184
THE MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW
The underworld is now not only the realm of knowledge for the omnipotent poet
and seer, apart from and superior to human frailty; it is also the repository of the
secrets of the earth-"O GEA TERRA."
Throughout The Pisan Cantos, woven through the depiction of a real prison,
which is also the visible structure of an inner hell, is the theme of love as the sole
preserver and healer. If hell is the "night of the soul," the externalization of suffering beyond pain, and the projection of an image of omnipotence deep in the mind
of the persona, it has never quite extinguished the traces of love which memory now
revitalizes as he struggles to survive. Pound repeats this theme many times:
nothing matters but the quality
of the affectionin the end-that has carved the trace in the mind
dove sta memoria.... (LXXVI)
Like a memory trace, this idea reappears, either in words similar to those above:
"nothing counts save the quality of the affection" (LXXVII), or more fully developed:
What thou lovest well remains,
the rest is dross
What thou lov'st well shall not be reft from thee
What thou lov'st well is thy true heritage
Whose world, or mine or theirs
or is it of none?
First came the seen, then thus the palpable
Elysium, though it were in the halls of hell,
What thou lovest well is thy true heritage.... (LXXXI)
Pound dissociates himself briefly from his persona, the explorer of hell, to write
his own love song; it is more direct and more honest than Mauberley's but it is
essentially a memory of an emotion straining against the barriers to feeling which
created an inner hell and against the real prison to which his own life has delivered
him. Love may be an "Elysium" in the "halls of hell," but Elysium has left its trace
only in nostalgia and yearning. The main persona of The Cantos is most deeply
involved in projecting the chaotic rage fostered by the hell he has constructed
within and has come to know in the reality of his daily life.
In Rock-Drill and Thrones, Pound returns to this theme: love remaining alive in
the depths of hell. Perhaps in spite of himself, in Rock-Drill, especially in Canto
90, he is most explicit in contrasting the "dulled edge beyond pain," the depersonalized realm of Hades, with the nostalgia for love. He appeals to the Sibyl:
Sibylla,
from under the rubble heap
m'elevasti
