Catullus 65
Hortalus, even if care separates me, having faltered with constant grief, from learned maidens, nor is the mind of my spirit able to reveal the sweet offspring of the Muses, with such evils it itself undulates:
For recently in the Lethean whirlpool a flowing wave
Washed the pale little foot of my brother
Whom having been snatched away from our
Eyes the Trojan earth crushed under the Rhoetean shore
Never hereafter will I behold you, brother, more delightful than life?
But surely I will always love you,
Always because of your death, I will sing sorrowful songs,
Such (songs) as the Daulian one sings under the dense shadows of branches,
Lamenting the fates of destroyed Itylus.-
But nonetheless in such sorrows, Hortalus, I send
These translated songs of Battiades to you
In order that you might not think that your words entrusted in vain to roaming,
Winds have flowed out by chance from my mind,
Just as an apple sent as the secret gift of a betrothed husband
Runs forward from the pure lap of the maiden,
Which placed under the soft dress of the miserable (girl) having forgotten,
Whiles she leaps forward to the arrival of her mother, is shaken out,
And that thing is driven headlong in a sloping fall,
For this sad one a guilty blush spreads on her face.