While our fates twine together, sate we our eyes with love; For long night comes upon you and a day when no day returns. Let the gods lay chains upon us so that no day shall unbind them. Fool who would set a term to love’s madness, For the sun shall drive with black horses, earth shall bring wheat from barley, The flood shall move toward the fountain Ere love know moderations, The fish shall swim in dry streams. No, now while it may be, let not the fruit of life cease. Dry wreaths drop their petals, their stalks are woven in baskets, To-day we take the great breath of lovers, to-morrow fate shuts us in. Though you give all your kisses you give but a few.” Nor can I shift my pains to other Hers will I be dead, If she confers such nights upon me, long is my life, long in years, If she give me many, God am I for the time. VIII Jove, be merciful to that unfortunate woman Or an ornamental death will be held to your debit, The time is come, the air heaves in torridity, The dry earth pants against the canicular heat, But this heat is not the root of the matter: She did not respect all the gods; Such derelictions have destroyed other young ladies aforetime, And what they swore in the cupboard wind and wave scattered away. Was Venus exacerbated by the existence of a comparable equal? Is the ornamental goddess full of envy? Have you contempted Juno’s Pelasgian temples, Have you denied Pallas good eyes? Or is it my tongue that wrongs you with perpetual ascription of graces? There comes, it seems, and at any rate through perils, (so many) and of a vexed life, The gentler hour of an ultimate day. Io mooed the first years with averted head, And now drinks Nile water like a god, Ino in her young days fled pellmell out of Thebes, Andromeda was offered to a sea-serpent and respectably married to Perseus, Callisto, disguised as a bear, wandered through the Arcadian prairies While a black veil was over her stars, What if your fates are accelerated; your quiet hour put forward, You may find interment pleasing,