II

Pound’s synthesis of a paradiso in The Pisan Cantos is not achieved solely by the use of such numinous images and ideas as those detailed above. He had copies of the ‘Four Books’ – the Confucian Classics – with him at Pisa, and Confucian concepts are essential to a full understanding of the poem’s ‘entry into paradise’. In fact, the conceptual architecture behind The Cantos is, from this point on, largely based on Confucian philosophy. This, in itself, is hardly surprising: while Pound could legitimately point to a sequence of neo-pagan revivals in the history of the West, there is no solid consistency between the different movements he references. Even if there were truly a ‘light from Eleusis’ that persisted through the various movements of Gnosticism, Catharism, Renaissance Neo-Platonism and eighteenth century Deism, and which survived, in some form, to inspire the various pagan revivals of the twentieth century, such a Western tradition was, at best, a thing of shreds and patches. In Confucianism – a significant element in Pound’s poem from Canto XIII onwards – he found much of what he believed in and cherished already neatly documented in one ancient and remarkably consistent tradition. Confucianism requires of its followers a deep reverence for ancient pagan rituals; it venerates the divine heroes of the past; it is fundamental humanistic, and, crucially for Pound perhaps, it believes in an impersonal deity, one that could be easily identified with the Divine Mind, the One, of neo-Platonic philosophy. Confucians speak of ‘Heaven’ not ‘God’ and Pound believed in ‘the νόος, the ineffable crystal’, not the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Given all these factors, it is hardly surprising that Pound, effectively, converted to Confucianism, and The Cantos , which begin – at least in part – as an attempt to evoke the surviving fragments of a philosophical pagan sensibility in Western culture, end up, naturally enough, implying that Confucian ideas should become more and more the touchstone of people’s beliefs in the West.

The important Chinese concept of ch’i has already been mentioned: other key terms also achieve a new prominence in The Pisan Cantos , particularly ch’eng ( chéng 誠) in its philosophical sense denoting sincerity ; chung ( zhōng 中), the Confucian mean , and dao ( dào 道), the Confucian way . How these concepts intertwine in traditional Chinese thinking can be appreciated from Pound’s translation of the Ta Hsio or Great Learning :

Sincerity ( ch’eng ), this precision of terms is heaven’s process ( dao ).

What comes from the process ( dao ) is human ethics. The sincere man ( ch’eng ) finds the axis ( chung ) without forcing himself to do so. He arrives at it without thinking and goes along naturally in the midst ( chung ) of the process ( dao )

Three translations of the Chinese word dao are used in The Pisan Cantos , and Pound exploits the flexibility of the concept to unite several of his key themes. ‘Process’ and ‘way’ are used for dao on the opening page of Canto LXXIV :

rain also is of the process.
What you depart from is not the way […]

the wind also is of the process, (838/425)

Here ‘way’ implies dao in its highest philosophical sense. The Confucian, having ‘departed’ from a particular understanding or way of life knows that what he has abandoned was not the dao , since ‘The path [ dao ] may not be left for an instant.’ In the context of the ‘Elegy for Mussolini’, these lines contain a strong sense of the persistence of the dao : however great the apparent failure, the very fact of failure – ‘What you depart from’ – helps to identify the true ‘way’. In this sense, the Confucian dao can be easily related to The Cantos ’ idea of ‘periplum’ – of mapping the world through a voyage of exploration. And given the heavenly nature of dao , this is a less haphazard procedure than might at first appear. If the Confucian can achieve sincerity ( ch’eng ), then his ‘periplum’ will, inevitably, become one with the dao .