia, in short, wherein, as Pound says, “the words are charged, over and above their plain meaning, with some musical property, which directs the bearing or trend of that meaning.” It is, he continues, “a force tending often to lull, or distract the reader from the exact sense of the language” (HTR 171-2).22

• 23 Compare Gross 164: “From Canto 85 to 109 the ‘prosody’is oppressively visual, depending on line arr (...)

18To put this passage alongside those more opaque and abstracted lines from “Canto XCVII” is perhaps to see why The Cantos could not be brought defin­itively to an end. For two different forms of “measure” here contend and in doing so declare their incompatibility. The one expresses a desire “that all con­verge as the root,” as Pound takes it from The Sacred Edict (XCIX 708), and this is the measure that models itself on the absolute identification of the mone­tary ratio. Related images of enclosure and mirroring are now associated with peace, silence, and the uncontentiousness of self-identity, while “measure” is increasingly a matter of pregnant fixities expressing absolute value. And such fixities, we should note, are inscribed not only as currency ratios, but as ideograms, and, indeed, as writing itself, for in Thrones the rhythmic impulse is under steady pressure from a countervailing tendency toward the visual and the static.23 At the same time, though, this “convergence” in some unitary prin­ciple or measure is constantly interrupted and deflected by an older, more famil­iar measure, that more clearly “musical” one, which in weaving together hetero­geneous things is subtly responsive to the colours, sounds and nuances which assert diversity and difference in the face of abstraction and merely quantita­tive identity (compare, for example, the Del Mar passages of “Canto XCVII” with the minute verbal discriminations in the passage drawn from Apollonius later in the same canto, “That this colour exists in the air” etc. [689]). For the one measure, there is the “quiet” of a perfectly enclosed and finished world, most powerfully imagined in the feudal landscapes of the late cantos; for the other, there is a residual intimation of futurity, of the incalculable, though one which is now bounded by the prospect of the poet’s own death and which is framed by the complex mix of emotions so finely caught in the “exultant” but deathly evocation of the Venetian lagoon in “Canto CX.” “[T]his is a dying,” we are warned in “Canto CXIII” (800), but even at this late stage the ending of the poem seems still to recede before us. No more than Pound can we, as readers, resolve these different measures in one transcendent and all-unifying prosody; but perhaps, unlike Pound, we may take comfort in the fact that we cannot.