“THE TROPE OF THE FALLEN LEAVES”.
“THE TROPE OF THE FALLEN LEAVES”. Spiegelman traces the thought in Pound’s poem back to Homer. In the Iliad, a warrior says: “The lives of men are like the generations of leaves; one comes, another dies.”
Spiegelman says that the same image is used by Virgil in the Aeneid, by Dante in the Inferno, and by Milton in Paradise Lost and that Virgil, Dante and Milton “place their men and their metaphorical leaves, in an underworld”.
Spiegelman closes his essay by observing that Pound’s poem takes place underground in the Metro.