The Temperaments - Analysis

Sex as a social mask, not a private truth

Pound’s central joke is also his central claim: people’s reputations for purity or depravity are often inversions of their actual lives, because reputation is built out of performance. The poem pits two men against each other like exhibits in a crude little study. Florialis carries a staggering secret record—Nine adulteries, 12 liaisons, 64 fornications, even something approaching a rape—and yet he passes for a man who is bloodless and sexless. Bastidides does the opposite: he talks and writes of nothing save copulation, but his one clear “proof” of virility (he became the father of twins) arrives only through humiliation.

The poem’s obscenity isn’t just for shock; it’s the instrument that strips away polite self-presentation. By putting sex in the language of accounting—numbers, categories, totals—Pound treats desire as something that can be hidden, tallied, traded, and lied about, rather than something that naturally reveals a person’s “temperament.”

Florialis: the quiet man with a loud ledger

Florialis is described with almost absurd delicacy: the sins Rest nightly upon the soul of our delicate friend. That phrasing makes his wrongdoing feel like a private weight, but the poem refuses him any moral grandeur. The list is too blunt, too clinical, too comic in its precision. The real sting is social: his crimes are not read on his body. He is quiet and reserved in demeanour, and that demeanor is enough to get him misclassified as harmless. The tension here is between the enormity of what he has done and the ease with which he is socially forgiven, or at least socially unmarked.

Even the word passes matters: it implies not innocence but successful presentation. Florialis doesn’t need to argue for his purity; he only needs to inhabit the right surface.

Bastidides: the loud mouth who must pay for proof

Bastidides seems like he should be the obvious libertine—he talks and writes obsessively about sex—yet the poem makes his outcome both more ordinary and more cruel. He does father children, but it is framed as a feat achieved at some cost: he had to be four times cuckold. In other words, he gets the public sign of sexual success (twins) only by being publicly positioned as a man whose partner sleeps with other men.

That twist makes the poem’s satire sharper: the man who markets sexuality becomes dependent on other people’s sexuality to validate him. His identity is not desire but advertisement, and advertisement invites punishment. Where Florialis’ hidden life remains socially intact, Bastidides’ performed life boomerangs into shame.

The poem’s turn: from secret vice to public ridicule

The hinge arrives with on the contrary. Florialis’ section is built on concealment—private acts versus public blankness—while Bastidides’ section is built on exposure, even overexposure. The tone stays dry and amused, but the target shifts: first the poem mocks the world’s credulity (how someone can pass as sexless), then it mocks the braggart’s dependence on an audience (how “talking and writing” invites a reckoning).

A sharper question the poem leaves behind

If Florialis can commit 64 fornications and remain quiet and reserved, what exactly does society punish—acts, or the visibility of acts? Pound’s tally-sheet style suggests a bleak answer: the poem doesn’t imagine justice catching up to anyone; it imagines only misreading, mislabeling, and the occasional public joke at a boaster’s expense.