CANTO LXXIV

Pisa, in the 23rd year of the effort in sight of the tower 
and Till was hung yesterday 
for murder and rape with trimmings plus Cholkis 
        plus mythology, thought he was Zeus ram or another one 
                      Hey Snag wots in the bibl’?
                      wot are the books ov the bible? 
                      Name ‘em, don’t bullshit ME. 
a man on whom the sun has gone down      莫    OΎ ΤΙΣ 

“Pound made notes for the verses about Manes and the city of Dioce as early as July; sometime later he wrote out a version without Dioce but including the dream, Benito and La Clara; and still later, he recopied the lines on a leaf between pages ninety-one and ninety-two of the Canto 74 manuscript and typed them, still without Dioce, onto a separate sheet. We know that he did not insert them into the text even in early October from the evidence of the typewriters. Even after he had retyped the first two-thirds of Canto 74 sometime after 17 October, the Mussolini lines had not yet been inserted. In one late typescript, Pound in fact had written an “incipit” next to the “Canto ?74” above the first lines of his text, lines that still began “The suave eyes, quiet, not scornful.” It was likely among his last decisions at Pisa to affix the page with the lines on Mussolini, beginning “The enormous tragedy of the dream,” adding in longhand “To build the city of Dioce. . . .” Then and only then did he boldly pencil in page “1” and with the same pencil renumber pages one through nine” (81). 

From: Ronald Bush, “Modernism, Fascism, and the Composition of Ezra Pound’s ‘Pisan Cantos’” Modernism/modernity, vol. 2, no. 3, (September 1995): 69-87.