No More Learning

To see or to touch the curve of her breast

Would lift my lover's fate above the rest,

Raising me on high like an Asian prince.

I'd be a demi-god, kissed by her desire,

And breast on breast, quenching my fire,

A deity at the gods' ambrosial feast.

Note: Ixion was tormented on a wheel in Hades, Tantalus by water and food just out of reach, Prometheus by having his liver torn by vultures, Sisyphus by being forced eternally to roll a boulder to the top of a hill and see it roll back again. Ambrosia was the food of the gods.

Les Amours de Cassandre: XCIV

Whether her golden hair curls languidly,

Or whether it swims by, in two flowing waves

That over her breasts wander there, and stray,

And across her neck float playfully:

Whether a knot, ornamented richly,

With many a ruby, many a rounded pearl,

Ties the stream of her rippling curls,

My heart delights itself, contentedly.

What delight it is, a wonder rather,

When her hair, caught above her ear,

Imitates the style that Venus employed!

Or with a cap on her head she is Adonis,

And no one knows if she's a girl or boy,

So sweetly her beauty hides in both disguises.

Note: Venus loved Adonis. The styles are taken from Classical art.

Les Amours de Cassandre: CXXXV

Sweet beauty, murderess of my life,

Instead of a heart you've a boulder:

Living, you make me waste and shudder,

Impassioned by amorous desire.

The fresh blood that would set you on fire

Has failed to melt your icy nature,

Savage, cruel, liking nothing better,

Than suitor-less icily to retire.

Oh, learn to live, so fierce in your cruelty:

Don't keep it all for Dis, your sweet beauty,

We have to capture a little joy in loving.

We must deceive him softly, sweetly, Death:

Since down there, below, under the earth,

The body's no more than ash, void of feeling.

Note: Dis is also Pluto, the god of the underworld.

Les Amours de Cassandre: CLII

Moon with dark eyes, goddess with horses black,

That steer you up and down, and high and low,

Never remaining long, when once they show,

Pulling your chariot endlessly there and back:

My desires and yours are never a match,

Because the passions that pierce your soul,

And the ardours that inflame mine so,

Court different desires to ease their lack.
For you, on Latmos, fondling your sleeping boy,

Would always wish some languid ploy

As restraint for your flying chariot:

But I whom Love devours all night long,

Wish from evening onwards for the dawn,

To find the daylight that your night forgot.

Note: Selene, the Moon, loved Endymion on Mount Latmos, while he slept.

Les Amours de Cassandre: CLX

Now, when Jupiter, fired by his lusts,

Wants to conceive the jewels of his eyes,

And with the heat of his burning thighs

Fills Juno's moist womb with his thrusts:

Now, when the sea, or when violent gusts

Of wind grant way to great ships of war,

And when the nightingale, in forest far,

Renews her grievance against Tereus:

Now, when the meadows and when the flowers

With thousands upon thousands of colours

Paint the breast of the earth so bright all round,

Alone and thoughtful among the secret cliffs,

With a silent heart I tell over my regrets,

And through the woods I go, hiding my wound.

Note: Juno, the great Goddess, was sister and wife of Jupiter. Tereus was the King of Thrace who raped his sister-in-law Philomela: she was changed into a nightingale.

Les Amours de Cassandre: CLXXII

I'd like to burn all the dross of my human clay,

So that I could take my flight to heaven,

Making myself divine, like Alcmene's son,

Hercules, joining the gods, all ablaze.

Already my spirit, longing for better ways,

Paces through my flesh, rebelliously,

And already brings the victim fuel to feed

His immolation in your vision's rays.

O holy pyre, O flame that's nourished by

A fire divine, may your fierce heart now burn

My familiar surface so completely, I,

Free and naked, might with a single flight

Rise, beyond the sky, to adore in turn

That other beauty from which your own derives.

Note: Hercules, Alcmene's son, tormented by the shirt of Nessus immolated himself on a pyre on Mount Oeta, and was deified.

Les Amours de Cassandre: CLXXIV

Now when the sky and when the earth again

Fill with ice: cold hail scattered everywhere,

And the horror of the worst months of the year

Makes the grass bristle across the plain:

Now when the wind mutinously prowling,

Cracks the boulders, and uproots the trees,

When the redoubled roaring of the seas

Fills all the shoreline with its wild surging:

Love burns me, and winter's bitter cold

That freezes all, cannot freeze the old

Ardour in my heart that lasts forever.

See, Lovers, how I'm treated, in what ways

I die of cold through summer's scorching days:

Of heat, in the depths of icy weather.

Les Amours de Cassandre: CXCII

It was hot, and sleep, gently flowing,

Was trickling through my dreaming soul,

When the vague form of a vibrant ghost

Arrived to disturb my dreaming, softly

Leaning down to me, pure ivory teeth,

And offering me her flickering tongue,

Her lips were kissing me, sweet and long,

Mouth on mouth, thigh on thigh beneath.

What coral, what lilies, and what roses,

In seeming, my open hand discloses,

Now, with twin caresses stroking her.

Faith, oh my faith, what fragrant breath,

What sweet odour from her mouth's excess,

What rubies and what diamonds were there.

Les Amours de Cassandre: CXCIII

Those twin pulses of thickly clotted milk

Ebb and flow through their white valley,

As the salt-tide, in its estuary,

Slowly rises, and slowly ebbs, like silk.

A space is created between them there,

Like a level pass between two hills

That the snowdrift's whiteness softly fills,

When the gusts of wind have dropped in winter.