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verum ubi vementi magis est commota metu mens
consentire animam totam per membra videmus
sudoresque ita palloremque exsistere toto
corpore et infringi linguam voemque aboriri,
caligare oculos, sonere auris, succidere artus,
denique concidere ex animi terrore videmus
saepe homines |
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But when the intelligence is moved by more vehement fear, we see the whole spirit throughout the frame share in the feeling; sweatings and pallor hence arise over the whole body, the speech falters, the voice dies away, blackness comes before the eyes, a sounding is in the ears, the limbs give way beneath; in a word we often see men fall to the ground for mental terror. |
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But there is no way of knowing a priori whether the closure of the third stanza in 51 is false closure40 or reinforcement of the real end of the poem. The problem is compounded by the loss of the last stanza(s) in Sappho, and critics have naturally taken different views as to the relation of what Sappho may or may not have said in them to the problem stanza of Catullus 51. The tone of the last stanza has been interpreted very differently by different critics, as humorous and as serious: but it has often been felt to 'spoil' the poem, particularly by those who wish to see this as Catullus' expression of love at first sight, his overture to Lesbia and the poem that explains her name, a declaration of love later powerfully reversed in poem 11, the other poem in the corpus in sapphics. |
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One answer to this question of the tone of the last stanza is that it is indeterminate, because the tone of lovers discourse always is. There is in principle no answer to the question of whether a lover is serious. Naturally my own reading of Catullus 51 is in terms of Romantic Irony: the recall to reality in the last stanza enables us to take the declaration of love 'seriously'. This is bound up, however, with the status of the poem as a translation. The cause of Catullus' affliction is idleness, otium: having too much time on one's hands, not attending to negotium, business. There has been much discussion of what otium here means, and it is clearly a word to which both context and intertext give great complexity. But I would suggest that this is not only the otium produced by love and productive of it, the otium which leaves Catullus with a mind too free of normal cares to avoid brooding on his passion; it is also the otium in which he has produced this translation of Sappho. As Charles Segal41 and others have pointed out, this aspect of otium is highlighted by the conjunction with poem 50 in the extant collection. There Catullus and Calvus had been playing around writing verses at leisure, otiosi: and a translation of Sappho is exactly the sort of |
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40 Compare the false closure of poem 8, discussed in Fowler (1989) 98101. |
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41 Segal (1970). |
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