BK. Ezra Pound

34. ‘The Seventh Canto’. Dial 71 (August 1921): 205-08.

		Thin husks I had known as men. Reprinted as canto VII in subsequent collections.

Stoicheff (202) traces the ‘Thin husks I had known as men, / Dry casques of departed locusts’ (57, p. 26) to lines from Pound’s version of Kakitsubata (23), in which the title character refers to her own apparition as ‘the cracked husk of the locust’. The understated allusion is in keeping with the elegiac tone and memories of loss, both historical and personal, that make up much of the canto. Pound returns to understated references to Kakitsubata many years later at the end of The Cantos (see 72). Reprinted in subsequent collections, 35, 41, and 57, as canto VII.