Quote:
Originally Posted by Mary Cresswell
I think what Pound could be referring to is an atmospheric phenomenon sometimes called 'the green flash' - a very small, very quick flicker of green you see on the horizon at the instant the sun sets in the sea (if you blink you miss it - and it certainly doesn't colour the sky green). It's rare, but I have seen it so I know it exists! Looking at the Canto, I think he's looking for a metaphor to express impermanence, perhaps of beauty? power?
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I agree, Mary. Surely the grasshopper's flying suggests fleetingness. The image is (for me) powerful in part because it juxtaposes the great with the small, sky with insect, so suddenly and surprisingly. "Sunset" evokes an image of oranges and reds and yellows, and then there is that flash of green. Pound's side-by-side placement of the seemingly incongruous images is an instance of how he applied to poetry what he learned about Chinese from Ernest Fenellosa (however mistaken he or Fenellosa may have been, as some have pointed out), as in the famous ur-Imagist poem:
In a Station of the Metro
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
And his famous statement about the poetic image: "An image is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time."