Poem 5 (Let Us Live, My Lesbia) by Catullus
Poem 5, known as "Let Us Live, My Lesbia," is a renowned work by the Roman poet Catullus, celebrated for its exploration of love and the fleeting nature of life. Written early in Catullus's relationship with Lesbia, the poem encourages embracing passionate love in the moment, urging his beloved to dismiss the judgment of older, envious figures. It underscores a carpe diem philosophy, contrasting the ephemeral nature of life with the lasting consequences of societal disapproval. Catullus's vivid imagery of counting kisses—"a thousand kisses, a hundred more"—suggests both innocent affection and deeper themes, such as the fear of witchcraft that could arise from sharing too much with outsiders. Scholars delve into interpretations, linking the poem to Roman beliefs about the power of knowledge and the evil eye. The use of hendecasyllabic verse connects this work to classical literary traditions, influencing Renaissance poets who sought to emulate ancient styles. Overall, "Let Us Live, My Lesbia" resonates with themes of love, mortality, and the tension between private joy and public scrutiny.
Poem 5 (Let Us Live, My Lesbia) by Catullus
Excerpted from an article in Magill’s Survey of World Literature, Revised Edition
First published:Written: First century b.c.e. (collected in The Poems of Catullus: A Bilingual Edition, 2005)
Type of work: Poem
The Work
Ben Jonson and Christopher Marlowe wrote imitations of Poem 5, and Robert Herrick’s “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time” (“Gather ye rosebuds while ye may”), though directly inspired by Horace’s carpe diem (seize the day), is also strongly reminiscent of this work. Evidently written early on in the poet’s relationship with Lesbia, Poem 5 opens by exhorting the beloved to enjoy sensual love in the present and to ignore moral reproaches from envious older people. What is their disapproval compared with the brevity of life?; because, “. . . when our brief light has set,/ night is one long everlasting sleep.”
At first glance the poem seems very similar in spirit to carpe diem, but it goes on to evoke other levels of meaning. The poet demands numberless kisses of Lesbia: “Give me a thousand kisses, a hundred more,/ another thousand, and another hundred . . .” In this breathless enumeration, some scholars have perceived an innocent, delighted, and amorous confusion. Others inferred a more serious intent: Envious witnesses would somehow be able to harm the young couple by knowing the exact number of kisses exchanged; in Roman belief this knowledge could enable a practitioner of witchcraft to curse the lovers with the evil eye. The lovers should prevent this by concealing the account from their detractors, and even from themselves.
To explain the repeated alternation “a thousand” with “a hundred,” one scholar envisions the lovers tallying kisses with a Roman abacus, which had separate columns for pebbles representing tens, hundreds, and thousands. When the accounting is completed, according to this vivid interpretation, the abacus is shaken vigorously, scattering all the pebbles and wiping out the score, to the confusion of those who would give the evil eye. The poem itself makes no mention of an abacus or of counting pebbles (calculi), but the Latin verb used here, conturbabimus, does denote a throwing into disorder.
Poem 5 is written in hendecasyllabic verse (meaning literally, eleven-syllable line), a form favored by Sappho and the Alexandrians and revived during the Renaissance. Among Renaissance poets striving to re-create or surpass the literary forms of classical literature, a vogue arose for using quantitative meter (hendecasyllabic and others from classical Greek and Latin) in stress-based vernacular languages, especially English. As late as the nineteenth century, poets such as Alfred, Lord Tennyson and Algernon Charles Swinburne were attempting this form, with varied success.
Bibliography
Arnold, Bruce, Andrew Aronson, and Gilbert Lawall. Love and Betrayal: A Catullus Reader. Student ed. Lebanon, Ind.: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2000.
Balmer, Josephine. Chasing Catullus: Poems, Translations, and Transgressions. Chester Springs, Pa.: Tarset, 2004.
Burd, Aubrey. Catullus: A Poet in the Rome of Julius Caesar. With a selection of Catullus’s poems translated by Humphrey Clucas. New York: Carroll & Graf, 2004.
Catullus. The Poems of Catullus: A Bilingual Edition. Translated, with commentary, by Peter Green. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.
Fordyce, C. J., ed. Catullus. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.
Garrison, Daniel H. The Student’s Catullus. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989.
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Wray, David. Catullus and the Poetics of Roman Manhood. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.