OF OPINION WITH LYGDAMUS
Tell me the truths which you hear of our constant young lady,
Lygdamus,
And may the bought yoke of a mistress lie with
equitable weight on your shoulders;
For I am swelled up with inane pleasurabilities
and deceived by your reference
To things which you think I would like to believe.
No messenger should come wholly empty,
and a slave should fear plausibilities;
Much conversation is as good as having a home.
Out with it, tell it to me, all of it, from the beginning,
I guzzle with outstretched ears.
Thus? She wept into uncombed hair,
And you saw it,
Vast waters flowed from her eyes?
You, you Lygdamus
Saw her stretched on her bed—
it was no glimpse in a mirror;
No gawds on her snowy hands, no orfevrerie,
Sad garment draped on her slender arms.
Her escritoires lay shut by the bed-feet.
Sadness hung over the house, and the desolated female attendants
Were desolated because she had told them her dreams.
She was veiled in the midst of that place,
Damp wooly handkerchiefs were stuffed into her undryable eyes,
And a querulous noise responded to our solicitous reprobations.
For which things you will get a reward from me, Lygdamus?
To say many things is equal to having a home.
And the other woman “has not enticed me
by her pretty manners,
“She has caught me with herbaceous poison,
she twiddles the spiked wheel of a rhombus,
“She stews puffed frogs, snake’s bones, the moulded feathers of screech owls,
“She binds me with ravvles of shrouds.
“Black spiders spin in her bed!
“Let her lovers snore at her in the morning!
“May the gout cramp up her feet!
“Does he like me to sleep here alone, Lygdamus?
“Will he say nasty things at my funeral?”
And you expect me to believe this
after twelve months of discomfort?
V
1
Now if ever it is time to cleanse Helicon;
to lead Emathian horses afield,
And to name over the census of my chiefs in the Roman camp.
If I have not the faculty, “The bare attempt would be praise-worthy.”
“In things of similar magnitude
the mere will to act is sufficient.”
The primitive ages sang Venus,
the last sings of a tumult,
And I also will sing war when this matter of a girl is exhausted.
I with my beak hauled ashore would proceed in a more stately manner,
My Muse is eager to instruct me in a new gamut, or gambetto,
Up, up my soul, from your lowly cantilation,
put on a timely vigour,
Oh august Pierides! Now for a large-mouthed product.
Thus:
“The Euphrates denies its protection to the Parthian
and apologizes for Crassus,”
And “It is, I think, India which now gives necks to your triumph,”
And so forth, Augustus. “Virgin Arabia shakes in her inmost dwelling.”
If any land shrink into a distant seacoast,
it is a mere postponement of your domination,
And I shall follow the camp, I shall be duly celebrated,
for singing the affairs of your cavalry.
May the fates watch over my day.
2
Yet you ask on what account I write so many love-lyrics
And whence this soft book comes into my mouth.
Neither Calliope nor Apollo sung these things into my ear,
My genius is no more than a girl.
If she with ivory fingers drive a tune through the lyre,
We look at the process
How easy the moving fingers; if hair is mussed on her forehead,
If she goes in a gleam of Cos, in a slither of dyed stuff,
There is a volume in the matter; if her eyelids sink into sleep,
There are new jobs for the author,
And if she plays with me with her shirt off,
We shall construct many Iliads.
And whatever she does or says
We shall spin long yarns out of nothing,
Thus much the fates have allotted me, and if, Maecenas,
I were able to lead heroes into armour, I would not,
Neither would I warble
