Analysis of Homage To Sextus Propertius - VI
Ezra Pound 1885 (Hailey) – 1972 (Venice)
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 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 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.
Scheme | a bcCxxxbdbbCxxxxxbdab xdxb xbbe xeb bxxxx |
---|---|
Poetic Form | |
Metre | 110010110101 1010101 0101110010010 10001010 11011 10101100 100010111111110 01111110010 01111110100 0010010010 11101111 10001010 111100101111011 1001010100 110111100 11111111 00111110 01010010 01010010 11111111 11111010111 11100111 111110110111110 11011111 1010010110 1111101 11011110 111010 1111 101101011 111010 11111 1010110010001 1101111 0111101 0110011111 111111 |
Closest metre | Iambic pentameter |
Characters | 1,355 |
Words | 247 |
Sentences | 10 |
Stanzas | 6 |
Stanza Lengths | 1, 20, 4, 4, 3, 5 |
Lines Amount | 37 |
Letters per line (avg) | 29 |
Words per line (avg) | 7 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 182 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 41 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 1:13 min read
- 141 Views
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