ABSTRACT
Published Nineteenth Century, March 1883; then 1885. Written on a visit to Sirmio, June 1880 (Mem. ii 247). It alludes to T.’s brother Charles, who had died in 1879 (cp. Prefatory Poem to My Brother’s Sonnets, p. 625). The beauty of Sirmio is the subject of Catullus’s Poem xxxi, which begins Paene insularum, Sirmio, insularumque / ocelle (T.’s ‘all-but-island’); exclaims o venusta Sirmio (T.’s l. 2); and ends o Lydiae lacus undae: / ridete, quicquid est domi cachinnorum (T.’s l. 8). T. characteristically combines this poem of joy (o quid solutis est beatius curis) with the sadness of Catullus’s Poem ci, an elegy for his dead brother, beginning Multas per gentes et multa per aequora vectus (apt to T.’s travels), and ending atque in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale. The mingling of the two moods resembles Tears, idle tears: ‘… gather to the eyes, / In looking on the happy Autumn-fields’.
