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The nuances are subtle: a teacher transmits information and examines the student; a tutor helps the student and encourages him to make his own decisions, to be, in a sense, his own examiner. Knowledge is data received from without through the public office of the teacher. Wisdom is illumination brought forward from within through the private office of the tutor. Knowledge comes piecemeal, in an "uncertain and slow" fashion. Wisdom grows unmistakably, like the brightening glow of a lamp. As the reader explores these parallel differences, a coherent and ordered pattern of thought unfolds.
The compound nouns in this poem work by bringing into a single, cohesive unit two lines of thought that have an initially unclear relationship to each other. The reader is therefore compelled to provide his own discursive explanation of the connections being made, to "flesh out" the ideogrammes with his own associations and images.
The allusion to ideogramme proves helpful. Pound supposed the Chinese language to be largely constructed of characters which were formed by joining two pictographs. Although, according to Hugh Kenner 38, these forms comprise not more than ten per cent of the written language, Pound's appraisal of the power of the ideogrammatic method of composition is acute. They struck him as a core, luminous with meaning. The very luminosity of the compound was a direct result of the brilliant shift of meaning from one word to the other, a shift so swift as to make it seem like a moving picture. In the words of Hugh Kenner, Pound wanted "to make happenings run through words, not to join static categories with copulae..."[39] The ideogramme enabled him to seize a process, to concentrate it into exactness, and to capture withal a wealth of radiant meaning. Pound took his inspiration from the investigations of Fenellosa. Fenellosa saw the Chinese ideogrammatic method as a key means of extending the language by forming new words from old. Hence, the Chinese adjectival equivalent of the English word "bright" is a construct consisting of two pictographs: "sun" and "moon." The interaction of the two images gives us the "brightness" experience, an advance not only in terms of language but also in terms of man's understanding or awareness.
