The plan was to call the book La Fraisne (“The Ash Tree”) after the title of the first poem, and ded­i­cate it to H.D. Shortly before Pound sent the book to his Venet­ian printer, how­ever, he learned that his friend William Brooke Smith had died of tuber­cu­lo­sis. This was 1908; Pound and Smith had met seven years ear­lier when the former was a fresh­man at Penn. It was Smith who first gave Pound a book of Oscar Wilde’s (Salomé), and Smith whom Pound would lament to WCW some thir­teen years later, “I haven’t replaced him and shan’t and no longer hope to.” The news of Smith’s death demanded a change: now the book would be ded­i­cated to Pound’s “caritate primus” and titled A Lume Spento.

The source of the title is easy enough to spot: half a line from late in Pur­ga­to­rio 3. (The canto was fer­tile ground for twentieth-​century quote-​hunters: Robert Penn Warren found the epi­graph for All the King’s Men—“mentre che la sper­anza ha fior del verde”—just a few lines down.) “Caritate primus”—“first friend”—is another Dante allu­sion: it’s a Latin ver­sion of the epi­thet Dante gave Cav­al­canti in the Vita Nuova.

In the Pur­ga­to­rio, “a lume spento” appears in the mouth of Man­fred, King of Sicily and the son of Fred­er­ick II, the stupor mundi. When Dante meets him in the Valley of the Rulers, Man­fred is “blond and hand­some and noble in bear­ing,” but he is also dis­fig­ured: his eye­brow remains cleft by the blow that killed him, and he wears a wound near the top of his chest.

Like many of the shades the pil­grim meets in pur­ga­tory, Man­fred begs Dante to carry news of his fate back to the world of the living. He fears that his daugh­ter Con­stance will think he died in con­tu­macy of the Church, and with good reason. At the time of his death, he was the target of a cru­sade by Pope Urban IV, who had accused Man­fred of heresy and excom­mu­ni­cated him “with male­dic­tion,” a curse that announced him “damned with the devil and his angels and all the repro­bate to eter­nal fire.”

“Hor­ri­ble were my sins,” Man­fred tells Dante, and though he does not spec­ify, we learn from our com­men­taries that he had been accused of mur­der­ing his father, his brother, and two nephews. The chron­i­cler Vil­lani tells us that the young king was “just as dis­solute as his father, or even more”:

He played music and sang, and liked to see jug­glers, courtiers, and beau­ti­ful con­cu­bines around him. Man­fred always dressed in green…. But his whole life was Epi­curean; he cared nei­ther for God nor for the saints, but only for the delights of the flesh.

The excom­mu­ni­ca­tion was still in place when Man­fred died on Feb­ru­ary 26, 1266 at the hands of Urban’s French troops, but his pur­ga­to­r­ial shade insists to Dante that this was not the end of his story:

After my body was ripped
by two fatal stabs, I gave myself
weep­ing to Him who par­dons willfully.

Poscia ch’io ebbi rotta la per­sona
di due punte mor­tali, io mi rendei,
piangendo, a quei che volon­tier perdona.

The late tears that saved Manfred’s eter­nal soul did not save his mortal body. After their first burial, Manfred’s remains were dis­in­terred by an arch­bishop who ordered them thrown in the river Verde. (Yes, the king who wore only green was dis­posed in the Green River.) Here is how Man­fred describes the post­mortem fate of his bones:

Now the rain bathes them and the wind blows them
beyond the king­dom, near the Verde,
where he car­ried them with tapers quenched.

Or le bagna la piog­gia e move il vento
di fuor dal regno, quasi lungo ’l Verde,
dov’ e’ le trasmutò a lume spento.

“A lume spento” could mean “with lights out,” but for his­tor­i­cal rea­sons, most trans­la­tors of the Pur­ga­to­rio give some­thing like Pound’s “with tapers quenched.” The phrase refers to the medieval tra­di­tion of bury­ing heretics “sine cruce, sine luce”—without crosses or can­dles to accom­pany them. In this fash­ion Man­fred was buried under a cairn at Ben­evento; in this fash­ion he was dug up and dis­patched into the Verde.

The antir­i­tual returns us to Pound. Taken together, the title and ded­i­ca­tion of A Lume Spento put Will Smith—Pound’s bril­liant and hand­some friend (and maybe lover)—in the place of the bril­liant and hand­some Man­fred. Daniel Tiffany sug­gests that “Pound’s ele­giac ges­ture cor­re­sponds to the exhuma­tion and rebur­ial of his corpse. By ded­i­cat­ing the book to Smith as he does…Pound…identifies his own first book of poems as a lit­er­ary crypt.” Even if we wonder how the des­e­cra­tion of Manfred’s corpse at the far end of the allu­sion is sup­posed to count as “rebur­ial,” we accept this as respon­si­ble crit­i­cism. The com­par­i­son is plainly the one Pound wanted us to make.

I have to wonder, though, if the allu­sion to Man­fred doesn’t also beg some irre­spon­si­ble crit­i­cism. Isn’t the life it better fits Pound’s own? After all, what­ever minor here­sies Pound appre­ci­ated in Smith were noth­ing com­pared to his own major heresy, which resulted in the clos­est thing to excom­mu­ni­ca­tion the modern world knows. And how­ever we come down on the ques­tion of whether a person’s art can or should redeem the fail­ings of his life, it’s hard to argue that Pound’s late poems didn’t serve him in some­thing of the way that Manfred’s tears served him—as a means of repen­tance, at the very least:

                   But the beauty is not the mad­ness
Tho’ my errors and wrecks lie about me.
And I am not a demigod,
I cannot make it cohere.

A late trans­la­tion of Horace’s famous “Exegi Mon­u­men­tum” ode—Pound’s last sanc­tioned pub­li­ca­tion–gives just the barest hint that he might have held fast to the exam­ple of Man­fred as a model. The third, fourth, and fifth lines of his ver­sion run:

Gnaw of the wind and rain?
                                                         Impotent
The flow of the years to break it, how­ever many.

They trans­late, very roughly, Horace’s “non imber edax, non aquilo impotens, / possit diruere aut innu­mer­abilis / anno­rum series et fuga tem­po­rum.” But doesn’t that “gnaw of wind and rain” also point back, how­ever subtly, at Manfred’s “Or le bagna la piog­gia e move il vento”? Like­wise, when Pound writes

Bits of me, many bits, will dodge all funeral

he wants us to hear Horace’s “mul­taque pars mei / vitabit Libiti­nam” (Libitina is the god­dess of funer­als). But there’s an echo in there too of Manfred’s bones, scat­tered “quasi lungo il Verde,” that will never find final consecration.

It goes against every­thing we know to believe that that fates are fore­shad­owed in life the way they are in novels or poems. We are not sup­posed to believe that his­tory works this way, and yet still some­times we do.