CANTO LVI

 Ezra Pound The Cantos New York: New Directions, 1998. 255

The Mongols take over in canto 56 for an interval of 160 years. The terrible Ghengis Khan came in having heard something of ‘alphabets, morals, mores’, and being surprised to learn that it was more profitable to tax his new subjects than to exterminate them in his usual fashion; but Kublai Khan, who extended Mongol domination over all China ‘was a buggar for taxes’ and his finance minister was ‘stinking with graft’; and though Gin Tsong honoured Kung with the rites ‘his son died of assassins’. Through the main part of this canto the movement is unsettled, scherzo-like, casting rapidly back and forth between occupying Mongol and weak Sung, touching on wars, taxes, and granaries, on bandits, pirates–and a treatise for the cultivation of silk-worms. Under the decadent last of these Mongols there were again ‘At court, eunuchs and grafters / among mongols no man trusted other’, and that dynasty fell in confusion ‘from losing the law of Chung Ni (Confucius)’. This time it was the son of a poor labourer, Hong Vou, who rose up to defeat the failing rulers and restore order in the empire. ‘Once again war is over. Go talk to the savants,’ he said, under the ideograms naming Yao, Chun, [Han], and Chou. 

David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet II: 280

The canto covers the period between the start of the Southern Song dynasty in 1127 and the death of Hongwu Emperor, the founder of the Ming dynasty in 1398.

• The canto starts with a recap of material in canto LV, the destruction of the northern Song dynasty, the rise of Genghis Khan and the effort of Yelü Chucai to persuade the Mongols to tax, not exterminate the populations they conquer. Lines 1-24.
• Interlude. Lines 25-49.
• The Mongol invasion of China (1205-1279). Lines 50-114.
• The Yuan dynasty (1279-1368). Lines 114-189.
• The struggle against the Yuan dynasty and the rise of Zhu Yuanzhang, the rebel founder of the Ming dynasty. Lines 189-238.
• The reign of Hongwu, the founder of Ming. His last words. Lines 238-307.

RELATED CANTOS

CANTO XVIII [Kublai Khan’s bark money and the conquest of China]

CANTO LIII [the standard of virtue: the ancient emperors, the Zhou dynasty and Confucius]