Poems

Inside a single poem the subtractive test fails on almost every line. Poem 85 cannot lose a word, and 101 and 5 are as tight. The body is another matter. A dozen invective squibs could go, the Gellius poems, the run on Aurelius and Furius, the jokes on stolen napkins and bad breath, and the Lesbia poems, the brother poems and 64 would need none of them; several are slight occasions that survive because the book does. Whether the arrangement is the poet’s is unsettled, so the sequence cannot be argued as compelled. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is not the shortness of the forms, which is not charged, but that a share of the hundred and thirteen is occasional verse whose removal costs the body little. It clears the cap by four tenths.

Score: 7.9 / 10

What the book brings into the open can be stated: desire and regard can come apart in one person, and a man can see this in himself and not be able to stop. Poem 72 states it as a proposition, that such a wrong forces a lover amare magis, sed bene velle minus, to love more but to wish well less. Poem 76 carries the Roman language of duty, pietas, fides, foedus, out of religion and the forum into a private love, and finds that the language holds and the love does not; he prays to be rid of it as of a disease. Poem 8 splits the self into speaker and addressee. 101 discloses a grief that ritual cannot discharge, and performs the ritual anyway. Held below the top band because the disclosure is of one condition, explored deeply, rather than of a social order.

Score: 8.8 / 10

The height is real and it recurs. Poem 5 sets the kisses against the night: the suns can set and return, and for us, once the brief light has set, there is one perpetual night to be slept. Poem 11 ends a coarse dismissal with the love fallen like the flower at the meadow’s edge, touched by the passing plough. The last line of 101, Ariadne’s lament on the shore in 64, the frenzy and waking of Attis in 63 and the homecoming to Sirmio in 31 all rise. Frequency is the charge. Of a hundred and thirteen poems perhaps fifteen to twenty reach elevation, and much of the rest is wit, abuse and occasion, done at a deliberately low pitch. The summits are high; the plain between them is wide.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Myth is built, not merely evoked, in three places. In 64 the happy marriage of Peleus and Thetis encloses the abandonment of Ariadne by Theseus, and the Fates’ song at the wedding foretells Achilles’ slaughter; the close says the gods no longer visit a corrupted mankind, so that the archetypal frame carries the poem’s argument about broken faith. In 68 the bride Laodamia, whose husband died at Troy, is laid over Lesbia arriving at a borrowed house, and Troy over the brother’s grave. In 63 a devotee’s self-mutilation and waking regret make an archetype of possession particular. Lesbia herself becomes a figure. But in most of the body myth is ornament or absent, and the book is weighed whole: 63, 64 and 68 lift the axis to 8.3, short of the Epochal Gate.

Score: 8.3 / 10

The inheritance was Greek, Sappho, Archilochus, Callimachus and the Hellenistic epigram, and at Rome the weight of Ennian epic and public verse. The departure is to make a Roman citizen’s own love, quarrels, brother and friends the subject of a sequence of poems in Latin, in the first person, under a real if veiled woman’s name, and to set the Sapphic stanza of 51 and the obscene iambics of 16 in the same small book. Poem 51 translates Sappho until its last stanza turns on the translator. The stake was real: poems against Caesar and his officer Mamurra (29, 57, 93) while Caesar was the most powerful man in Rome, and an aesthetic of small finished poems against the grand manner. Held short of the top because much of the departure was shared with the neoteric circle, Calvus and Cinna, whose poems are lost.

Score: 8.8 / 10

The forms carry the knowledge. Poem 85 is one elegiac couplet: the hexameter poses the question, the pentameter answers with ignorance and ends on the passive, physical excrucior, and in any other shape the self-division would be described, not enacted. Poem 8 is in choliambics, iambic lines that limp at the close, for a man resolving to hold out, obdura, whose resolve falters line by line. The galliambics of 63, short syllables crowding at the line’s end, are the rhythm of the Cybele cult’s frenzy. In 64 the frame of the coverlet lets an abandoned marriage sit inside a celebrated one, which is the poem’s argument. The hendecasyllable gives the polymetrics the speed of talk. Held below 9.0 because in the epigrams the couplet is often a neutral container for a joke.

Score: 8.8 / 10

The evidence is two thousand years of return, most of it since the fourteenth century, without exhaustion. Questions remain open and fertile: whether the book’s order is the poet’s and what the order means; who Lesbia was, since Apuleius names her Clodia and which Clodia is still argued; whether the sparrow of 2 and 3 is only a sparrow; whether 68 is one poem or two, and what its nested similes do; how the personal poems and the Alexandrian long poems speak to each other; what the obscenity is for, and how the claim of 16, that the poet must be chaste but his verses need not be, complicates every first person in the book. The short poems keep yielding read aloud and in translation, where every generation finds 5, 85 and 101 untranslated. Held below 9.0 because the occasional poems, once their occasion is reconstructed, give little more.

Score: 8.8 / 10

The field is Latin poetry of the first century BC, with Greek lyric and Alexandrian poetry as its inheritance. The intrinsic force: the book reorganised what Latin poetry could be about and in what voice, and the subjective love poem, the beloved under a pseudonym, the course of a love told in a sequence, and the couplet used for personal feeling, as Latin elegy would use it, begin here for us. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Propertius, Tibullus and Ovid build Roman love elegy on it, and Ovid places him among the dead poets in his elegy for Tibullus; Martial takes him as the model for the epigram; Virgil turns a line of 66 into Aeneas’ words to Dido in the underworld, and Dido owes much to Ariadne in 64; from Pontano and Johannes Secundus through Jonson and Campion to Tennyson, Yeats and Zukofsky, the kiss poem and the lover’s self-address descend from him. Discounted because some of what is credited to him belonged to a circle whose work is lost.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. On form the book is substantially whole, a hundred and thirteen poems in a recognisable order, but it is a text recovered after near-loss: nearly silent for some seven centuries, corrupt in many places, with lacunae in 61, 62, 64 and 68 among others, and the divisions of several poems disputed. That is charged on form at about three tenths off the usual figure for a text of millennia read without break. On presence, it was read and imitated in antiquity, and since the fourteenth century it has been continuously read, edited, taught and translated, in every European language, and set to music in Orff’s Catulli Carmina; the axis gives wide presence at most a tenth, which it receives. Fabric is not separately charged for a text. The figure stands below the oldest epics read without break and above any modern book.

Score: 9.2 / 10

Judged on the Latin. The command of the medium runs across a range of metres no other Latin poet of the age shows in surviving work: the hendecasyllable made to sound like speech, as in the invitation of 13; the Sapphic stanza; choliambics; pure iambics in 4; the galliambic of 63, the one sustained Latin poem in that metre; the hexameter of 64, with its Alexandrian spondaic endings and slow ornament; and the elegiac couplet from the two-line epigram to the long periods of 68. Word order is made expressive: the first line of 101 travels through many peoples and over many seas before it arrives. Diminutives and colloquial idiom are used with exact control. Held below the top because some of the epigrams are rough in a way that reads as haste, not design, and the elegiacs are less fluent than the polymetrics.

Score: 9.1 / 10

The two most distant elements are the obscene threat of 16 and the Alexandrian epyllion of 64, and in large part they obey one law. One code governs the book: the urbane, the witty and the charming, lepidus, venustus, urbanus, against the boorish and the dull; and fides, foedus and pietas as the bonds of love and friendship, whose breach calls down the invective. Poem 64 ends on mankind’s loss of faith, brothers killing brothers and the gods withdrawing; the personal poems are about a broken foedus. That is one law across a wide range, and narrowness is not the reason for the score. The charges are three: the translated Lock of Berenice (66) and the dialogue with a door (67) sit under the law only loosely; the arrangement’s authority is uncertain, so the book’s coherence is partly the reader’s; and the Lesbia poems, scattered across the book, do not form a sequence the order confirms.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Judged as a lyric body, the reach is wide and held by one voice. Consciousness: the divided lover, the self addressed in the second person. Family: the brother’s grave in the Troad (65, 68, 101), and the father’s household at Verona and Sirmio (31). Friendship and its betrayal: Fabullus, Veranius, Calvus, Alfenus (30). The state: Caesar, Pompey, Mamurra, Cicero (49), and the provincial service in Bithynia under Memmius with its disappointments (10, 28, 46). Marriage and its rites (61, 62). The sacred: the hymn to Diana (34) and the cult of Cybele (63). History and the order of the world, in the ages of mankind and the departure of the gods at the end of 64. Literature itself, in the dedication (1), Cinna’s Zmyrna (95) and the bad poets (14, 22, 36). The orders are integrated through one code, not listed; but a lyric book holds them in glimpses, and the figure says so.

Score: 8.0 / 10