Homage to Sextus Propertius VI

When, when, and whenever death closes our

eyelids,

Moving naked over Acheron

Upon the one raft, victor and conquered

together,

Marius and Jugurtha together,

one tangle of shadows.

Caesar plots against India,

Tigris and Euphrates shall, from now on, flow at his

Tibet shall be full of Roman policemen,

bidding,

The Parthians shall get used to our statuary

and acquire a Roman religion;

One raft on the veiled flood of Acheron,

Marius and Jugurtha together.

Nor at my funeral either will there be any long trail,

bearing ancestral lares and images;

No trumpets filled with my emptiness,

Nor shall it be on an Atalic bed;

The perfumed cloths shall be absent.

A small plebeian procession.

Enough, enough and in plenty

There will be three books at my obsequies

Which I take, my not unworthy gift, to Persephone.

You will follow the bare scarified breast

Nor will you be weary of calling my name, nor too

weary

To place the last kiss on my lips

When the Syrian onyx is broken.

“He who is now vacant dust

“Was once the slave of one passion:”

Give that much inscription

“Death why tardily come?”

You, sometimes, will lament a lost friend,

For it is a custom:

This care for past men,

Since Adonis was gored in Idalia, and the Cytharean

Ran crying with out-spread hair,

In vain, you call back the shade,

In vain, Cynthia. Vain call to unanswering shadow,

Small talk comes from small bones.

—
Ezra Pound

Poems 1918-1921, 1921