Basil says/they beat drums for three days/till all the drumheads were busted/(simple village fiesta)/and as for his life in the Canaries...

Basil Bunting, British poet and friend of Pound's.

I was fortunate enough to be invited to spend Easter one year with an uncle or cousin of JR Masoliver...who was the lord of large village in Argon. ... The village had a hermandad [brotherhood or fraternity], which behaved most of the year as other hermandads did--it buried people, especially the poor, or those who required special celebration, and to do this the brothers dressed in voluminous black smocks and huge black hood-masks, shaped much like the white ones of the Ku Klux Klan. That preserved their anonymity and therefore the merit of their charity. But at Easter everybody in the village, strangers too and even women, became for a day or two members of the hermandad and hid themselves in these hideous costumes. You couldn't tell who was man and who was girl unless you heard their voice. Then everybody took drums, huge drums, biggish brass drums or side drums, and beat them in one dull repetitive rhythm all the time Jesus was harrowing hell--that is, from noon of Good Friday (the agony of the cross) till noon of Easter Sunday (the resurrection). There was no pause for meals or sleep. ... As long as your drum lasted you must go on beating it, pausing only to drink wine.

--Bunting, Basil "The Village Fiesta", Paideuma, 10:3, pgs. 619-620.