I Hate and I Love Read online

now the furor of March skies

  retreats under Zephyrus …

  and Catullus will forsake

  these Phrygian fields

  the sun-drenched farm-lands of Nicaea

  & make for the resorts of Asia Minor,

  the famous cities.

  Now, the trepidation of departure

  now lust of travel,

  feet impatiently urging him to be gone.

  Good friends, good-bye,

  we, met in this distant place,

  far from our Italy

  who by divergent paths

  must find our separate ways home.

  48

  Iuventius,

  were I allowed

  to kiss your eyes

  as sweet as honey

  on & on, three

  thousand kisses

  would not seem

  too much for me,

  as many as

  ripe harvest ears

  of sheaves of corn

  would still not be

  too much of kiss-

  ing you, for me.

  50

  The other day we spent,

  Calvus, at a loose end

  flexing our poetics.

  Delectable twin poets,

  swapping verses, testing

  form & cadence, fishing

  for images in wine

  & wit. I left you late,

  came home still burning with

  your brilliance, your invention.

  Restless, I could not eat,

  nor think of sleep. Under

  my eyelids you appeared

  & talked. I twitched, feverishly,

  looked for morning … at last,

  debilitated, limbs

  awry across the bed

  I made this poem of

  my ardour & for our

  gaiety, Calvus … Don’t

  look peremptory, or

  contemn my apple. Think.

  The Goddess is ill-bred

  exacts her hubris-meed:

  lure not her venom.

  51

  Godlike the man who

  sits at her side, who

  watches and catches

  that laughter

  which (softly) tears me

  to tatters: nothing is

  left of me, each time

  I see her,

  … tongue numbed; arms, legs

  melting, on fire; drum

  drumming in ears; head-

  lights gone black.

  Coda

  Her ease is your sloth, Catullus

  you itch & roll in her ease:

  former kings and cities

  lost in the valley of her arm.

  58

  Lesbia, our Lesbia, the same old Lesbia,

  Caelius, she whom Catullus loved once

  more than himself and more than all his own,

  loiters at the cross-roads

  and in the backstreets

  ready to toss-off the ‘magnanimous’ sons of Rome.

  65

  Although entangled in prolonged grief

  severed from the company of the Muses

  and far from Pieria

  my brain children still-born

  myself among Stygian eddies

  the eddies plucking at the pallid foot

  of a brother

  who lies under Dardanian soil

  stretched by the coastland

  whom none may now hear

  none touch

  shuttered from sight

  whom I treasured more than this life

  and shall –

  in elegies of loss

  plaintive as Procne crying under the shadow of the cypress

  for lost Itylus,

  I send, Hortalus, mixed with misery

  Berenice’s Lock –

  clipped from Callimachus

  for you might think my promise

  had slipped like vague wind through my head

  or was like the apple

  unavowed

  the girl takes from her lover

  thrusts into her soft bodice

  and forgets there …

  till her mother takes her off guard –

  she is startled,

  the love-fruit trundles ponderously across the floor

  and the girl, blushing, stoops gingerly

  to pick it up.

  68

  Borne down by bitter misfortune

  you send me this letter, Manlius,

  blotted with tears,

  it comes like flotsam

  from a spumy sea –

  from the shipwreck of your affairs –

  a cry from the undertow …

  and that you,

  whom Venus deprives

  of soft sleep,

  whom the Greek Muse

  no longer tempts,

  who turn restlessly

  in an empty bed,

  call me ‘my friend’,

  that you look to Catullus

  for love-gifts of Venus

  & of the Holy Muses,

  is a gift in itself,

  but your own tears blind you to mine.

  I am not neglectful of friendship,

  but we two squat in the same coracle,

  we are both swamped by the same stormy waters,

  I have not the gifts of a happy man …

  Often enough,

  when a man’s toga first sat on my shoulders

  I chased love & the Muses,

  in the onset of youth

  the tart mixture of Venus

  seeming sweet,

  but a brother’s death

  drove a young man’s kickshaws

  into limbo –

  I have lost you, my brother

  and your death has ended

  the spring season

  of my happiness,

  our house is buried with you

  & buried the laughter that you taught me.

  There are no thoughts of love nor of poems

  in my head

  since you died.

  Hence, Manlius

  the reproach in your Roman letter

  leaves me unmoved:

  ‘Why loiter in Verona,

  Catullus, where

  for men of our circle

  cold limbs in an empty bed

  are the rule –

  not the exception?’

  Forgive me, my friend

  but the dalliance of love

  that you look for

  has been soured by mourning.

  As for a poem …

  our tastes call for my Greek books,

  and those are at home

  where we both live

  and where our years pile up,

  in Rome …

  I have few copies of anything by me.

  One case only has followed me North.

  There is nothing curmudgeonly here –

  on whom do you think

  I would sooner lavish

  love-gifts of Venus

  & gifts of the Holy Muses

  than you?

  You have turned to a friend

  & the friend’s hands are empty …

  How can I give what I have not got?

  […]

  [Abridged.]

  70

  Lesbia says she’d rather marry me

  than anyone,

  though Jupiter himself came asking

  or so she says,

  but what a woman tells her lover in desire

  should be written out on air & running water.

  72

  There was a time, Lesbia, when

  you confessed only to Catullus in love:

  you would set me above Jupiter himself.

  I loved you then

  not as men love their women

  but as a father his children – his family.

  To-day I know you too well

  and desire burns deeper in me

  and you are more coarse
r />   more frivolous in my thought.

  ‘How,’ you may ask, ‘can this be?’

  Such actions as yours excite

  increased violence of love,

  Lesbia, but with friendless intention.

  73

  Cancel, Catullus, the expectancies of friendship

  cancel the kindnesses deemed to accrue there:

  kindness is barren, friendship breeds nothing,

  only the weight of past deeds growing oppressive

  as Catullus has discovered, bitter & troubled,

  in one he had once accounted a unique friend.

  75

  Reason blinded by sin, Lesbia,

  a mind drowned in its own devotion:

  come clothed in your excellences –

  I cannot think tenderly of you,

  sink to what acts you dare –

  I can never cut this love.

  76

  If evocations of past kindness shed

  ease in the mind of one of rectitude,

  of bond inviolate, who never in abuse of God

  led men intentionally to harm,

  such, as life lasts, must in Catullus shed

  effect of joy from disregarded love.

  For what by man can well in act or word

  be done to others has by me been done

  sunk in the credit of an unregarding heart.

  Why protract this pain? why not resist

  yourself in mind; from this point inclining

  yourself back, breaking this fallen love

  counter to what the gods desire of men?

  Hard suddenly to lose love of long use,

  hard precondition of your sanity

  regained. Possible or not, this last

  conquest is for you to make, Catullus.

  May the pitying gods who bring

  help to the needy at the point of death

  look towards me and, if my life were clean,

  tear this malign pest out from my body

  where, a paralysis, it creeps from limb to limb

  driving all former laughter from the heart.

  I do not now expect – or want – my love returned,

  nor cry to the moon for Lesbia to be chaste:

  only that the gods cure me of this disease

  and, as I once was whole, make me now whole again.

  77

  Whom I have trusted to no end (Rufus)

  other than expense of evil knowledge

  has come to the ambush,

  inflamed viscera,

  raped all that was precious.

  Here was poison in rape of life

  here was disease of love.

  Witness the chaste mouth of a chaste woman

  soiled by loathsome saliva –

  not with impunity:

  your acts shall to succeeding ages

  be by the bent Sibyl broadcast, in accents of infamy.

  79

  They nickname Lesbia’s brother ‘pulcher’,

  naturally

  since she prefers him to Catullus & the Catulli;

  but let him dispose as he will of Catullus

  (& the Catulli)

  when he finds three men of distinction

  willing to greet him in public.

  83

  Lesbia is extraordinarily vindictive

  about me in front of her husband

  who is thereby moved to fatuous laughter –

  a man mulishly insensitive, failing to grasp

  that a mindless silence (about me) spells safety

  while to spit out my name in curses, baring

  her white teeth, means she remembers me, and

  what is more pungent still, is scratching the wound

  ripening herself while she talks.

  84

  ‘Hadvantageous’ breathes Arrius heavily

  when he means ‘advantageous’,

  intending ‘artificial’ he labours ‘hartificial’,

  convinced he is speaking impeccably while

  he blows his ‘h’s about most ‘hartificially’.

  One understands that his mother – his uncle –

  his family, in fact, on the distaff side

  spoke so.

  Fortunately he was posted to Syria

  and our ears grew accustomed to normal speech again,

  unapprehensive for a while of such words

  until suddenly the grotesque news reaches us

  that the Ionian Sea has become

  since the advent of Arrius

  no longer Ionian

  but (inevitably) Hionian.

  85

  I hate and I love. And if you ask me how,

  I do not know: I only feel it, and I’m torn in two.

  86

  We have heard of Quintia’s beauty. To me she is tall, slender

  and of a white ‘beauty’. Such things I freely admit;

  but such things do not constitute beauty.

  In her there is nothing of Venus,

  not a pinch of love spice in her long body.

  While Lesbia, Lesbia is loveliness indeed.

  Herself of particular beauty

  has she not plundered womanhead of all its graces,

  flaunting them as her adornment?

  87

  No woman loved, in truth, Lesbia

  as you by me;

  no love-faith found so true

  as mine in you.

  91

  In this hopeless & wasting love of mine

  I trusted you for one reason, Gellius:

  not because I knew you well

  nor respected your constancy

  nor thought you able (or willing) to rinse out your mind

  but merely because the woman for whom

  this compulsive desire is eating me

  happens to be neither your mother

  nor sister

  nor any other close female relative.

  In spite of our intimacy I did not believe

  you would find here incentive for action.

  – You did,

  in the overwhelming attraction

  pure sin holds for you, Gellius,

  or anything smacking of sin.

  96

  If, Calvus, effects of grief

  affect

  those enigmatic sepulchres

  of former love

  & spent friendships,

  lamented & evoked in our desire,

  reflect, her early death

  will never grieve Quintilia

  half so much

  as your long love must make her gay.

  99

  Purloining while you played in honeyed youth

  a kiss, sweeter than one suspects ambrosia tastes,

  I paid, Iuventius, in full:

  an hour or more

  you racked me with my own self-exculpations

  your loathing left untouched by tears.

  No sooner had I kissed you

  than with every finger

  in every corner of your mouth

  you washed & rubbed

  all contact of my lips

  like the slaver of some syphilitic whore

  away. More:

  you gave me, fallen, to an enemy

  – Amor

  who has not since ceased to rack me in his own usage,

  so that a purloined kiss

  once ambrosial,

  is changed to one more acid than acid hellbane tastes.

  Met with such strong despite of love

  my fallen love

  shall from this day no kisses more purloin.

  101

  Journeying over many seas & through many countries

  I come dear brother to this pitiful leave-taking

  the last gestures by your graveside

  the futility of words over your quiet ashes.

  Life cleft us from each other

  pointlessly depriving brother of brother.

  Accept then, in our parents’ c
ustom

  these offerings, this leave-taking

  echoing for ever, brother, through a brother’s tears.

  – ‘Hail & Farewell’.

  104

  Do you really believe I could blacken my life,

  the woman dearer to me than my two eyes?

  If I could

  I should not be sunk in this way in my love for her –

  who performs a zoo of two-backed beasts,

  daily with Tappo.

  107

  If ever anyone anywhere, Lesbia, is looking

  for what he knows will not happen

  and then unexpectedly it happens –

  the soul is astonished,

  as we are now in each other,

  an event dearer than gold,

  for you have restored yourself, Lesbia, desired

  restored yourself, longed for, unlooked for,

  brought yourself back

  to me. White day in the calendar!

  Who happier than I?

  What more can life offer

  than the longed for unlooked for event when it happens?

  109

  Joy of my life! you tell me this –

  that nothing can possibly break this love of ours for each other.

  God let her mean what she says,

  from a candid heart,

  that our two lives may be linked in their length

  day to day,

  each to each,

  in a bond of sacred fidelity.

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