One Ever-During Night

Catullus, Campion, Propertius

This afternoon / evening at 7 pm EST (4 pm PST) I’ll be giving a lecture on my translations. I’ll be trying out some material from a piece I wrote for the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Greek and Latin Meter (/ Metre). You can read the abstract and RSVP here. Hope you can join!

Catullus Reading His Poems at Lesbia’s House, by Alma-Tadema

Carpe diem may have been Horace’s phrase, but Latin poetry’s most memorably stated argument for seizing (or “plucking”) the day comes from Catullus’ most famous poem, poem 5:

Catullus 5 (ll.1-6)

Vivamus mea Lesbia, atque amemus,
rumoresque senum severiorum
omnes unius aestimemus assis!
soles occidere et redire possunt:
nobis cum semel occidit brevis lux,
nox est perpetua una dormienda.
da mi basia mille, deinde centum,
dein mille altera, dein secunda centum,
deinde usque altera mille, deinde centum.
dein, cum milia multa fecerimus,
conturbabimus illa, ne sciamus,
aut ne quis malus invidere possit,
cum tantum sciat esse basiorum.

My Lesbia, let’s live and love!
And what the crabbed old crows are mouthing
we’ll hold as worth – oh, less than nothing!
Suns in succession set and rise,
but we, when our brief daylight dies,
must sleep one everlasting night.
Give me a thousand kisses, then
a hundred, then another thousand,
another hundred then, and then
a thousand, then a hundred more;
then after many, many thousands,
we’ll jumble the numbers up, lose count,
and foil the jealous fogeys’ jinxes
by muddling the true amount.

The first six lines of this poem, which echo through later poetry, are memorable for a number of reasons: partly because of their sheer exuberance—they’re full of juice and joy, as Father Hopkins might say—which the jaunty meter of phalaecian hendecasyllabics perfectly suits; partly because of what we know about Catullus and the brevity both of the relationship he celebrates here, and of his life, for which his short-lived, intense affair with Lesbia feels like a metaphor; but mostly because of the elision in line 6:

NOX EST PER petuUUna DORmiENda

Something about the way those ‘oo’ sounds run together in ‘one perpetual’ night suggests the dark continuum or vacuum in which the individual self (una) is swallowed up and dissolved in the undifferentiated perpetual. This is one of the single most memorable lines of Latin poetry and that elision is a big part of why.

The second half of the poem is quite a bit less catchy than the first, perhaps because its content is less universal. The idea of account books being muddled or jumbled up (like shaking an abacus) so that no jealous busybodies can find out the exact number of kisses, which they could then use to “jinx” the happy couple with the evil eye, is far from self-evident in the Anglophone world. It’s no wonder that Thomas Campion omitted it entirely from this adaptation of poem 5, where Catullus’ nox pepetuuna becomes the “ever-during night” of Campion’s refrain:

My Sweetest Lesbia
By Thomas Campion

My sweetest Lesbia, let us live and love,
And though the sager sort our deeds reprove,
Let us not weigh them. Heaven’s great lamps do dive
Into their west, and straight again revive,
But soon as once set is our little light,
Then must we sleep one ever-during night.

If all would lead their lives in love like me,
Then bloody swords and armor should not be;
No drum nor trumpet peaceful sleeps should move,
Unless alarm came from the camp of love.
But fools do live, and waste their little light,
And seek with pain their ever-during night.

When timely death my life and fortune ends,
Let not my hearse be vexed with mourning friends,
But let all lovers, rich in triumph, come
And with sweet pastimes grace my happy tomb;
And Lesbia, close up thou my little light,
And crown with love my ever-during night.

To my ear Campion’s courtly pentameter couplets lend his poem a dignified, stately slowness which feels rather removed from the dash and bounce of Catullus’ hendecasyllables—I hear a better analogy in the tetrameters of Marvell or Jonson’s Songs to Celia. Campion’s versification is much more suited to the evocative couplets of Propertius, to whom he turns after the Catullan opening. Instead of money-and-hex metaphors Campion in his second stanza re-works a memorable passage from near the end of Propertius 2.15, in which exulting over a sexual conquest gives way to wistful reflection. The passage runs:

Propertius 2.15 (ll. 41 ff.)

qualem si cuncti cuperent decurrere vitam
et pressi multo membra iacere mero,
non ferrum crudele neque esset bellica navis,
nec nostra Actiacum verteret ossa mare,
nec totiens propriis circum oppugnata triumphis
lassa foret crinis solere Roma suos.
haec certe merito poterunt laudare minores:
laeserunt nullos proelia nostra deos.

If everyone desired a life like mine,
and bedded down beneath the weight of wine,
there’d be no warships, and no swords stained red;
Actium’s waves would not roil with our dead,
and Rome, beset by Romans everywhere,
wouldn’t be worn out tearing at her hair.
One thing the future ought to praise me for:
no gods were outraged by my sort of war.

The fourth line in Campion’s second stanza, “Unless alarm came from the camp of love,” while not based specifically in this elegy, uses the militia amoris (‘warfare of love’) trope common in love elegy and reveals Campion’s thoroughgoing saturation in this poetry. The last stanza, too, resounds with elegiac (and perhaps Horatian) echoes, though it is based less on any specific passage of Propertius than on the several more or less fevered imaginings of the poet’s own death scattered throughout the elegies. This passage from 1.7 (using Goold’s text) is a likely enough candidate:

Propertius 1.7 (ll. 11-14, 23-4)

me laudent doctae solum placuisse puellae,
Pontice, et iniustas saepe tulisse minas;
me legat assidue post haec neglectus amator,
et prosint illi cognita nostra mala.
nec poterunt iuvenes nostro reticere sepulcro
'ardoris nostri magne poeta iaces.'

To be a cultured lady’s one true love,
bearing her unjust threats, is praise enough;
I hope the outcast lover reads me next,
and profits hearing how I, too, was vexed.
Then visiting my tomb young men will cry,
“Great poet of our passions, there you lie!”

One Ovidian (or perhaps Marvellian) touch in Campion’s poem comes in the antepenultimate line, when he imagines triumphant lovers (like the one in Prop. 2.15) who “with sweet pastimes grace my happy tomb.” Ovid was the love elegist least apt to swoon over muggy imaginings of his own death, as Propertius did ten times an hour; it would be more like Ovid — though his phrasing would be less decorous than Campion’s “sweet pastimes” — to imagine lovers using his grave for an assignation. After all, he did write (2.10):

but let me die in Venus’ labile throes,
melting with pleasure as my spirit goes;
and let some eulogist be moved to claim,
‘This fellow’s death and lifestyle were the same.’