Canto 16 - Analysis

A descent that keeps turning into history

This section of Canto 16 reads like a descent where the underworld is not only a mythic place but a pressure chamber for modern memory. The poem begins before hell mouth on a dry plain between two mountains, and that stark, almost diagram-like landscape quickly becomes a moral and historical one: evil is not confined to one pit, because the speaker keeps running into it again—in art, in war, in crowds, in talk. Pound’s central move here is to make the infernal continuous with the everyday: the same force that drives Blake to howl against the evil shows up later as corpses in trenches, as a bored bureaucracy rebuking a man for levity, as a lieutenant ordering soldiers to fire into a crowd.

The tone, at first visionary and elevated, refuses to stay pure. It keeps being punctured by blunt speech, profanity, and multiple languages. That tonal instability is the point: if hell is real, it won’t stay politely in allegory.

Blake running naked: the artist as alarm

The first striking figure is Blake, a running form described as naked, shouting, with eyes rolling and limbs whipping like flaming cart-wheels. He runs from evil but cannot stop staring at it, his head held back to gaze on the evil. That is a compressed portrait of a certain kind of artist: propelled by horror, morally allergic to it, yet compelled to look. Even his movement is paradoxical—flight and fixation at once—suggesting that witness is not a clean posture. To see clearly is already to be marked.

Blake’s reappearance from the north side with eyes blazing toward hell mouth feels less like escape than like re-engagement: the artist circles the same problem. Beside him, Pound places Peire Cardinal, and across the way Il Fiorentino (Dante) and lo Sordels, each looking at hell through an instrument: mirror and shield. These are not casual name-drops. They frame a spectrum of response—direct bodily alarm (Blake), poetic denunciation (the troubadour), reflective seeing (mirror), defensive seeing (shield)—as if the poem is asking what kind of looking can survive what it has to look at.

Acid lakes and “hell ticks”: contamination and the urge to cleanse

The poem then plunges into grotesque, bodily detail: blue lakes of acid, limbo of chopped ice, and a speaker who says, I bathed myself with acid to free himself of hell ticks and fallen louse eggs. It’s an appalling image of purification: the only solvent strong enough to remove hell’s parasites is also corrosive. Cleanliness here is not comfort; it’s damage chosen over infestation.

The lake called Palux Laerna becomes a mass of dissolving human material: limbs fluid, bodies mingled, like fish heaped, an arm rising to clutch a fragment of marble, embryos in flux, faces gone—generation submerging. The classical echo (Lerna’s swamp) meets an almost industrial vision of human life turned into slurry. The marble fragment matters: even in dissolution, someone reaches for culture, for form, for a remnant that can still be held. But the poem does not let that gesture redeem the scene; it is swallowed again by eels and submergence.

The oasis and the founders: a calm that doesn’t cancel the pit

A hinge arrives with Then light, air. After acid and chopped ice, the poem opens into saplings, a blue banded lake, stones, the calm field, and a passage clean-squared in granite. The language becomes cleaner, almost rinsed. Entering the earth—patet terra—leads paradoxically to the new sky and light as after a sun-set, suggesting not heaven exactly but a post-catastrophe clarity.

Here stand the heroes: Sigismundo and Malatesta Novello, founders looking toward the mounts of their cities. Even the nymphs rise quietly from fount-pools, weaving water reeds into garlands. The tension is sharp: the poem can imagine civic making, calm water, and ritual beauty—but it places this calm right next to hell’s mouth. The oasis is not an escape from history; it is a fragile counter-image, an insistence that human building exists, even if it cannot guarantee goodness.

Voices in the grass: war stories as an underworld of talk

The poem’s calm breaks when the speaker lies Prone in that grass and hears des voix. What follows is a flood of anecdote: Strasbourg, Galliffet’s triple charge, a man nurse who killed a Prussian and whose body stank for three days, an admiral describing a scarlet-wrapped figure as Lord Byron Dead drunk with the face drawn out to a...gel. The underworld is now oral: not a place but a register of remembered violence and myth-making, where heroism, gossip, and disgust sit in the same breath.

Then the poem turns explicitly to modern war with a rage that refuses to be decorous: because that son of a bitch Franz Josef, and Napoléon Barbiche. Aldington is put on Hill 70 in a trench dug through corpses among kids of sixteen crying mamas. Gaudier’s death is paired with killed a good deal of sculpture, as if war destroys not only bodies but the very capacity to shape matter. T.E.H. drags books from the library into the trenches and the Library complains—an almost comic bureaucratic note that becomes, in context, monstrous. The poem’s anger is not only at killing, but at the shallow systems of value that continue to function beside killing.

Verdun, dialect, and the crowd: hell as a mass phenomenon

French speech arrives in a long rush—tous les nerveux, men on all fours crying maman, and the blunt claim that at the end, at Verdun, the big men y voyaient extrêmement clair. The talk is both compassionate and pitiless: people are reduced to animals, yet also judged. Even the generals are weighed to un centigramme and found to be du bois, as if authority is mere dead material. The horror is not abstract; it’s in the mouth, in what can still be said after endurance.

Then German-accented speech shifts the frame to revolution: Brest-Litovsk, troops released from the eastern front, the idea that that’s the trick—get a crowd moving. In Petrograd’s square near the Nevsky and Moscow station, soldiers refuse to fire; a cossack kills the lieutenant; there was the revolution as soon as they named it. The poem’s earlier images of hell-mouth and submerging bodies find a social counterpart here: history becomes a crowd-event, unstable, unpredictable, suddenly irreversible.

The hardest question the canto leaves hanging

If people can do everything except act, as one speaker claims, what is this canto doing—acting, or only naming? Pound stages looking (mirror, shield, Augustine toward the invisible) and running (Blake), cleansing (acid), founding (the Malatestas), and then drowning in voices. The poem seems to suspect that speech itself is one of hell’s media—yet it also treats speech as the only way the evidence survives.