The Rescuing Theophany

In the first canto of his modern epic poem, The Cantos, Ezra Pound stages the journey into the Underworld Circe tells Odysseus it is necessary for him to visit. And so he enters that dark realm with his sword and a single pig for his sacrifice to the dark lords. And there he meets the shade of every single human being who has ever lived - kings and queens, princes and princesses, peasants and slaves, and all they want, regardless of their earthly status, is to drink some of the pig's blood to revive their lost sense of life. It is very bleak. The pattern Pound adopted for The Cantos was to put his ulyssean character in peril, a peril that his human strength cannot avert. Then a theophany suddenly rescues the hero. It is the appearance of Aphrodite who saves Odysseus, but her rescue is not a narrative element. Rather Pound shifts attention from the warrior hero to the scholar-poet, detailing the literary sources that gave him knowledge of the ancient past. And those sources evoke vividly the presence of Aphrodite as the calm, unruffled rescuer. Take we the Goddess, Venus: "Venerandam, Aurean coronam, pulchram, etc." Light on the foam, breathed on by zephyrs, And air-tending hours. Mirthful, "orichalci, " with golden Girdles and breast bands. Here are two theophanies I wrote for my poem, "The Double Woman, " but I could not fit them into the finished poem. I print them separately here because Aphrodite deserves the homage. (1) It is dawn when Aphrodite alone enters our world. Time and Change scatter before her august approach. She stepped forth from a mirror, and strides across a marble floor, whose pattern suggests the movement of water in its restless grace of motion. She stops at the edge of the portico, and looks up into the vanishing stars. Her eyes connect the stillness of things above and below, whose calm, ultimate calm, puzzles humans, expecting every moment only turmoil.... (2) A silence had descended over the bustle of morning in the palace. Servants fell silent, some fell to their knees. The old men of the Council had witnessed such divine piercing of the fabric of the world. Oh, some among these graybeards smiled and felt no fear. What they saw, what everyone saw was a benign presence, gentle, pure, kind. Aphrodite rose out of a hive of honey, she glided across the mosaic floor, and people later claimed it was a music of total beauty that accompanied her. She trailed sweetness wherever she went, and when she reached the painting, she touched it with nectar and ichor....