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Nancy wrote: << The entire verse makes a very coherent single image. It is not a serious poem; it is a joke between the two of them, and there is not, in my view, any reason to import any speculative, ambiguous, symbolic meaning in such a text. Nancy in another post wrote: <<Indeed, I cannot see any other way to read it grammatically unless Pound is both Urania and a midwife performing both acts. It is quite exact syntactically that a male Urania begat TWL on Eliot and that this being a difficult pregnancy to get out, Pound performed the caesarean section to remove it--there being, one presumes, no birth canal in a male mother.>> I think true enlightenment is contained in "it is a joke between the two of them," and I agree that importing extra meaning is uncalled for, and that would certainly include an inapplicable literalism such as "there being, one presumes, no birth canal in the male mother," an admixture to the conceit that is unnecessary. Meaning, there is no "birth canal" in biological males and there are no biological mothers among biological males, so why try to make the conceit match up with biology? It "is not a serious poem." Once all the tweezers are applied, the life has already departed. Eliot has created a poem, likened to a mother creating a baby. From what I gather lately about Urania, it seems she would be inadequate, on her own, to produce the full-grown "creature" called The Waste Land. Let Pound have his joke. Ken A. --