Chapter IV

_Iste fuit vir incultus,_
_Deo laus, quod est sepultus,_
_Vermes habent eius vultum_
_A-a-a-a--A-men._
_Ego autem jovialis_
_Gaudero contubernalis_
_Cum jocunda femina._

To Dives

Who am I to condemn you, O Dives,
I who am as much embittered
With poverty
As you are with useless riches?

Ladies

_Agathas_

Four and forty lovers had Agathas in the old days,
All of whom she refused;
And now she turns to me seeking love,
And her hair also is turning.

_Young Lady_

I have fed your lar with poppies,
I have adored you for three full years;
And now you grumble because your dress does not fit
And because I happen to say so.

_Lesbia Illa_

Memnon, Memnon, that lady
Who used to walk about amongst us
With such gracious uncertainty,
Is now wedded
To a British householder.
_Lugete, Veneres! Lugete, Cupidinesque!_

_Passing_

Flawless as Aphrodite,
Thoroughly beautiful,
Brainless,
The faint odour of your patchouli,
Faint, almost, as the lines of cruelty about your chin,
Assails me, and concerns me almost as little.

Coda

O my songs,
Why do you look so eagerly and so curiously into people’s faces,
Will you find your lost dead among them?

Ancora

Good God! They say you are _risqué_,
O canzonetti!
We who went out into the four A.M. of the world
Composing our albas,
We who shook off our dew with the rabbits,
We who have seen even Artemis a-binding her sandals,
Have we ever heard the like?
O mountains of Hellas!!

Gather about me, O Muses!
When we sat upon the granite brink in Helicon
Clothed in the tattered sunlight,
O Muses with delicate shins,
O Muses with delectable knee-joints,
When we splashed and were splashed with
The lucid Castalian spray,
Had we ever such an epithet cast upon us!!

A TRANSLATION

FROM THE PROVENÇAL OF EN BERTRANS DE BORN.

=“Dompna pois de me no’us cal”=

Lady, since you care nothing for me,
And since you have shut me away from you
Causelessly,
I know not where to go seeking,
For certainly
I will never again gather
Joy so rich, and if I find not ever
A lady with look so speaking
To my desire, worth yours whom I have lost,
I’ll have no other love at any cost.

And since I could not find a peer to you,
Neither one so fair, nor of such heart,
So eager and alert,
Nor with such art
In attire, nor so gay
Nor with gift so bountiful and so true,
I will go out a-searching,
Culling from each a fair trait
To make me a borrowed lady
Till I again find you ready.

Bels Cembelins, I take of you your colour,
For it’s your own, and your glance
Where love is,
A proud thing I do here,
For, as to colour and eyes
I shall have missed nothing at all,
Having yours.
I ask of Midons Aelis (of Montfort)
Her straight speech free-running,
That my phantom lack not in cunning.

At Chalais of the Viscountess, I would
That she give me outright
Her two hands and her throat,
So take I my road
To Rochechouart,
Swift-foot to my Lady Anhes,
Seeing that Tristan’s lady Iseutz had never
Such grace of locks, I do ye to wit,
Though she’d the far fame for it.

Of Audiart at Malemort,
Though she with a full heart
Wish me ill,
I’d have her form that’s laced
So cunningly,
Without blemish, for her love
Breaks not nor turns aside.
I of Miels-de-ben demand
Her straight fresh body,
She is so supple and young,
Her robes can but do her wrong.

Her white teeth, of the Lady Faidita
I ask, and the fine courtesy
She hath to welcome one,
And such replies she lavishes
Within her nest;
Of Bels Mirals, the rest,
Tall stature and gaiety,
To make these avail
She knoweth well, betide
No change nor turning aside.

Ah, Bels Senher, Maent, at last
I ask naught from you,
Save that I have such hunger for
This phantom
As I’ve for you, such flame-lap,
And yet I’d rather
Ask of you than hold another,
Mayhap, right close and kissed.
Ah, lady, why have you cast
Me out, knowing you hold me so fast!

The Coming of War: Actaeon

An image of Lethe,
and the fields
Full of faint light
but golden,
Gray cliffs,
and beneath them
A sea
Harsher than granite,
unstill, never ceasing;
High forms
with the movement of gods,
Perilous aspect;
And one said:
“This is Actaeon.”
Actaeon of golden greaves!

Over fair meadows,
Over the cool face of that field,
Unstill, ever moving,
Hosts of an ancient people,
The silent cortège.

After Ch’u Yuan

I will get me to the wood
Where the gods walk garlanded in wistaria,
By the silver blue flood
move others with ivory cars.
There come forth many maidens
to gather grapes for the leopards, my friend,
For there are leopards drawing the cars.

I will walk in the glade,
I will come out of the new thicket
and accost the procession of maidens.

Liu Ch’e

The rustling of the silk is discontinued,
Dust drifts over the court-yard,
There is no sound of foot-fall, and the leaves
Scurry into heaps and lie still,
And she the rejoicer of the heart is beneath them:

A wet leaf that clings to the threshold.

Fan-piece, for her Imperial Lord

O fan of white silk,
clear as frost on the grass-blade,
You also are laid aside.

Ts’ai Chi’h

The petals fall in the fountain,
the orange-coloured rose-leaves,
Their ochre clings to the stone.

In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

Alba

As cool as the pale wet leaves
of lily-of-the-valley
She lay beside me in the dawn.

Heather

The black panther treads at my side,
And above my fingers
There float the petal-like flames.

The milk-white girls
Unbend from the holly-trees,
And their snow-white leopard
Watches to follow our trace.

The Faun

Ha! sir, I have seen you sniffing and snoozling about
among my flowers.
And what, pray, do you know about horticulture,
you capriped?

“Come, Auster, come, Apeliota,
And see the faun in our garden.
But if you move or speak
This thing will run at you
And scare itself to spasms.”

Pervigilium

The gilded phaloi of the crocuses
are thrusting at the spring air.
Here is there naught of dead gods
But a procession of festival,
A procession, O Giulio Romano,
Fit for your spirit to dwell in.
Dione, your nights are upon us.

The dew is upon the leaf.
The night about us is restless.

The Encounter

All the while they were talking the new morality
Her eyes explored me.
And when I arose to go
Her fingers were like the tissue
Of a Japanese paper napkin.

Tempora

Io! Io! Tamuz!
The Dryad stands in my court-yard
With plaintive, querulous crying.
(Tamuz. Io! Tamuz!)
Oh, no, she is not crying: “Tamuz.”
She says, “May my poems be printed this week?
The god Pan is afraid to ask you,
May my poems be printed this week?”

Black Slippers: Bellotti

At the table beyond us
With her little suede slippers off,
With her white-stocking’d feet
Carefully kept from the floor by a napkin,
She converses:
_Connaissez-vous Ostende?_
The gurgling Italian lady on the other side of the restaurant
Replies with a certain hauteur,
But I await with patience
To see how Celestine will re-enter her slippers.
She re-enters them with a groan.

Society

The family position was waning,
And on this account the little Aurelia,
Who had laughed on eighteen summers,
Now bears the palsied contact of Phidippus.

Image from D’Orleans

Young men riding in the street
In the bright new season
Spur without reason,
Causing their steeds to leap.

And at the pace they keep
Their horses’ armoured feet
Strike sparks from the cobbled street
In the bright new season.

Papyrus

Spring ...
Too long ...
Gongula ...

“Ione, Dead the Long Year”

Empty are the ways,
Empty are the ways of this land
And the flowers
Bend over with heavy heads.
They bend in vain.
Empty are the ways of this land
Where Ione
Walked once, and now does not walk

But seems like a person just gone.

Shop Girl

For a moment she rested against me
Like a swallow half blown to the wall,
And they talk of Swinburne’s women,
And the shepherdess meeting with Guido,
And the harlots of Baudelaire.

To Formianus’ Young Lady Friend

AFTER VALERIUS CATULLUS

All Hail! young lady with a nose
by no means too small,
With a foot unbeautiful,
and with eyes that are not black,
With fingers that are not long, and with a mouth undry,
And with a tongue by no means too elegant,
You are the friend of Formianus, the vendor of cosmetics,
And they call you beautiful in the province,
And you are even compared to Lesbia.

O most unfortunate age!

Tame Cat

“It rests me to be among beautiful women.
Why should one always lie about such matters?

I repeat:
It rests me to converse with beautiful women
Even though we talk nothing but nonsense,

The purring of the invisible antennæ
Is both stimulating and delightful.”

L’Art, 1910

Green arsenic smeared on an egg-white cloth,
Crushed strawberries! Come, let us feast our eyes.

Simulacra

Why does the horse-faced lady of just the unmentionable age
Walk down Longacre reciting Swinburne to herself, inaudibly?
Why does the small child in the soiled-white imitation fur coat
Crawl in the very black gutter beneath the grape stand?
Why does the really handsome young woman approach me in Sackville Street
Undeterred by the manifest age of my trappings?

Women Before a Shop

The gew-gaws of false amber and false turquoise attract them.
“Like to like nature”: these agglutinous yellows!

Epilogue

O chansons foregoing
You were a seven days’ wonder,
When you came out in the magazines
You created considerable stir in Chicago,

And now you are stale and worn out,
You’re a very depleted fashion,
A hoop-skirt, a calash,
An homely, transient antiquity.

Only emotion remains.

Your emotions?
Are those of a maître-de-café.

The Social Order

I

This government official,
Whose wife is several years his senior,
Has such a caressing air
When he shakes hands with young ladies.