Homage to Sextus Propertius III

Midnight, and a letter comes to me from our mistress:

Telling me to come to Tibur “At once!”

Bright tips reach up from twin towers,

Anienan spring water falls into flat-spread pools.

What is to be done about it?

Shall I entrust myself to entangled shadows,

Where bold hands may do violence to my person?

Yet if I postpone my obedience

because of this respectable terror,

I shall be prey to lamentations worse than a nocturnal assailant.

And I shall be in the wrong,

and it will last a twelve month,

For her hands have no kindness me-ward,

Nor is there anyone to whom lovers are not sacred at midnight

And in the Via Sciro.

If any man would be a lover

he may walk on the Scythian coast:

No barbarism would go to the extent of doing him harm,

The moon will carry his candle,

the stars will point out the stumbles,

Cupid will carry lighted torches before him

and keep mad dogs off his ankles.

Thus all roads are perfectly safe

and at any hour;

Who so indecorous as to shed the pure gore of a suitor?

Cypris is his cicerone.

What if undertakers follow my track—

such a death is worth dying.

She would bring frankincense and wreaths to my tomb,

She would sit like an ornament on my pyre.

God’s aid, let not my bones lie in a public location

With crowds too assiduous in their crossing of it;

For thus are tombs of lovers most desecrated.

May a woody and sequestered place cover me with its foliage

Or may I inter beneath the hummock

of some as yet uncatalogued sand;

At any rate I shall not have my epitaph in a high road.

—
Ezra Pound

Poetry, 1919