Homage to Sextus Propertius IV

difference of opinion with lygdamus

Tell me the truths which you hear of our constant

young lady,

Lygdamus,

And may the bought yoke of a mistress lie with

equitable weight on your shoulders;

For I am swelled up with inane pleasurabilities

and deceived by your reference

To things which you think I would like to

believe.

No messenger should come wholly empty,

and a slave should fear plausibilities;

Much conversation is as good as having a home.

Out with it, tell it to me, all of it, from the beginning,

I guzzle with outstretched ears.

Thus? She wept into uncombed hair,

And you saw it.

Vast waters flowed from her eyes ?

You, you Lygdamus

Saw her stretched on her bed, —

was no glimpse in a mirror;

No gawds on her snowy hands, no orfevrerie,

Sad garment draped on her slender arms.

Her escritoires lay shut by the bed-feet.

Sadness hung over the house, and the desolated female

attendants

Were desolated because she had told them her dreams.

She was veiled in the midst of that place,

Damp woolly handkerchiefs were stuffed into her un-

dryable eyes,

And a querulous noise responded to our solicitous

reprobations.

For which things you will get a reward from me,

Lygdamus?

To say many things is equal to having a home.

And the other woman “has not enticed me

by her pretty manners,

“She has caught me with herbaceous poison,

she twiddles the spiked wheel of a rhombus,

“She stews puffed frogs, snake’s bones, the moulded

feathers of screech owls,

“She binds me with ravvles of shrouds.

“Black spiders spin in her bedl

“Let her lovers snore at her in the morning!

“May the gout cramp up her feet!

“Does he like me to sleep here alone,

Lygdamus?

“Will he say nasty things at my funeral?”

And you expect me to believe this

after twelve months of discomfort?

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—
Ezra Pound

Poems 1918-1921, 1921