Navigation – Plan du site

AccueilNuméros5Part. III. Issues and Referential...Ezra Pound’s Catholic Prayer Book...

Part. III. Issues and Referentiality: presence(s)

Ezra Pound’s Catholic Prayer Book: Pro Patria Et Deo

James Kraus

Texte intégral

 “their Katholou can not be sufficiently derived from their hekasta”

(LXXIV 461)

1In 1945, when Ezra Pound was incarcerated in the Disciplinary Training Center at Pisa, Italy, he received and began annotating a 64-page Catholic Prayer Book for Army and Navy.1 In this paper, I will present a description and brief analysis of The Prayer Book and Pound’s annotations in it. Pound’s use of The Prayer Book provides insight to his application of the ideogrammic method in linking Confucianism to Catholicism. Furthermore, the Prayer Book provides evidence in support of an essentially religious reading of the Pisan Cantos.

2Subtitled “Pro Deo et Patria”—“For God and Country”—the Prayer Book measures approximately 3x5 inches; its cover is of a brown, textured card stock, and the internal leaves are of a standard bond paper. Originally published in 1917 by the Paulist Press in New York, it includes sections of the Roman Catholic Mass, as well as prayers intended to inspire soldiers or sailors facing death in time of war. It contains 61 headings, beginning with morning, evening and night prayers, and a page entitled “Rules of Life.” Then follows an outline of the Roman Catholic Mass, many parts in parallel Latin and English. Then there are a number of pages that provide instruction related to Catholic confes-sion. The final pages present various prayers that would be of value to soldiers in combat: prayers for victory and peace, prayers for the dying and the dead, and lastly a “Prayer for All in Trouble.”

3Twenty-five of The Prayer Book’s 64 pages are annotated. On three pages, passages are underlined, and on two pages, Pound wrote English or Latin phrases. In virtually every instance, the annotations link directly to the text of the Pisan Cantos. Additionally, Pound used other material, not annotated, from The Prayer Book in the Pisan Cantos. And finally, on the inside back cover Pound wrote three page numbers. This is consistent with his practice of creating a cross reference of his own on the endpapers of books he was reading; this type of annotation is found throughout his library (King “An ABC of E.P.’s Library” 36).

4The Prayer Book was normally given to soldiers who attended Catholic Mass and was suitable for carrying in the pocket of a shirt or coat; because of its brevity, it has been referred to as a “missal-ette” (Lynch). Perhaps Pound attended services while he was at the DTC. We know that services were held and that they were generally very popular, inasmuch as the prisoners were excused from normal drill and other work if they attended (King “Ezra Pound at Pisa” 53). Presumably, the ambience of the DTC was quite different on Sundays as a result. We do not know if the services were multi-denominational, or if there were separate Catholic services.

5Also, while at Pisa, Pound was at work on new poems for The Cantos, as well as on a new book of translations of Confucius which would later be called Confucius: The Unwobbling Pivot and The Great Digest. So I would like to advocate an approach to The Prayer Book that as fully as possible embraces its relationship to the Pisan Cantos as well as to his Confucian translations. I align my perspectives on Pound’s Confucian translations substantially with those in Mary Paterson Cheadle’s Ezra Pound’s Confucian Translations. Cheadle says that much of the appeal of the Confucian translations is “the dialogue, sometimes contrapuntal, they carry on with the political ideas Pound campaigned for” (4). In light of Pound’s annotated Prayer Book, the counterpoint Cheadle refers to may be seen as to some degree religious.

“The R.C. Chaplain’s Field Book”

6At times, Pound’s Pisan poems seem to ironize the Catholocism of The Prayer Book, while at other times they also seem to embrace significant aspects of the Prayer Book’s more devotional tones. It is near the beginning of “Canto LXXIV,” the first of the Pisan Cantos, that Pound refers to The Prayer Book specifically, yet ironically, as “the R.C. Chaplain’s field book”:

money to signify work done, inside a system

and measured and wanted

“I have not done unnecessary manual labor”

says the R.C. Chaplain’s field book

(preparation before confession) (446)

7This passage contains what we suppose to be a direct quotation from The Prayer Book, “I have not done unnecessary manual labor.” But Pound’s syntax diverges from The Prayer Book’s in an important way. In The Prayer Book, Pound marked the passage which appears there in the form of a question: “Have I done any unnecessary manual labor?” (32) That the speaker of the Pisan Cantosturns the interrogatory into a declaration marks the poem’s adoption of a confessional mode, and I would like to argue that this is one major element in the broader religious tone that emerges throughout the Pisan Cantos. In an early draft of the poem, Pound had written “(preparation before communion)”; the word “communion” is crossed out and “confession” is written below. Also, the parentheses appear to have been added at the same time.2 Notably, Pound makes only three annotations to the “Communion” section of The Prayer Book, compared to more than 15 in the sections related to confession.

8In The Prayer Book, the Mass begins on page 9; Pound’s first annotations are on page 14. Here we find Pound’s “Sincerity” ideogram (Cheng), with one of its two parts above the other, adjacent to the text of the Collect. In The Prayer Book, the Collect occurs near the beginning of the Mass when the Priest -gathers together the prayers of the faithful for presentation to God. The Collect begins, “O God of strength, to Whom belongeth all that is perfect…” The sincerity ideogram does not appear in the published “Canto LXXIV”; however, it does appear in manuscript “Canto LXXIV” next to the Latin word “sinceritas.” Pound included approximately 14 ideograms on this page of manuscript, none of which appear in the current edition of The Cantos of Ezra Pound.The sincer-ity ideogram also appears in “Canto LXXVI” following these words: “the word is made/perfect” (474). And a closely related ideogram appears at the end of “Canto LXXVII.” In this context, it appears twice, and between the two charac-ters is the phrase “bringest to focus” (495). Cheadle argues that in this context, it signals a kind of focused resting place, not a rebirth, as Massimo Bacigalupo has suggested (121). I submit that in keeping with Pound’s ideogramic method, the function of the ideogram extends to both Cheadle’s a Bacigalupo’s readings. The sincerity ideogram is included in the list of twelve ideograms that Pound begins The Great Digest with, under the heading “Terminology”:

Sincerity. The precise definition of the word, pictorially the sun’s lance coming to rest on the precise spot verbally. The right-hand half of this compound means: to perfect, bring to focus. (20)

9So in the Confucian context, as Pound explains later in The Great Digest, the ideogram is about “finding precise verbal expression for the heart’s tone, for the inarticulate thoughts” (51). In the context of the Collect, the priest brings to focus the disparate prayers (read “inarticulate thoughts”) of the people.

10Two pages later in the Prayer Book we come to the Nicene Creed, with its dialectical emphasis: “heaven and earth… all things visible and invisible… the living and the dead” (16). Pound’s annotation is the “Sun and Moon” ideogram (Ming). And as he explains in The Great Digest, this ideogram describes “the total light process, the radiation, reception and reflection of light; hence, the intelligence. Bright, brightness, shining” (34). What is significant for the Pisan Cantos and for our current reading of Pound’s reading of the Mass is the identification of light with the concept of totality, of pure process. As he writes a few pages further along in The Prayer Book, and as he writes in the Pisan Cantos, “all things that are, are lights.” This is not just a refrain but a fugal theme that repeats with variation after variation, a “divine spirit” animating the -particulars of memory and ritual as the totality of nature and of poetic process. The “Sun and Moon” ideogram also appears in the first of the Rock Drill Cantos.

11In The Prayer Book, on the page facing the Nicene Creed is a commentary about the Mass headed “The Offertory, or Offering.” It is in this part of the Mass that the priest lifts the Host and prays, “Accept, O holy Father, Almighty, Eternal God, this immaculate Host, which I, Thy unworthy servant, offer unto Thee” (17). In the margin adjacent to it is Pound’s “Will” ideogram (Chih), or as he writes in “Canto LXXVII,” where it also appears, “directio voluntatis, as lord over the heart” (487). In the context of “Canto LXXVII” the ideogram suggests, as it does in the context of the Prayer Book, the will to action. It is only 24 lines prior that Pound refers directly to the Mass—“learned what the Mass meant,/how one shd/perform it” (487). In The Great Digest, Pound writes: “The will, the direction of the will, directio voluntatis, the officer standing over the heart” (22). I would like to suggest that the transposition of the “Will” ideogram with the Latin phrase, with the Offertory of the Mass and with the eight other ideograms on the same page of “Canto LXXVII,” form an ideogrammic complex that seeks to extend itself globally. In this way it signals a movement toward organic unity and a relief from despair.

12On the following page of the Prayer Book, next to the “Beget or Be Born” ideogram (Chong) is the text describing how the priest, during the Mass, adds wine and water to the cruet. Then follows the text of what the priest says: “O, God, Who, in creating human nature, didst wonderfully dignify it, and hast still more wonderfully renewed it” (18). In the adjacent margin is the “Renew” ideogram (Hsin), which is the familiar framing character of the “Make it New” ideogram of “Canto LIII” (265).

13Under the heading in The Prayer Book “The Memento of the Living,” we find the prayer in which the priest evokes the memory of the Virgin Mary along with a list of Apostles and Martyrs. Pound does not annotate this section. However, after noting the plausible transfiguration of the Virgin Mary into the “Kuanon” of The Cantos, as readers of the Pisan Cantos, we are struck by the sequence of four names, “Thaddeus, Linus, Cletus, Clement,” the last three of which appear in the same sequence in “Canto LXXIV.” Here is the passage from The Prayer Book:

In communion with and honoring the memory, especially of the glorious ever Virgin Mary, Mother of our God and Lord Jesus Christ; as also of Thy blessed Apostles and Martyrs, Peter and Paul, Andrew, James, John, Thomas, James, Philip, Bartholomew, Matthew, Simon and Thaddeus, Linus, Cletus, Clement, Xystus, Cornelius, Cyprian, Lawrence, Chrysogonus, John and Paul, Cosmas and Damian, and of all Thy saints, through whose merits and prayers grant that we may be always defended by the help of Thy protection. Through the same Christ our Lord. Amen. (21-22)

14Interestingly, Thaddeus is also the name of Pound’s fraternal grandfather. However, I would like to point out that “Linus, Cletus, Clement” stand out within the list of Martyrs because their six syllables carry a delightful euphony. And within “Canto LXXIV” they stand out because of the important rhyme that links them with “paraclete” eleven lines further along, as well as some 55 lines prior. In the context of The Prayer Book paraclete is a term applied to the holy spirit, meaning an advocate, one who provides comfort or consolation, an intercessor. It appears later in the The Prayer Book, following a tetrameter verse prayer. At the head of the page is “Prayers to the Holy Spirit”:

Holy Spirit! Lord of light!

From Thy clear celestial height,

    Thy pure beaming radiance give…

We beseech Thee O Lord, that the Paraclete Who proceedeth from Thee may enlighten our minds and lead us, as Thy Son hath promised, into all truth. Who liveth and reigneth with Thee in the unity of the same Holy Spirit, one God world without end. Amen. (44)

15Adjacent to the last part of the prayer, to the line that includes “Paraclete Who proceedeth” Pound placed the “Sun and Moon” ideogram and below it the ideogram described in The Great Digest as “light descending (from the sun, moon and stars.) to be watched as component in ideograms indicating spirits, rites, ceremonies” (20). It is in “Canto LXXX” we see the focusing of the various rays of light that revolve around the word paraclete, as well as others that are found in the Prayer Book—“immacolata,” “hagoromo”—that appear in The Prayer Book:

“With us there is no deceit”

said the moon nymph immacolata

Give back my cloak, hagoromo,

had I the clouds of heaven

as the nautile borne ashore

in their holocaust

as wistaria floating shoreward

with the sea gone the colour of copper

and emerald dark in the offing

the young Dumas has tears thus far from the year’s end

At Ephesus she had compassion on silversmiths

revealing the paraclete

standing in the cusp

of the moon… (520-521)

16Of course it is the goddess Diana who shows compassion to the silversmiths at Ephesus (Terrell 435), and it is through this passage that the speaker of the poem has a brief dialogue with a moon nymph, the nymph whose feathered cloak (or hagoromo) had been taken by a priest. In The Prayer Book, Pound inscribed the bottom of one page with the word “Hagoromo.” Just above Pound’s inscription, under the heading “An Act of Faith” is this one sentence: “O, my God, I firmly believe all the sacred truths which Thy Holy Catholic Church believes and teaches, because Thou hast revealed them Who canst neither deceive nor be deceived” (50).

17Under the heading “Memento for the Dead” we find the “Rests” ideogram (Chih), keyed to the phrase “to all that rest in Christ” (24). In “Canto LXXIX,” this ideogram appears adjacent to a passage in which the author brings to focus two analogical patterns: birds landing and taking off from wires, and musical notation. So “rests” suggests the resting of birds at the same time as it -suggests a musical rest. In the prayer, “Memento for the Dead” we find the word “refreshment” (24). While “Canto LXXIX” resonates with the tone of a drunken song, a few lines below the “rests” ideogram we find a possible connection to the “Memento for the Dead,” as the speaker/singer raises a toast “to the production and the slaughter/(on both sides) in memoriam” (507).

18On the same page of The Prayer Book, we find another list of martyrs, and again we find three of them (all women, in this instance) whom the author has also given home in “Canto LXXX”:

Immaculata, Introibo

for those who drink of bitterness

Perpetua, Agatha, Anastasia

     saeculorum (533)

19“Introibo” appears in The Prayer Book throughout the beginning of the Mass, “Introibo ad altare Dei,” meaning “I will go unto the altar of God” (9). “Saecu-lorum” appears throughout the entire Mass, including the “Memento for the Dead,” in the phrase “per omnia saecula saeculorum,” meaning “forever and ever” or “world without end.” Literally, “saeculorum” is the plural form of generation, referring to a substantial period of time.

“They Think With Light”

20On page 30 of The Prayer Book, headed “The Last Gospel,” Pound wrote the phrase that reverberates, both in Latin and in English, throughout the Pisan Cantos: “omnia quae sunt/sunt lumina,” meaning “all that is, is light.” Then in the left margin are the ideograms “speaks,” “sincerity,” and “sun and moon.” Here is the text of The Prayer Book:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God: the same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by Him, and without Him was made nothing that was made: in Him was life, and the life was the light of men: and the light shineth in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.

There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. This man came for a witness, to give testimony of the light that all men might believe through him. He was not the light, but came to give testimony of the [light]. He was the true light which enlighteneth every man that cometh into this world. (30)

21Pound underlined and bracketed the word “light.” Early in “Canto LXXIV,” “sunt lumina” is attributed to Scotus Erigena, and 16 lines further along the phrase appears again, then twice in Latin on one page, and again in English, preceded by the word “OMNIA” all in capital letters and on a line by itself, followed by the line, “all things that are are light.” (449). Early in “Canto LXXXIII,” we find it again, “omnia quae sunt, lumina sunt” (548).

22As for Pound’s relationship to Catholicism, The Prayer Book suggests a -sincere interest beyond a merely historically one, beyond a merely allusive one, and beyond one that merely exploits Catholicism in order to more successfully propaganidize for Italian Fascism.

23In 1940, Pound wrote:

It is permitted that a man work at clarifying his own ideas. I have been asked whether I am a Catholic and I am not ready to deny it. I don’t expect any organization to accept responsibility for my speculations. I do not 13th March anno XVIII deny any Catholic dogma. (Machine Art 141)

24Yet it is the heretics he admires, saying, “They think with light. Omnia quae sunt, lumina sunt” (141). But it is monotheism that Pound finds problematic: “The simple world of nymphs and satyrs is not the only alternative to a crazy quilt of abstracter superstitions” (142). As opposed to abstraction, Pound asserts the ideogramic method with its emulation of the complex oganicism of nature. As Maria Luisa Ardizzone points out in her introduction to Machine Art, it is the reductionism of monotheism which Pound rejects, and it is in the concreteness of the artistic process that Pound believes.

25Because Pound’s work is so comprehensively allusive in nature, it would seem that one would would proceed by explaining how one text was influenced by the others. However, I want to suggest that the dynamic relationships among these texts are not merely allusive, but inter-textual. Although my purpose in this essay is essentially descriptive, I’ve come to regard the inter-textual approach, especially as outlined by Julia Kristeva in Revolution in Poetic Language, as one that seems well-suited to the three texts in question—Pound’s annotated Catholic Prayer Book, the Pisan Cantos, and Pound’s Confucian translations. So, in returning to the central topic of this essay, to Pound’s Catholic Prayer Book, we see some important keys to our understanding of the Pisan Cantos, to their textual history, to their confessional tone, and to Pound’s inter-textual poetics, which he referred to as “the ideogrammic method.”

26However, in beginning to understand Pound’s intertextuality, we must also keep in mind that one of the defining characteristics of this approach is that, while there are numerous examples of how the three texts are co-extensive with one another, we must acknowledge that there are innumerable further extensions of these texts into others. Furthermore, Pound’s ideogrammic method is grounded in his understanding of the general nature of Chinese written language, as outlined in Ernest Fenellosa’s “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry.” This essay had been central to Pound’s poetic practice as it had evolved from as early as 1914. Pound’s use of Chinese ideograms seems further grounded in his work translating Confucius both into English and into Italian—and it objectifies by several degrees what might otherwise be an essentially subjective, perhaps merely allusive, poetic practice.

27Pound accomplishes this by having the Chinese ideogram serve two functions at once. In the Pisan texts that are the subject of this essay, the ideogram serves to index the text of the Prayer Book to the other two texts. And second, the ideogram itself serves as a container for specific Confucian ideas. Pound’s ideogrammic annotations are by extension Pound’s transposition of the Con-fucian ethical system with the liturgy described in The Catholic Prayer Book. The fact of Pound’s annotation suggests the simultaneous co-extension of both texts; because we see how these texts are indexed, we know that Pound’s annotative, marginal gestures are beyond mere superimposition; in fact, their imposi-tion functions in a thoroughly dynamic, i.e. co-extensive, way. Yet the -essential characteristic of this technique of transposition and co-extension is that the texts diverge from one another in often quite dramatic ways. Pound was doubtless aware of this, for in The Great Digest, he writes, “One seizes one axe -handle in cutting the other. One can, at a glance, note a divergence from the model” (17).

28As I suggested earlier, to study Pound’s work is to acknowledge at every turn the need to problematize our endeavor, for Pound’s errors were deep.

29In conclusion, I want to return to “Pro Patria et Deo,” the subtitle of The Prayer Book. The Italian Fascism that Pound had been for many years advocat-ing had taken on some distinctly religious aspects, notably in “Canto LXXII,” which, as Ron Bush has pointed out, “enacts the Fascist ritual of celebrating martyrs of the ‘faith’” (73). Together, the Pisan Cantos, the Prayer Book and Pound’s Confucius can be seen as a tableau in which Pound enacts the problem-atic and troubling rituals and incantations that comprise the separate -linguistic worlds of church and state. As Ron Bush, Tim Redman and others have shown, the Pisan Cantos are, in large part, an extension of the Fascist political -program Pound was advocating. In addition, because Pound asserts a Confucian -system, with its emphasis on the ethical integrity of the individual and the state as being co-extensive with the Catholic one, our reading is further problematized. Clearly, at the same time that we read the Pisan Cantosas a group of political poems, we must, after reading The Prayer Book and Pound’s annotations to it, also read them as religious. We have Pound’s Confucianism transposed with certain aspects of Catholicism, transposed with Italian Fascism. In this way, the Pisan Cantosmay serve as a case study bearing on the problematic and troubling distinction between the moral authority of the state and that of religion. This distinction, or separation as it is often called, is fundamental, at the same time as it is obviously historically tenuous, especially in time of war. By “funda-mental,” in this instance and at this particular historical junction, I want to suggest that the “separation” is a very real one, and that it is in some sense a separa- tion of fundamental-isms. However, Pound’s Fascism, like his Confucianism, and like his Catholicism, becomes problematic in part because it is not charac-terized by the narrowness or the doctrinal rigidity that would typify a fundamentalism. And the reason for this is that Pound’s poetic process, by its nature, seeks to transpose, extend and transform the language structures on which it is based. Another way of understanding this procedure is that it is like a fugue, in which the musical composition develops incrementally by way of theme, counter-theme, and variation. On occasion this sort of progression might be marked by reversals of tone which we may hear as in some sense ironic.

Haut de page

Bibliographie

Bacigalupo, Massimo. The Formed Trace: The Later Poetry of Ezra Pound. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980.

Bush, Ronald. “Modernism, Fascism and the Composition of Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos.” Modernism/Modernity II 3 (1995) 69-87.

Catholic Prayer Book for Army and Navy: Pro Patria et Deo. New York: The Paulist Press, 1917. Copy containing Pound’s annotations at Schloss Brunnenburg, Merano, Italy.

Cheadle, Mary Paterson. Ezra Pound’s Confucian Translations.Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997.

Fenollosa, Ernest. The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1964.

King, Michael. “An ABC of E.P.’s Library.” Library Chronicle of the University of Texas at Austin n.s. 17 (1981) 31-45.

—. “Ezra Pound at Pisa: an Interview with John L. Steele.” Texas Quarterly XXI 4 (1978) 48-61.

Kristeva, Julia. Revolution in Poetic Language. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984.

Lynch, Kevin, Fr. Telephone Interview, September 27, 2001.

Pound, Ezra. The Cantos of Ezra Pound. New Directions Books: New York, Fourteenth Printing, 1998.

—. Machine Art and Other Writings: The Lost Thought of the Italian Years. Maria Luisa Ardiz-zone, ed. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996.

—, tr. Confucius: The Unwobbling Pivot, The Great Digest, The Analects. New York: New Directions, 1951.

Terrell, Carroll F. A Companion to the Cantos of Ezra Pound. Berkeley: University Press of California, 1993.

Haut de page

Pour citer cet article

Référence électronique

James Kraus, « Ezra Pound’s Catholic Prayer Book: Pro Patria Et Deo »Sillages critiques [En ligne], 5 | 2003, mis en ligne le 01 juillet 2015, consulté le 28 avril 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/sillagescritiques/4139 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/sillagescritiques.4139

Haut de page

Auteur

James Kraus

James Kraus is Professor of English at Chaminade University in Honolulu, Hawai’i. His publications include critical works on Ezra Pound, Gary Snyder, W.S. Merwin and Galway Kinnell. Additionally, his poetry is widely published in journals such as Virginia Quarterly Review, Pequod, and San Marcos Review; it has been anthologized in Poetry Hawai’i.

Haut de page

Droits d’auteur

CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.

Haut de page
Rechercher dans OpenEdition Search

Vous allez être redirigé vers OpenEdition Search