SOURCE: "Sordello," in Provence and Pound, University of California Press, 1978, pp. 186-214.

[Makin is an educator and Pound scholar. In the following excerpt, he discusses the content, style, and language of Sordello's poetry, and examines the influence of his life and works on Pound's early verse and his Cantos.]

Pound's respect for both Browning and Dante gave him good reasons to be interested in Sordello. But in the early years of studying the troubadours he brushed over him; he tended to think of writing as either noble-and-difficult or easy-and-slick, and Sordello was easy.

But when Pound came back to the troubadours he followed Dante's lead even more carefully, and his opinion of Sordello improved. In 1937 he wrote, 'With Sordello the fusion of word, sound, movement is so simple one only understands his superiority to other troubadours after having studied Proven al and half-forgotten it, and come back to twenty years later' [quoted in Letters, to Katue Kitasono, 11 March 1937]. He explained further:

Only after long domesticity with music did I, at any rate, see why Dante has mentioned Sordello, or has he even done so in De Eloquio?

Above other troubadours, as I feel it now, Sordello's hand (or word) 'deceives the eye' honestly. The complete fluidity, the ease that comes only with mastery in strophes so simple in meaning that they leave nothing for the translator [quoted in Guide to Kulchur, 1938].

One might think that Arnaut Daniel is an acquired taste; but now Pound spoke of his 'merits that can be picked out, demonstrated, explained'; Sordello was for those who had 'direct perception of quality' [quoted in Guide to Kulchur]. Writing about his great praise in the early days for Arnaut, he now said 'A more mature judgment, or greater familiarity with Provencal idiom might lead one to prefer the limpid simplicity of some of Sordello's verses' [quoted in The Spirit of Romance].

So the history of Pound on Sordello is like the history of Pound on Bernart de Ventadorn: late appreciation of a mastery in music that can only be hinted at, not shown. The two troubadours also have a lot in common in their 'content'.

The first impression that Sordello's poetry gives is bland, not only in sound but in thought; there is rarely an idea or a phrase that has not been smoothed by use in another troubadour's work. Sordello himself says he belongs to the school of trobar leu, the easy style:

I like to make, with easy words,
a pleasing song and one with a light melody,
because the finest lady one can choose,
to whom I hand myself over and surrender and
  give myself,
does not like and is not pleased by master-class
  poetry;
and because it doesn't please her, from now on
  I'll make my singing
easy to sing and agreeable to listen to,
clear to understand and delicate, whoever has the
  delicacy to pick it out.
["Bel m'es ab motz leugiers a far"]

Sordello does not include the striking nature-imagery that even Bernart de Ventadorn opened with; he sticks more or less closely to the casuistry of love. Sometimes he admits that he is interested in love-making, perhaps, obliquely, but everything is so surrounded with fear of doing the wrong thing it is difficult to know what Sordello is at:

And if love makes me want anything
you should not do,
for pity's sake I wish to ask you
that you should not do it;
for I prefer to live in torments
than that your worth [pretz] should be devalued,
lady, for anything you might do for me;
because I have enough from you, whom I desire,
if only you sincerely permit me
to love and serve you.
["Dompna, meillz qu'om pot pensar"]

Sordello has aetherialised his lady into nothing but a source of moral worth, and when he meets someone who thinks of women as flesh and blood, they cannot even speak the same language. Montanhagol asks him which is best: that he should know his lady's heart, or that she should know his. Sordello answers:

'Montanhagol, it would please me
a hundred times more
that she for whom I die living
should know …
my heart, that she holds in torment,
than that I should know hers;
because if the truth should show to her
how I am tormented for her,
she would take pity on it,
or all her heart would be
hard as stone, cold as ice …'

'Sordello, it is truly much better
that you should know the heart and the feelings
of her whom you love truly
—whether she loves you or is fooling you;
because often under a fine appearance
great falsity hides,
and, if you find yourself being fooled,
you will seem too mad
if, after that, you love unloved …'

'Montanhagol, I don't take it
as any trickery from her
whom I love and serve loyally,
even if it pleases her to kill me …'
["Senh' En Sordel, mandamen"]

They are the adepts of two different faiths: Montanhagol of all the mediaeval beliefs that woman was a sink of iniquity, and Sordello of the religion of Courtly Love. It is difficult to say which is narrower.

The kind of casuistry that Sordello shared with Bernart de Ventadorn also brought a 'morality' into love. For them, moral value in the troubadour depends on the quality of lady he chooses and on his devotion; but moral value in the lady depends on the quality of man she deigns to accept and on her pity on his devotion. This is a little circular; did nobody start off with intrinsic value, inspiring devotion or acceptance from their partner? Hence the terms become somewhat vague, and both in their etymology and in their use there is a suggestion that words like pretz mean 'high reputation' or 'the fact that I, or people generally, esteem you'. The reductio ad absurdum would be something like this: 'I love you, and you have valor, so that it is unthinkable that you should refuse me, because a lady who has valor never refuses a knight who has valor, what though my only valor be this, that I have set my sights on a lady of such great valor as yourself.' Thus:

… because I love what is uniquely estimable
  [de bon pretz],
I prefer to love her uselessly
rather than another who might deign to take me
  to her;
but I don't serve her unrewarded,
because a real lover never serves unrewarded
when he serves with his heart in an honoured
  and valued [prezan] place;
wherefore the honour is a reward to me for the
  fact that I don't seek the overplus, though I'd
  certainly accept it.
["Ben m'es ab motz leugiers a far"]

Sordello is in Bernart de Ventadorn's prison, and he uses the same apparatus to lament it:

I hate mirrors, for they are too harmful to me
in relation to her who makes me languish in her
  prison,
and when she looks at her body and her shapes,
thinking what sort of person she is, she thinks
  little of my torment.…
["Atretan dei ben chantar finamen"]

A large part of his verses is taken up with considering how little, when he thinks of the great worth of the lady who is the cause of his torments, he cares about his torments—he only regrets that when she has killed him there will be no one to sing her praises properly. We can see the beginning of the Petrarchan war games, with their glances as darts of love, their wounds, their sallies and retreats of spirits, at moments in Sordello. Sordello tells us how part of his fineness consists in not wanting the wrong thing, because he could not love her half so much, loved he not honour more; because of this fineness he should and sometimes does feel secure against all rivals, since she is bound to love the finest of her lovers. This concern with his own state is what really marks him out as a later troubadour, sharing the Gothicness of expression that Pound speaks of with Bernart and with Arnaut. We find in William IX of Aquitaine that he expresses a desire for a presence that he feels would transform his world, and he expresses his pain at its lack. It is we, the readers, who can see the effects of this want on him. But with the later troubadours we find them in 90 per cent of their verse expressing, not their desire or its unfulfilment, but their observations as to the effect of its unfulfilment, held as a permanent state, on themselves. It makes me, they observe endlessly, into an amans fis, a 'fine lover'—Sordello talks of his 'fine joy', of himself as one of the 'fine courtly men', of his 'fine heart' that she has stolen, and of handing himself over to her 'fine and true'.

Though there is much scope for fun at the expense of these contortions, they led Sordello to a very high development of his art. The prison of love was his 'subject'; it fitted his nature, as we can see; he refined the weapons of poetry to a point where he could use them on it with psychological exactitude. He invented an intricate causative logic which dominates the poem and expresses his entrapment. Quar, 'because', per que, 'wherefore', and their equivalents begin almost every clause. In a typical

Sordello stanza the reasoning that constitutes his prison builds up continuously in a complicated series of subordinations, weaving through the gentle rhythms and imposing its continuity on them with many enjambments, until it reaches a perfect stasis in the last line, often containing both a verbal and logical paradox and a highly developed cross-play of sounds. He is held in a languishing happiness:

    Now towards the time of May
    when I see leaf and flower appear
    to reach my duty
    I shall sing in the best manner in the world,
worthy lady, since I cannot cease,
since I turn back to see you, from singing,
but because I don't see you my life seems
  death to me,
and singing pain, and pleasure unhappiness
[e chanz dolors e plazers desconortz.]
["Er encontra I temps de mai"]

Sordello only hits the gentle plaintive rhythm that is his 'voice' when he uses a line that is longer than that of most troubadour songs; most of his groups of lines that do not have or lead to this metric length are of little strength. He needs leisure to develop his peculiar soft ennui. When he hits this rhythm he begins to interweave his sounds and verbal contrasts to an extraordinary degree. The following stanza, for example, has an intense cross-play of verbal contrasts, which I have italicised:

As the ill person who cannot keep well
when he is cured, so that the illness takes him
  again
and makes him worse in this second sickening
than it made him before, so it has taken me and
  takes me
with the illness of love with which I have
  sickened again:
because I did not keep myself from it when I
  had got away,
now I have such an illness as I will never be
  cured of
if the beautiful one through whom I have it
  doesn't cure me.
["Si co l malaus qe no se sap gardar"]

The way in which the verbal play fits into the ambulation of sounds can only be heard in the original:

Si co l malaus qe no se sap gardar
qan es garitz, per qe l mals lo repren
e l fai trop peig en son recalivar
qe non a faich, aisi m'es pres e m pren
del mal d'amor dun sui recalivatz:
qar no m gardei qan eu n'era escapatz,
ar ai tal mal dun jamais non garai
si no m garis la bella per cui I'ai.

The whole of Sordello's real content, that is the content in which he differentiates himself from other poets and makes us 'smell' his individuality, is this logic through which he points out to his beautiful captor one by one the interconnected reasons why it is through her that he is trapped. On rare occasions it focuses so sharply on the nature of the captor that it produces a most beautiful 'sympathetic parallel' to her in the nature-imagery that traditionally starts the Provencal poem:

Atretan dei ben chantar finamen
d'invern com faz d'estiu, segon rason,
per c'ab lo freitz voill far gaia canson
que s'en pascor de chantar cor mi pren,
quar la rosa sembla lei de cui chan,
aultresi es la neus del sieu senblan:
per qu'en andos dei per s'amor chantar,
tant fort mi fan la rosa e l neus menbrar.
[Atretan dei ben chantar finamen]

We have seen Pound's attempt at this in Canto VI; he caught the obsessive repetitions, but it was beyond even his art to catch the sound of Sordello's invention, the winding syntax:

I must sing as finely
in winter as I do in summer, according to
  reason,
for with the cold I want to make a gay song,
since if the desire to sing takes me at Easter,
because the rose resembles the lady I sing of,
equally the snow is like her;
so that in each season I must sing for her love;
so much do the rose and the snow remind me.
[quoted in Cantos]

SORDELLO AND CUNIZZA, HISTORICALLY

Pound did not dwell on the beauty of Sordello's work; it was the story of Cunizza, Sordello's sometime lady, that impressed him and made her one of the lights at the centre of his Paradise. One of the Provencal vidas sums up the story:

Sordello was from Sirier in Mantuan country, the son of a poor knight who was called Sir El Cort. And he delighted himself in learning songs and in composing; and he stayed with the good courtiers, and learned all that he could; and made coblas and sirventes.

And he came away to the court of the Count of San Bonifacio; and the Count honoured him greatly. And he fell in love with the wife of the Count, in the manner of pleasure, and she with him. And it happened that the Count did not get on with her brothers, and estranged himself from her. And Sir Ezzelino and Sir Alberico, her brothers, had Sordello abduct her from the Court; and he came away to stay with them; and he was with them a long time in great happiness.

And then he went off to Provence, where he received great honour from all good men, and from the Count and the Countess, who gave him a good castle and a noble wife [quoted in Biographies, by Boutiére and Schutz].

Though this story is suspiciously like the vida of Bernart de Ventadorn, we know a great deal more about Sordello. Like William IX of Aquitaine, he was a political figure, which both attracted public attention to his deeds and provided a different kind of documentation.

Sordello had made a poor start in his career—we know of it chiefly from his competitors, the troubadours who infested the courts of northern Italy around 1220. They accused him of being a gambler, and of being a jongleur, willing to sing anyone's songs for handouts. No doubt he had risen above these circles by the time he met Cunizza. Sordello had been at the court of Azzo VII d'Este, and from there he went to the court of Azzo's friend, Rizzardo di San Bonifacio, in Verona. At the beginning of the year 1222, the Da Romano and the San Bonifacio had concluded a peace in their lengthy and bitter struggle, and as a sign of trust had married off Cunizza da Romano to Rizzardo di San Bonifacio, while Zilia di San Bonifacio went in marriage to Ezzelino II da Romano. Cunizza is the lady to whom a love-judgement is referred in one of Sordello's songs, a partimen with another troubadour. The two houses were back at war by 1226, and the troubadours were soon spreading the news that Sordello had carried Cunizza off. The chronicler Rolandino, whom Pound uses extensively, relates that Ezzelino II

In the sixth place begot the lady Cunizza, the order of whose life was thus:—At first she was given as wife to Count Rizzardo di San Bonifacio; but in a while, on the orders of Ezzelino her father, Sordello, a man from his retinue, took the lady away from her husband secretly, and with her it was said that he lay while she was staying at her father's court. And when Sordello had been driven out by Ezzelino, a certain knight, Bonio of Treviso by name, loved the lady, and took her away from her father's court secretly, and she, excessively in love with him, went around very many parts of the world with him, having much pleasure and spending a great deal. At last they both returned to Alberico da Romano, the brother of the lady, who ruled reigned in Treviso, against the will of Ezzelino her brother, as it was said and became apparent; and there this Bonius stayed with the said lady Cunizza, though the wife of Bonius was still living and staying in Treviso.

This was not the end of Cunizza's affairs:

Bonius was finally killed by the sword on a certain Sunday, when Ezzelino apparently wanted to snatch the city of Treviso from the rule of his brother. When, after all this, the lady Cunizza had fallen as far as to her brother Ezzelino, he married her to Sir Aimeric, or Rainier, of Braganza, a nobleman. But afterwards, when war broke out in the Marca [Trevigiana], Ezzelino had his kinsman killed with certain noblemen of Braganza and elsewhere in the Marca. Yet again Cunizza, after the death of her brother Ezzelino, got married, in Verona.

Sordello also proceeded to other affairs. The other Proven al vida, which calls him 'very treacherous and false towards ladies and towards the barons with whom he stayed', says that after the liaison with Cunizza he secretly married one Otta di Strasso, and had to stay armed in Ezzelino da Romano's house to protect himself from her brother and from Cunizza's people. He then travelled westwards to Provence; a song by Uc de Saint-Circ describes his expertise in seducing his way through the courts. He stayed with the great patron Savaric de Mauléon, in Aquitaine, and visited St. James of Compostella. By 1241 he was with Raimon-Bérenger of Provence, beginning a new career in politics. His famous song of the 'three disinherited men' curses the Count of Toulouse, the King of Aragon, and the Count of Provence, each beaten in recent struggles. Another famous sirventes starts out as a lament on the death of Blacatz, a nobleman of Provence who was a patron of troubadours, and turns on the cowardly princes of Europe to tell them they need to eat the dead man's heart, for his courage. This poem immediately raised Sordello's status; his name began to appear among those of great vassals. But Raimon-Bérenger died in 1245, and Sordello transferred his loyalties to the new master of Provence, Charles of Anjou, and he began to appear in the acts of this prince as miles, 'knight'. When Charles of Anjou set off to conquer the kingdom of Sicily in 1265, Sordello probably went with the land army, but Charles seems to have ditched him, for we find his name in this surprising letter to Charles from Pope Clement IV:

… many people presume that having subjected them to labours beyond their capacities, you are defrauding your Proven al men of their pay.… Your knight Sordello is languishing at Novara; even had he not deserved well of you, he ought to be bought out, and how much more should he be ransomed for his merits; and many others who have served you in Italy have returned naked and poor to their homes [quoted in Sordello, Le Poesie, edited by M. Boni].

Sordello was soon released and back in favour: Charles began to shower him with gifts. First came a castle; then after the battle of Tagliacozzo, that secured the Kingdom of Naples for Charles of Anjou, more fiefs; then more castles, and even, it seems, a cloth-works. Sordello was worth 200 ounces of gold per annum, and was a familiaris of one of the great princes of Europe. At the height of his prosperity he died, at some time around 1269.

As for Cunizza, one would have presumed that she was dead by the time that Sordello returned to Italy, were it not for an act which survives from that very year. Boni describes how Sordello 'returned, changed, to a changed Italy, where many of those he had known or at whose side he had lived had disappeared'. Rizzardo di San Bon-ifacio was dead. Ezzelino da Romano had died of wounds received at the battle of Cassano d'Adda; his brother Alberico had been betrayed to the Guelfs, who had butchered him, with his wife and children, at San Zeno. Only Cunizza still lived. When the Romano house fell, after her third marriage, she had found refuge in Tuscany with her relatives on her mother's side. On 1 April 1265, being a guest at the house of Cavalcante de' Cavalcanti, she signed an act of manumission freeing her brothers' slaves, violently execrating those who had handed over Alberico and his family to their deaths, and finally (as Boni does not say) freeing them also.

SORDELLO IN DANTE AND POUND: THE SCOURGE OF PRINCES

Most readers take their knowledge of Sordello from Dante, where in the Purgatorio (as Pound notes in The Spirit of Romance) Virgil says: '"But see there a soul, that stationed/entirely alone looks towards us.…'" Dante describes Sordello:

                              O Lombard soul,
how you were proud and disdainful,
and honest and slow in the moving of your
  eyes!
It said nothing to us;
but let us go on, only watching
in the manner of a lion when it rests.
But Virgil went on towards it, asking
that it show us the best way up;
and it did not answer his question;
but questioned us
about our countries and our lives.

Sordello and Virgil, fellow-Mantuans, embrace, and on these implications of past glory Dante builds a great invective against modern Italy.

Pound picks up the tone of this famous picture of Sordello Mantuan, the lion in repose, when he describes Henry James:

And the great domed head, con gli occhi onesti  e tardi

'with the honest and slow eyes'. Pound is thinking of Henry James the rebel, the teller of uncomfortable truths, whose club (with that of Browning) had beaten what little intelligence London possessed into its skull, and whose death, as Eliot said, would cement the new Anglo-American entente, in this comparison with Sordello. For Sordello appears 'before hell mouth' in Canto XVI, and Pound's Hell is London:

And in the west mountain, Il Fiorentino,
Seeing hell in his mirror,
              and lo Sordels
Looking on it in his shield;
And Augustine, gazing toward the invisible
  [quoted in Cantos].

Pound also takes Dante's Sordello to scourge the princes of Europe as described by Thomas Jefferson in 1822:

             a guisa de leon
The cannibals of Europe are eating one another
  again
            quando si posa [quoted in Cantos].

The authority of Jefferson, observing from his retirement, is like that of Sordello: 'in the manner of a lion/… when it rests.'

But Pound notes that 'Sordello's right to this lonely and high station above "the valley of the kings" has at times been questioned …' [quoted in The Spirit of Romance]. Sordello's right to his position in Purgatory depends not on his political importance, which has not been questioned, but on his moral stature; and it his been said that in his political songs the attacks are unjust and the themes hackneyed. We find it difficult to care about the cowardice of princes, but this is the constant theme of Sordello and other troubadours. The theme is a fusion of two currents of feeling: the first is that a prince's highest duty is to defend his patrimony, and the second, in the case of a great proportion of songs by Sordello's contemporaries, is that the expansionism of 'the Church and the French' is a usurpation. The princes in question would realise the hopes of their peoples simply by making good their claim to what belonged to them as of 'right', custom, or divine law. This vindication of territorial rights had been elevated, for example by Bertran de Born, into an equivalent of 'honour'. To us it seems a strange localisation of honour, but at least it was an ethical concept, and could be seen as embodying systems of personal values; for all these troubadours it was the one obstacle to mere greed, and in particular, at this time, the greed of the Church and the French, making itself felt most particularly in the Albigensian Crusade. Originality of theme and treatment was not something the troubadours saw in the same light as the twentieth century; what Sordello does in his Blacatz sirventes is to invest his polemic with the solemnity of mourning in these majestic hexameters with their heavy ending, tones no doubt picked up from Bertran de Born's lament for the Young King:

Planher vuelh en Blacatz en aquest leugier so
ab cor trist e marrit, et ai en be razo,
qu'en luy ai mescabat senhor et amic bo,
e quar tug l'ayp valent en sa mort perdut so.…
["Planher vuelh en Blacatz"]

I want to lament Sir Blacatz with this slight tune
with a sad and low heart—and I have good
  reason,
for in him I've lost a good lord and friend,
and since in his death all ways worth anything
  are lost.…

CUNIZZA IN PARADISE

Cunizza, of whom we know no more than the scraps I have related, is to be found in Dante's Paradise, where one might not particularly have expected her. She introduces herself:

In that part of the evil Italian land
that is between the Rialto [that is, Venice]
and the sources of Brenta and Piava
rises a hill, not very high,
from which once descended a spark [Ezzelino da
  Romano]
that caused great destruction to the land.
From one root were born both I and it;
I was called Cunizza, and I shine here

because the light of this star [Venus] overcame
  me.
But joyfully I pardon myself
the cause of my fate, and I don't lament,
which would probably seem strange to your
  people.

It has indeed seemed strange to people here below that Cunizza should not lament the sins we know she committed. Thus Hauvette:

Dante seems to have known nothing about the gallantries that marked the youth of Sordello; this impression is the stronger in that the poet has put Cunizza in Paradise, naturally in the heaven of Venus, but without any allusion either to Sordello or to the other lovers of this joyous lady. It seems therefore that Dante was passably ill-informed here [quoted in France].

In this strange reasoning it is natural that Cunizza should be in the heaven of Venus, but apparent that Dante knew nothing of her amours or her first lover's. Critics are quite aware that the heaven of Venus is the sphere of sensual love, but cannot admit any connection, since God is the very opposite of sensual love; one, for example, can only guess that Dante put her there because she freed her slaves.

But Dante's Cunizza after all has the authority of being in his Paradise, and she says specifically that she pardons herself 'the cause of my fate, and I don't lament.' She makes it quite clear that the 'cause' of her 'fate' is that

the light of this star [Venus] overcame me

and warns us that we will find this surprising. Pound gave the words of Dante's poem the attention they ask for. In The Spirit of Romance he connected this passage with the words of Folquet de Marseille:

Here, in defiance of convention, we find Cunizza:

Out of one root spring I with it; Cunizza was I
  called, and
            here I glow because the light of
  this star overcame me.

In Canto IX, lines 103-106, [Folquet's]

Yet here we not repent, but smile; not at the sin,
  which
             cometh not again to mind, but at
  the Worth that
             ordered and provided,

we have matter for a philosophical treatise as long as the Paradiso.

The sin that Folquet speaks of is the ardour of his love, which he has described at length. We know quite a lot about the career of this man from troubadour to heretichunting bishop, and he seems to have been just as deep in the pleasures of love as Cunizza; his words, dismissing his sins, are almost identical with Cunizza's.

The early commentators on Dante could see that he had made Cunizza into Venus: 'Rightly the poet figures himself finding this lady in the sphere of Venus; for if the noble Cypriots dedicated their Venus and the Romans their Flora, each a most beautiful and splendid whore (formosissimam & ditissimam meretricem), how much more worthily and nobly could the Christian poet save Cunizza' [Benvenuto da Imola, quoted in Chabaneau, Biographies]. They had no doubt that she liked to have lovers: 'It is to be known that the said lady Cunizza is said to have been in love at all times of her life, and her love was of such generosity that she would have held it great ill-breeding to think of denying it to anyone who asked courteously' [Jacopo della Lana, quoted in Chabaneau, Biographies]. There is no doubt that they were right. Pound is no doubt also right in deducing from the evidences of her life a 'grace' of character:

Cunizza, white-haired in the House of the Cavalcanti, Dante, small guttersnipe, or small boy hearing the talk in his father's kitchen or, later, from Guido, of beauty incarnate, or, if the beauty can by any possibility be brought into doubt, at least and with utter certainty, charm and imperial bearing, grace that stopped not an instant in sweeping over the most violent authority of her time and, from the known fact, that vigour which is a grace in itself. There was nothing in Crestien de Troyes' narratives, nothing in Rimini or in the tales of the ancients to surpass the facts of Cunizza, with, in her old age, great kindness, thought for her slaves [quoted in Guide to Kulchur].

Using his methods of argument by juxtaposition, Pound suggested that such grace was an influence which would propagate itself (as in Canto VI's line of descent), and that it was incompatible with any crudeness of cultural manifestation. This passage on Cunizza in the Guide to Kulchur is immediately followed by a whole string of examples of the mediaeval clarity and precision: Sordello's verse, the exactitude of mediaeval theology, the beauty of Romanesque architecture descended from Byzantium, and its relation to Moslem building and to certain buildings in Poitiers. All this amounts, Pound says, to an 'antiusura paideuma'. The connection between Cunizza and these things is that a sharper awareness of emotional distinctions will lead one to sharper distinctions elsewhere. That is why Pound felt that the troubadours were 'raised' by their ladies; that is why Dante's Beatrice, who ultimately leads him to Paradise, was first worshipped for her material beauty.

Though each of the demigoddesses in the Cantos has her adequate worshipper, for whom she creates emotional clarity, each at some point causes destruction. In the Pisan Cantos Pound remarks:

and the greatest is charity
to be found among those who have not observed
                             regulations

Both clarity and chaos come into Sordello's Cantos XXIX and XXXVI.

Canto XXIX is about woman-born disorder and clarity. It begins with the chaos wrought by Pernella, the concubine of Aldobrando Orsini,

Bringing war once more on Pitigliano

which rhymes with the chaos in the house of Este wrought by Parisina, a parallel to Eleanor of Aquitaine in Cantos VIII and XX. It notes the complaints of Sextus Propertius against his girl's infidelities, and then moves to the document whereby Cunizza freed her slaves:

Liberans et vinculo ab omni liberatos
    ['freeing the freedmen from every chain']
As who with four hands at the cross roads
By king's hand or sacerdos'
              are given their freedom
—Save who were at Castra San Zeno.…

Cunizza for God's love, for remitting the soul of
  her father
—May hell take the traitors of Zeno.

Pound interpolates two lines from Rolandino's chronicle:

  And fifth begat he Alberic
  And sixth the Lady Cunizza.

Then he returns to the document of emancipation:

In the house of the Cavalcanti
             anno 1265:
Free go they all as by full manumission
All serfs of Eccelin my father da Romano
Save those who were with Alberic at Castra
  San Zeno
And let them go also
The devils of hell in their body.

Finally he goes back to Rolandino's account, pausing only to put in the line from Dante's words by Cunizza in Paradise—'The light of this star o'ercame me':

And sixth the lady Cunizza
That was first given Richard St Boniface
And Sordello subtracted her from that husband
And lay with her in Tarviso
Till he was driven out of Tarviso
And she left with a soldier named Bonius
nimium amorata in eum ['excessively in love
  with him']
And went from one place to another
'The light of this star o'ercame me'
Greatly enjoying herself
And running up the most awful bills.
And this Bonius was killed on a sunday
and she had then a Lord from Braganza
and later a house in Verona.

'This star' (Venus) predominates in this short life of Cunizza, and Pound makes it merge with the grace that freed her slaves. After the Cunizza passage, Canto XXIX shows examples of American suburban social life and the unsatisfying sexual moeurs of the Twenties young. Then comes a diatribe against woman:

   a chaos
An octopus
A biological process
             and we seek to fulfill.…
TAN AIODAN, our desire, drift.…
            Ailas e que'm fau miey huelh
            Quar noi vezon so qu'ieu vuelh.

We 'seek to fulfill' 'our desire', like the cock parading his feathers and his noise, with all kinds of attractions, including song; the biological pull results ultimately in the scrap of Sordello's song that Pound quotes: 'Alas, and what are my eyes doing to me/for they do not see what I wish' [from "Ailas, e que m fau miey huelh"].

Canto XXXVI begins with Pound's final translation of the 'Philosophic Canzone' of Cavalcanti. Cavalcanti's neo-Platonism in this song puts a particular emphasis on Love's place in the memory:

Where memory liveth,
    it takes its state
Formed like a diafan from light on shade

Sordello, Cunizza his mantram, and Sordello's temporal affairs—as being part of Cunizza's sphere of influence— are placed with this Cavalcanti. After the canzone the Canto introduces Scotus Erigena, who gave Pound the idea of a material universe as lights radiated by God. It considers oppositions to him: the later Church which confused him with contemporary rationalist heretics; and Aquinas and Aristotle, 'greek-splitting' metaphysicians. Then there is the rite of coition, which is behind what Pound thought of as a continuous cultural stream that produced the balanced part of the Western 'paideuma', including both Erigena and the troubadours; and Sordello appears:

Sacrum, sacrum, inluminatio coitu.
Lo Sordels si fo di Mantovana
             of a castle named Goito.

'The rite, the rite, illumination in coition' is a Latin dictum of Pound's; 'Sordello was from Mantua country' is from the vida. Then Pound cites Sordello's dealings with Charles of Anjou: receiving castles, complaining about the things he has already received (including a clothworks), and being helped out of prison by a letter to Charles from the Pope:

'Five castles!'
'Five castles!'
               (king giv' him five castles)
'And what the hell do I know about dyeworks?!'

His Holiness has written a letter:
    'CHARLES the Mangy of Anjou.…
..way you treat your men is a scandal.…'

Pound quotes from the document giving various castles to Sordello, and notes that he sold them all soon afterwards (in fact they may have been sold after his death):

Dilectis miles familiaris … castra Montis
  Odorisii
Montis Sancti Silvestri pallete et pile.…
['Beloved knight of our retinue … the castles of
Monte Odorisio, / Monte San Silvestro, Paglieta
  and Pila.…']
In partibus Thetis ['In the district of Thetis'].…
  vineland
                                   land tilled
                              the land incult
                  pratis nemoribus pascuis
             ['meadows groves pastures']
                      with legal jurisdiction
his heirs of both sexes
… sold the damn lot six weeks later,
Sordellus de Godio.
    Quan ben m'albir e mon ric pensamen.

The last line is the key: it is the interiorised icon, the troubadours' version of Love's place in the memory, the goddess that they preferred to any passing pleasure, from this stanza by Sordello:

When I consider well in my proud thoughts
   [Quan ben m'albir en mon ric pensamen]
of her to whom I give myself up and surrender
  myself, what kind
            she is,
I love her so much, because her worth is beyond
  that of the delightful
              women that exist,
that in the matter of love I esteem each one as
  nothing,
and since I know no other in the world so
  worthy
of whom I might take pleasure lying kissing;
for I do not want to taste any fruit
through which the sweet should turn sour for me
["Atretan dei ben chantar finamen"]