Carmina
Catullus
Catullus, Gaius Valerius. The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus. Burton, Sir Richard Francis, translator. London, Printed for the Translators, 1894.
- Albeit care that consumes, with dule assiduous grieving,
- Me from the Learnèd Maids (Hortalus!) ever seclude,
- Nor can avail sweet births of the Muses thou to deliver
- Thought o' my mind; (so much floats it on flooding of ills:
- For that the Lethe-wave upsurging of late from abysses,
- Lavèd my brother's foot, paling with pallor of death,
- He whom the Trojan soil, Rhoetean shore underlying,
- Buries for ever and aye, forcibly snatched from our sight.
- ---
- I can address; no more shall I hear thee tell of thy doings,
- Say, shall I never again, brother all liefer than life,
- Sight thee henceforth? But I will surely love thee for ever
- Ever what songs I sing saddened shall be by thy death;
- Such as the Daulian bird 'neath gloom of shadowy frondage
- Warbles, of Itys lost ever bemoaning the lot.)
- Yet amid grief so great to thee, my Hortalus, send I
- These strains sung to a mode borrowed from Battiades;
- Lest shouldest weet of me thy words, to wandering wind-gusts
- Vainly committed, perchance forth of my memory flowed—
- As did that apple sent for a furtive giftie by wooer,