How many kisses will suffice,
You ask me, Lesbia,—ask a lover!
Go bid him count the sands;—discover,
Even to a very grain precise,
How many lie in heaps, or hover,
When gusty winds the sand hills stir
About the benzoin-bearing plain,
Between Jove’s Cyrenean fane,
And Battus’ sacred sepulchre.
How many stars, in stillest night,
On loving thefts look down approving,—
So many kisses should requite
Catullus, ah too madly loving.—
Ye curious eyes, be closed in slumber,
That would be spies upon our wooing,
That there be none to note the number,
Nor tongue to babble of our doing.
Gratian.—Read that last again—for “my eyes,” I confess, were not as “curious” as they should have been, and were just closing as you came to the wooing.
Aquilius.—
That there be none to note the number,
Nor tongue to babble of our doing.
Gratian.—Well, rubbing his eyes, I am quite awake now; let us have your version, Master Curate.
Curate.—ad lesbiam.
Dost bid me, my Lesbia,
A number define,
To fill me, and glut me
With kisses of thine?
When equal thy kisses
The atoms of sand,
By spicy Cyrene
On Lybia’s strand,
The sand grains extending
From Ammon’s hot shrine,
To the tomb of old Battus,
That land-mark divine.
Or count me the star-lights
That see from above,
In still night, the thievings
Of mortals in love.
Thus canst thou, my Lesbia,
A number assign,
To glut thy mad lover
With kisses of thine.
A number the prying
To reckon may spare;
And gossips, unlucky,
Give up in despair.
Gratian.—(After a pause, his eyes half closed,)
“Give up in despair.”
Very mu—si—cal—sooth—ing.