Old Idea Of Choan By Rosoriu - Analysis

Splendour as a way of feeling time pass

In Old Idea of Choan, Pound builds a city out of moving spectacle, but the real subject is how quickly splendour turns into distance. The poem opens with public ceremony—seven coaches, outriders, golden saddles—and ends with a quiet, almost personal doubt: How shall we know all the friends / whom we meet on strange roadways? The central claim the poem seems to make is that imperial beauty is not simply decorative; it is a language for impermanence. Choan’s pageantry is gorgeous precisely because it is already slipping into mist, night, and the limits of what any one person can recognize or keep.

Street-level motion, royal stillness

The first section keeps shifting between movement and suspension. The streets cut into the highway, animals drag the coaches, and the procession eddy at gates—everything swirls, strains, and circulates. Yet the most important object, the jewelled chair, is oddly static, held up at the crossway Before the royal lodge. That contrast matters: the city’s energy exists to present something untouchable, a princess who is only implied by the waiting glitter of golden saddles. The tone here is awed but not intimate; the speaker keeps a careful distance, cataloguing surfaces—perfumed wood, dragons on the canopy—like someone watching a ritual whose meaning is bigger than any single viewer.

The dragon canopy and the city’s appetite for light

The poem’s most telling image of luxury is also an image of consumption: the dragon-embroidered canopy drinks in and casts back the sun. The city doesn’t merely reflect light; it absorbs it and returns it altered, as spectacle. That line makes Choan feel like a machine for turning nature into ceremony. But it also hints at a subtle tension: what can drink in light will eventually face darkness. The grandeur is framed as a temporary condition, something dependent on the sun’s presence—and the poem immediately confirms this with the blunt arrival of Evening.

Mist, doubling, and the soft takeover of night

The real turn in section I is the way evening changes the texture of the world. The trappings become bordered with mist; hundred cords of mist spread through the scene and double the trees. Doubling is a beautiful distortion: the city becomes richer-looking and less reliable at the same time. And then come the most unsettling pair in the poem—Night birds, and night women—who Spread out their sounds through gardens. The tone slides from ceremonial brightness into a hushed, sensual acoustics: not what is seen, but what is heard and half-understood. There’s a contradiction here that the poem doesn’t resolve: the same atmosphere that makes the world more sumptuous (mist, doubling, spread sounds) also makes it harder to grasp clearly. Choan’s beauty is inseparable from obscurity.

Section II: an architecture of enchantment, and a sudden human question

The second section begins as if it will outdo the first, piling up abundance: Birds with flowery wing, hovering butterflies, thousand gates, jade-glittering trees, terraces tinged with silver. Even fertility is aestheticized—The seed of a myriad hues. The place is designed for movement and meeting: A net-work of arbours and passages, covered ways, Double towers and winged roofs that border the routes. The line A place of felicitous meeting sounds like a promise the city makes about itself: here, encounters are meant to happen, as if planned by architecture.

Names on the skyline, strangers in the street

And yet the poem ends by admitting what all this planning can’t control. Riu’s house stands out on the sky, and the speaker recalls a legendary act of making—Butei of Kan’s high golden lotus built to gather his dews. These references feel like attempts to anchor the city in known stories and known people. But immediately, another building appears: another house which I do not know. That single not-knowing punctures the confident inventory of marvels. The closing question—How shall we know all the friends—is tender, but it’s also edged with resignation. Choan can stage meetings, but it cannot guarantee recognition; it can multiply gates and passageways, but it cannot map the meanings of the people moving through them.

One unsettling implication follows the poem’s own logic: if the city is truly felicitous because it gathers people, then it is also a place built to manufacture loss. The more gates and covered ways there are, the more likely it becomes that friendship will be brief, anonymous, or misread—another figure half-seen in mist, another voice among night birds in the gardens.