EPITAPH
Leucis, who intended a Grand Passion,
Ends with a willingness-to-oblige.
ARIDES
The bashful Arides
Has married an ugly wife,
He was bored with his manner of life,
Indifferent and discouraged he thought he might as
Well do this as anything.
Saying within his heart, "I am no use to myself,
"Let her, if she wants me, take me."
He went to his doom.
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.
OUR CONTEMPORARIES
When the Taihaitian princess
Heard that he had decided,
She rushed out into the sunlight and
swarmed up a cocoanut palm tree,
But he returned to this island
And wrote ninety Petrarchan sonnets.
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.
PAPYRUS
SPRING . . . . . . . . .
Too long . . . . . . . .
Gongula . . . . . . . . .
(All poems to be found in _Personae: The Collected Poems of Ezra Pound_)