On the American Wonder Child who translated Homer
before she was ten years old.

Little girls who translate the
The Iliad at eight
Are rarely fortunate.

Their Odyssey begun
On the heroic tune
They shoot straight at the sun
And hit the moon,
The variable romantic star, whose catch
Composed on no hexameter-loud tune
They have not learned, nor even there's a latch-
-Trick at the sun's front door
Lost at heaven's entrance in-and-out-uproar.

Gods, heroes, ghosts,
Cattle, the wine-dark
Fit nature, with that lark
Which was the lark and not the nightingale;
But no lass
Plays Juliet every night till the dawn-pale,
Nor bends her sheet to the heroic gale
A thousand years were spent to whistle-up;
And they will always clamour after Troy
On the moon's plain
Get at the last the spear without the cup.

Piracy, primitive geography

Shipwreck and sorcery and sheep-farming took

Art ten thousand years

A thousand years translated these

Into certain images,

Crystallised Aegean water

Gave the sun a twin daughter

With her sister, Jason's lamb,

Glorified in magic slaughter

Over the fleece of a ram:

And in treachery beautified.

A sailor and a pirate took

A thousand years to bring to book,

Turn to that far-wandering

Hyacinth-curved bigamist

Gentleman who Circe kissed.

Art takes time as long as love

Longer than love to make love last,

Take from the people of the past

The shapes that shall be loved for ever.

Under the sigh of bee or dove

Or ship or stone, O Bien-Aime,

Cat or whip or stone

Love at play,

You into feather.