Early Writings

  The water dripping from Bellerophon’s horse,18

  Alba, your kings, and the realm your folk

  have constructed with such industry

  Shall be yawned out on my lyre—with such industry.

  My little mouth shall gobble in such great fountains,

  “Wherefrom father Ennius,19 sitting before I came, hath

  drunk.”

  I had rehearsed the Curian brothers, and made remarks on

  the Horatian javelin20

  (Near Q. H. Flaccus’21 book-stall).

  “Of” royal Aemilia, drawn on the memorial raft,

  “Of” the victorious delay of Fabius, and the left-handed

  battle at Cannae,22

  Of lares fleeing the “Roman seat” ...

  I had sung of all these

  And of Hannibal,

  and of Jove protected by geese.

  And Phoebus looking upon me from the Castalian tree,

  Said then “You idiot! What are you doing with that water:

  Who has ordered a book about heroes?

  You need, Propertius, not think

  About acquiring that sort of a reputation.

  Soft fields must be worn by small wheels,

  Your pamphlets will be thrown, thrown often into a chair

  Where a girl waits alone for her lover;

  Why wrench your page out of its course?

  No keel will sink with your genius

  Let another oar churn the water,

  Another wheel, the arena; mid-crowd is as bad as mid-sea.”

  He had spoken, and pointed me a place with his plectrum:

  Orgies of vintages, an earthen image of Silenus

  Strengthened with rushes, Tegaean Pan,23

  The small birds of the Cytherean mother,24

  their Punic faces dyed in the Gorgon’s lake;25

  Nine girls, from as many countrysides

  bearing her offerings in their unhardened hands,

  Such my cohort and setting. And she bound ivy to his thyrsos;26

  Fitted song to the strings;

  Roses twined in her hands.

  And one among them looked at me with face offended,

  Calliope:27

  “Content ever to move with white swans!

  Nor will the noise of high horses lead you ever to battle;

  Nor will the public criers ever have your name

  in their classic horns,

  Nor Mars shout you in the wood at Aeonia,

  Nor where Rome ruins German riches,

  Nor where the Rhine flows with barbarous blood,

  and flood carries wounded Suevi.28

  Obviously crowned lovers at unknown doors,

  Night dogs, the marks of a drunken scurry,

  These are your images, and from you the sorcerizing of

  shut-in young ladies,

  The wounding of austere men by chicane.”

  Thus Mistress Calliope,

  Dabbling her hands in the fount, thus she

  Stiffened our face with the backwash of Philetas the Coan.

  III

  Midnight, and a letter comes to me from our mistress:

  Telling me to come to Tibur:

  At once!!

  “Bright tips reach up from twin towers,

  Anienan spring water falls into flat-spread pools.”

  What is to be done about it?

  Shall I entrust myself to entangled shadows,

  Where bold hands may do violence to my person?

  Yet if I postpone my obedience

  because of this respectable terror,

  I shall be prey to lamentations worse than a nocturnal

  assailant.

  And I shall be in the wrong,

  and it will last a twelve month,

  For her hands have no kindness me-ward,

  Nor is there anyone to whom lovers are not sacred at midnight

  And in the Via Sciro.

  If any man would be a lover

  he may walk on the Scythian coast,

  No barbarism would go to the extent of doing him harm,

  The moon will carry his candle,

  the stars will point out the stumbles,

  Cupid will carry lighted torches before him

  and keep mad dogs off his ankles.

  Thus all roads are perfectly safe

  and at any hour;

  Who so indecorous as to shed the pure gore of a suitor?!

  Cypris29 is his cicerone.

  What if undertakers follow my track,

  such a death is worth dying.

  She would bring frankincense and wreaths to my tomb,

  She would sit like an ornament on my pyre.

  Gods’ aid, let not my bones lie in a public location

  With crowds too assiduous in their crossing of it;

  For thus are tombs of lovers most desecrated.

  May a woody and sequestered place cover me with its foliage

  Or may I inter beneath the hummock

  of some as yet uncatalogued sand;

  At any rate I shall not have my epitaph in a high road.

  IV

  Difference of Opinion With Lygdamus30

  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,—

  it was no glimpse in a mirror;

  No gawds on her snowy hands, no orfevrerie,31

  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 undryable

  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 moulted feathers of

  screech owls,

  She binds me with ravvles of shrouds.

  Black spiders spin in her bed!

  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?

  V

  I

  Now if ever it is time to cleanse Helicon;

  to lead Emathian horses afield,

  And to name over the census of my chiefs in the Roman camp.

  If I have not the faculty, “The bare attempt would be

  praiseworthy. ”

  “In things of similar magnitude

  the mere will to act is sufficient.”

  The primitive ages sang Venus,

  the last sings of a tumult,

 
And I also will sing war when this matter of a girl is exhausted.

  I with my beak hauled ashore would proceed in a more stately

  manner,

  My Muse is eager to instruct me in a new gamut, or gambetto,

  Up, up my soul, from your lowly cantilation,

  put on a timely vigour.

  Oh august Pierides!32 Now for a large-mouthed product.

  Thus:

  “The Euphrates denies its protection to the Parthian and

  apologizes for Crassus,”

  And “It is, I think, India which now gives necks to your

  triumph,”

  And so forth, Augustus. “Virgin Arabia shakes in her inmost

  dwelling.”

  If any land shrink into a distant seacoast,

  it is a mere postponement of your domination.

  And I shall follow the camp, I shall be duly celebrated

  for singing the affairs of your cavalry.

  May the fates watch over my day.

  2

  Yet you ask on what account I write so many love-lyrics

  And whence this soft book comes into my mouth.

  Neither Calliope nor Apollo sung these things into my ear,

  My genius is no more than a girl.

  If she with ivory fingers drive a tune through the lyre,

  We look at the process.

  How easy the moving fingers; if hair is mussed on her

  forehead,

  If she goes in a gleam of Cos, in a slither of dyed stuff,

  There is a volume in the matter; if her eyelids sink into sleep,

  There are new jobs for the author;

  And if she plays with me with her shirt off,

  We shall construct many Iliads.

  And whatever she does or says

  We shall spin long yarns out of nothing.

  Thus much the fates have allotted me, and if, Maecenas,

  I were able to lead heroes into armour, I would not,

  Neither would I warble of Titans, nor of Ossa

  spiked onto Olympus,

  Nor of causeways over Pelion,33

  Nor of Thebes in its ancient respectability,

  nor of Homer’s reputation in Pergamus,

  Nor of Xerxes’ two-barreled kingdom, nor of Remus and his

  royal family,

  Nor of dignified Carthaginian characters,

  Nor of Welsh mines and the profit Marus had out of them.

  I should remember Caesar’s affairs ...

  for a background,

  Although Callimachus did without them,

  and without Theseus,

  Without an inferno, without Achilles attended of gods,

  Without Ixion, and without the sons of Menoetius and the Argo

  and without Jove’s grave and the Titans.

  And my ventricles do not palpitate to Caesarial ore rotundos,34

  Nor to the tune of the Phrygian fathers.35

  Sailor, of winds; a plowman, concerning his oxen;

  Soldier, the enumeration of wounds; the sheepfeeder, of

  ewes;

  We, in our narrow bed, turning aside from battles:

  Each man where he can, wearing out the day in his manner.

  3

  It is noble to die of love, and honourable to remain

  uncuckolded for a season.

  And she speaks ill of light women,

  and will not praise Homer

  Because Helen’s conduct is “unsuitable.”

  VI

  When, when, and whenever death closes our eyelids,

  Moving naked over Acheron36

  Upon the one raft, victor and conquered together,

  Marius and Jugurtha together,37

  one tangle of shadows.

  Caesar plots against India,

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

  Tibet shall be full of Roman policemen,

  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 Attalic 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 Cytherean38

  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.

  VII

  Me happy, night, night full of brightness;

  Oh couch made happy by my long delectations;

  How many words talked out with abundant candles;

  Struggles when the lights were taken away;

  Now with bared breasts she wrestled against me,

  Tunic spread in delay;

  And she then opening my eyelids fallen in sleep,

  Her lips upon them; and it was her mouth saying:

  Sluggard!

  In how many varied embraces, our changing arms,

  Her kisses, how many, lingering on my lips.

  “Turn not Venus into a blinded motion,

  Eyes are the guides of love,

  Paris took Helen naked coming from the bed of Menelaus,

  Endymion’s39 naked body, bright bait for Diana,”

  —such at least is the story.

  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.

  VIII

  Jove, be merciful to that unfortunate woman

  Or an ornamental death will be held to your debit,

  The time is come, the air heaves in torridity,

  The dry earth pants against the canicular heat,

  But this heat is not the root of the matter:

  She did not respect all the gods;

  Such derelictions have destroyed other young ladies aforetime,

  And what they swore in the cupboard

  wind and wave scattered away.

  Was Venus exacerbated by the existence of a comparable equal?
br />   Is the ornamental goddess full of envy?

  Have you contempted Juno’s Pelasgian temples.40

  Have you denied Pallas41 good eyes?

  Or is it my tongue that wrongs you

  with perpetual ascription of graces?

  There comes, it seems, and at any rate

  through perils, (so many) and of a vexed life,

  The gentler hour of an ultimate day.

  lo mooed the first years with averted head,

  And now drinks Nile water like a god,

  Ino in her young days fled pellmell out of Thebes,

  Andromeda was offered to a sea-serpent

  and respectably married to Perseus,

  Callisto,42 disguised as a bear,

  wandered through the Arcadian prairies

  While a black veil was over her stars,

  What if your fates are accelerated,

  your quiet hour put forward,

  You may find interment pleasing,

  You will say that you succumbed to a danger identical,

  charmingly identical, with Semele’s,43

  And believe it, and she also will believe it,

  being expert from experience,

  And amid all the gloried and storied beauties of Maeonia44

  There shall be none in a better seat, not

  one denying your prestige,

  Now you may bear fate’s stroke unperturbed,

  Or Jove, harsh as he is, may turn aside your ultimate day.

  Old lecher, let not Juno get wind of the matter,

  Or perhaps Juno herself will go under,

  If the young lady is taken?

  There will be, in any case, a stir on Olympus.

  IX

  I

  The twisted rhombs45 ceased their clamour of accompaniment;