Homage To Sextus Propertius - Ezra Pound

Another by Ezra Pound (see other for bio info) and possibly my favorite of all of his poems, perhaps because of its accessibility and stylistic departure from his best known.  Sextus Propertius was a Roman poet generally regarded for his elegies, of which close to one hundred survive.  They chronicle a love affair with an older woman who captured - and held - his heart early on and, it seems, until her death. 


I read this during my college years and the verse beginning with "Fool who would set a term to love's madness..." has always set the standard for expressing the absolute absurdity - and folly - of trying to control the object, arc, and/or duration of a love affair.  "The heart has its reasons, of which Reason knows nothing about", wrote Pascal, and we seem to forget that all the time.  Or how artificial barriers are just plain foolhardy and counter-productive to what our hearts want most: to connect.
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Homage to Sextus Propertius

                                            

While our fates twine together,

sate we our eyes with love;

For long night comes upon you

and a day when no day returns.

Let the gods lay chains upon us

so that no day shall unbind them.

Fool who would set a term to love's madness

For the sun shall drive with black horses,

earth shall bring wheat from barley,

The flood shall move toward the fountain

Ere love know moderations,

The fish shall swim in dry streams.

No, now while it may be, let not the fruit of life cease.

Dry wreaths drop their petals,

their stalks are woven in baskets,

To-day we take the great breath of lovers,

to-morrow fate shuts us in.

Though you give all your kisses

you give but few.

Nor can I shift my pains to other,

Hers will I be dead,

If she confer such nights upon me,

long is my life, long in years,

If she give me many,

God am I for the time.

                                         

                                                      Ezra Pound - American

Anonymous - Ancient Egypt

I mentioned in an earlier entry that I am interested in how different cultures and times wrote about the theme of this blog. Here are poems translated into English by Ezra Pound and Noel Stock from Italian text translated, in turn,from hieroglyphic texts dating from between 1567 B.C. to 1085 B.C.). The Italian version is called "Liriche Amorose Degli Antichi Egizioni" (Milan, 1957).
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II
Nothing, nothing can keep me away from my love
Standing on the other shore.
Not even old crocodile
There on the sandbank between us
Can keep us apart.
I go in spite of him,
I walk upon the waves,
Her love flows back across the water,
Turning waves to solid earth
For me to walk on.
The river is our Enchanted Sea.

III
To have seen her
To have seen her approaching
Such beauty is
Joy in my heart forever.
Nor time eternal take back
What she has brought to me.

IV
When she welcomes me
Arms open wide
I feel as some traveler returning
From the far land of Punt.
All things change; the mind, the senses,
Into perfume rich and strange.
And when parts her lips to kiss
My head is light, I am drunk without beer.

                                                                                                        Anonymous - Ancient Egypt