Homage to Sextus Propertius I

Shades of Callimachus, Coan ghosts of Philetas

It is in your grove I would walk,

I who come first from the clear font

Bringing the Grecian orgies into Italy,

and the dance into Italy.

Who hath taught you so subtle a measure,

in what hall have you heard it;

What foot beat out your time-bar,

what water has mellowed your whistles?

Out-weariers of Apollo will, as we know, continue their

Martian generalities,

We have kept our erasers in order.

A new-fangled chariot follows the flower-hung horses;

A young Muse with young loves clustered about her

ascends with me into the aether, . . .

And there is no high-road to the Muses.

Annalists will continue to record Roman reputations,

Celebrities from the Trans-Caucasus will belaud Roman celebrities

And expound the distentions of Empire,

But for something to read in normal circumstances?

For a few pages brought down from the forked hill unsullied?

I ask a wreath which will not crush my head.

And there is no hurry about it;

I shall have, doubtless, a boom after my funeral,

Seeing that long standing increases all things

regardless of quality.

And who would have known the towers

pulled down by a deal-wood horse;

Or of Achilles withstaying waters by Simois

Or of Hector spattering wheel-rims,

Or of Polydmantus, by Scamander, or Helenas and

Deiphoibos?

Their door-yards would scarcely know them, or Paris.

Small talk O Ilion, and O Troad

twice taken by Oetian gods,

If Homer had not stated your case!

And I also among the later nephews of this city

shall have my dog’s day,

With no stone upon my contemptible sepulchre;

My vote coming from the temple of Phoebus in Lycia, at Patara,

And in the mean time my songs will travel,

And the devirginated young ladies will enjoy them

when they have got over the strangeness,

For Orpheus tamed the wild beasts

and held up the Threician river;

And Citharaon shook up the rocks by Thebes

and danced them into a bulwark at his pleasure,

And you, O Polyphemus? Did harsh Galatea almost

Turn to your dripping horses, because of a tune, under Aetna?

We must look into the matter.

Bacchus and Apollo in favour of it,

There will be a crowd of young women doing homage to my palaver,

Though my house is not propped up by Taenarian

columns from Laconia (associated with Neptune and Cerberus),

Though it is not stretched upon gilded beams;

My orchards do not lie level and wide

as the forests of Phaecia,

the luxurious and Ionian,

Nor are my caverns stuffed stiff with a Marcian vintage,

My cellar does not date from Numa Pompilius,

Nor bristle with wine jars,

Nor is it equipped with a frigidaire patent;

Yet the companions of the Muses

will keep their collective nose in my books,

And weary with historical data, they will turn to my dance tune.

Happy who are mentioned in my pamphlets,

the songs shall be a fine tomb-stone over their beauty.

But against this?

Neither expensive pyramids scraping the stars in their route,

Nor houses modelled upon that of Jove in East Elis,

Nor the monumental effigies of Mausolus,

are a complete elucidation of death.

Flame burns, rain sinks into the cracks

And they all go to rack ruin beneath the thud of the years.

Stands genius a deathless adornment,

a name not to be worn out with the years.

—
Ezra Pound

Poems 1918-1921, 1921