Super hot. Ovid wrote of love and Metamorphoses, as well as the lament of famous heroines of history, written in couplets as letters to their men. He was famous and popular and somehow pissed off the emperor Augustus enough to get himself banished to a dump on the Black Sea for what he described as a “poem and a mistake.” Could the prim Augustus have not dug his love poems? Or was he too close with Augustus’s granddaughter Julia, whom he also had exiled and whose husband he had had waxed? We will never know for sure. Ovid wrote plays and books and is held with Virgil, another of Augustus’s favorites, and Horace as the greatest of the Latin poets. He knew from longing, as he spent years in exile writing poems addressed to the wife he would never see and the emperor who would not bend. This poem is a straight-up poem of desire, with jokes. By way of explanation, a wen is a boil or mark. Take this one to the pasture and lie down with it and a bowl of grapes. Jove is Jupiter is Zeus, the chief god. We all want more days like this.
In summer’s heat and mid-time of the day,
To rest my limbs upon a bed I lay,
One window shut, the other open stood,
Which gave such light as twinkles in a wood
Like twilight glimpse at setting of the sun,
Or night being past and yet not day begun.
Such light to shamefaced maidens must be shown,
Where they may sport, and seem to be unknown.
Then came Corinna in a long, loose gown,
Her white neck hid with tresses hanging down,
Resembling fair Semiramis going to bed,
Or Lais of a thousand wooers sped.
I snatched her gown, being thin the harm was small,
Yet strived she to be covered therewithal,
And, striving thus as one that would be chaste,
Betrayed herself, and yielded at the last.
Stark naked as she stood before mine eye,
Not one wen in her body could I spy.
What arms and shoulders did I touch and see?
How apt her breasts were to be pressed by me?
How smooth a belly under her waist saw I?
How large a leg, and what a lusty thigh?
To leave the rest, all liked me passing well;
I clinged her naked body, down she fell.
Judge you the rest. Being tired, she bade me kiss.
Jove send me more such afternoons as this.
