“ THE MIDDLE KINGDOM The emperors of fourteen dynasties, clad in robes of yellow silk embroidered with the Dragon, wearing gold diadems set with pearls and rubies, and seated on thrones of incomparable ivory, have ruled over the Middle Kingdom for four thousand years.
THE MILKY WAY My mother taught me that every night a procession of junks carrying lanterns moves silently across the sky, and the water sprinkled from their paddles falls to the earth in the form of dew. I no longer believe that the stars are junks carrying lanterns, no longer that the dew is shaken from their oars. ”

“ You had the ivory of my life to carve.
Use no more speech.
. . . .
And Picus of Mirandola is dead;
And all the gods they dreamed and fabled of,
Hermes, and Thoth, and Christ, are rotten now,
Rotten and dank.
. . . .
And through it all I see your pale Greek face;
Tenderness makes me as eager as a little child
To love you
You morsel left half cold on Caesar’s plate.
Richard Aldington
13 BEAUTY THOU HAST HURT ME OVERMUCH
The light is a wound to me. ”

“ Many things told are remembered of sterile Atthis.
I yearn to behold thy delicate soul
To satiate my desire. . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . .
Richard Aldington
20 SITALKAS
Thou art come at length
More beautiful
Than any cool god
In a chamber under
Lycia’s far coast,
Than any high god
Who touches us not
Here in the seeded grass. ”

“ Where the gods walk garlanded in wisteria,
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.
Ezra Pound
44 LIU CH’E
The rustling of the silk is discontinued,
Dust drifts over the courtyard,
There is no sound of footfall, 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. ”

“ THE JONQUILS I have heard that a certain princess, when she found that she had been married by a demon, wove a wreath of jonquils and sent it to the lover of former days.
52 THE MERMAID The sailor boy who leant over the side of the Junk of Many Pearls, and combed the green tresses of the sea with his ivory fingers, believing that he had heard the voice of a mermaid, cast his body down between the waves. ”

“ I threw the rose into the sea, and watched it, caught in the wave, receding, red on the snow-white foam, paler on the emerald wave.
And the sea continued to return it to me, again and again, at last no longer a flower, but strewn petals on restless water.
So with the heart, and with all proud things. In the end nothing remains but a handful of petals of what was once a proud flower . . .
John Cournos after K. Tetmaier
55 DOCUMENTS
57 TO HULME (T. E.) AND FITZGERALD
Is there for feckless poverty
That grins at ye for a’ that! ”