Lesbia always speaks ill of me, never shuts up about me: damn me if she doesn’t love me. What’s the sign? Because it’s the same with me: I’m continually complaining, but damn me if I don’t love her. —Catullus (Gaius Valerius Catullus) Catullus 92, translated by A. S. Kline . . .
Let’s Live and Love: To Lesbia
Let us live, my Lesbia, let us love, and all the words of the old, and so moral, may they be worth less than nothing to us! Suns may set, and suns may rise again: but when our brief light has set, night is one long everlasting sleep. Give me a thousand kisses, a hundred more, another . . .
Reconciliation
Agamemnon did not joy like this over his triumph at Troy, when Laomedon’s great wealth went down to ruin: Ulysses was no happier, when, his wanderings done, he touched the shore of his beloved Ithaca: nor Electra, on finding Orestes safe, when she’d cried, as a sister, clasping what she thought his . . .
Epithalamium
I tell you, I felt like an elephant that night, the night of the harvest. Each furrow put on airs in the moonlight, and the stars were so much confetti that took more than one lifetime to fall … I blundered about, wondered where to sit; I asked after you. My trunk was so heavy— and can you . . .
The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd
If all the world and love were young, And truth in every shepherd’s tongue, These pretty pleasures might me move To live with thee and be thy love. Time drives the flocks from field to fold When rivers rage and rocks grow cold, And Philomel becometh dumb; The rest complains of cares to . . .