Strangers Passer-ing In The Night

Ash Wednesday, and instead of penitence my thoughts turn to the passer poems (2 and 3) of Catullus. Since I was assigned poem 16 for St Valentine's day, I must wonder if the class is not meant as some sort of cosmic counterpoint. Maybe it's just part of the Chairman's plan (Philip K. Dick is always a good source of metaphors for the action of the Powers that be).

What can we make of poems 2 and 3? The first is a mock hymn, the second mock dirge, both of which follow upon the heels of poem 1. If poem 1 is a dedicatory epigram which provides the name of the dedicatee, the genre, and a devout desire for the work to last, then poem 2 is an invocation to the mortal goddess of the work. If poem 2 announces Catullus' infatuation with Lesbia, poem 3 describes its irrevocable end. These poems are as programmatic as poem 1 by providing the plot, such as it is, of a work characterized by variatio.

The passer, whose msgical companions pull the chariot of Aphrodite, appears only in these two poems because he has encompassed the entire book by being the book itself. The passer also represents the amores in the sense of physical poetry. That which Lesbia holds in her lap, to which she offers a finger, that which is a beloved comfort to her is the material on which Catullus' poetry is written. If we subscribe to this interpretation, the non-passerine lines 11-13 are not an aberration of overzealous annexation, but rather an appropriate comparison between the passer of Lesbia and the golden apple of Atalanta, both of which were instruments of unbinding girdles. The passer in poem 3 encompasses both the death of the poet as passer and the death of the poetry itself as evidence of a still-living affair. The terms with which the poet eulogizes the passer are actions characteristic of the lover (although the comment about being closer than family acquires ambivalence if Lesbia and Clodia are the same). The imprecation against Hades can be both metapohorical and literal: both the death of a pet bird and a love affair are things which cannot be undone.