Stolen Delights: Ben Jonson: Kisse me, sweet / Catullus: Carmen VII

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Mosaic from Centocelle, love scene: Roman, 1st c. AD: photo by Alberto Fernandez Fernandez, January 2008 (Collection of Greek and Roman Antiquities, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna) 

Kisse me, sweet: the warie lover
Can your favours keepe, and cover,
When the common courting jay
All your bounties will betray.
Kisse again: no creature comes.
Kisse, and score up wealthy summes
On my lips, thus hardly sundred,
While you breath. First give a hundred,
Then a thousand, then another
Hundred, then unto the tother              
Adde a thousand, and so more:
Till you equall with the store,
All the grasse that Rumney yields,
Or the sands in Chelsey fields,
Or the drops in silver Thames,
Or the starres, that gild his streames,
In the silent sommer-nights,
When youths ply their stolne delights.
That the curious may not know
How to tell' hem as they flow,              
And the envious, when they find
What their number is, be pin'd.



Ben Jonson: To the Same [Celia], The Forrest, 6, in Workes (1616)

Clodia Metelli, third daughter of the patrician Appius Claudius Pulcher and Caecilia Metella Balearica; thought to be the original of the Lesbia of the poems of Catullus: image from Promptuarii Iconum Insigniorum, 1553, published by Guillaume Rouille (1518?-1589)

Quaeris, quot mihi basiationes
tuae, Lesbia, sint satis superque.
quam magnus numerus Libyssae harenae
lasarpiciferis iacet Cyrenis
oraclum Iouis inter aestuosi
et Batti ueteris sacrum sepulcrum;
aut quam sidera multa, cum tacet nox,
furtiuos hominum uident amores:
tam te basia multa basiare
uesano satis et super Catullo est,
quae nec pernumerare curiosi
possint nec mala fascinare lingua.

Catullus: Carmina VII: Ad Lesbiam

Grains of sand, Yoff, Dakar, Senegal: photo by R G, 8 March 2009

You ask how many kissings of you, Lesbia, are enough for me and more than enough. As great as is the number of Libyan sand that lies on Silphium-bearing Cyrene, between the oracle of sultry Jove and the sacred tomb of old Battus; or as many as are the stars, when night is silent, that see the stolen loves of men, -- to kiss you with so many kisses, Lesbia, is enough and more than enough for your mad Catullus: kisses, which neither curious eyes shall count up nor an evil tongue bewitch.

Catullus: Carmina VII: English translation by F. W. Cornish in The Poems of Gaius Valerius Catullus, 1913

  Rounded and fine-grained eolian sand sample from the Gobi Desert (near Dalanzadgad in Mongolia). The width of the view is 10 mm: photo by Siim Sepp, 24 October 2011




Mosaic from Villa Romana del Casale, near Piazza Amerina, Sicily: photo by M. Disdero, June 2006