Catullus and the Death of Love

The title means 'The Sparrow is Dead' in Latin—it's the opening line of Catullus 3, where the Roman poet mourns his lover Lesbia's pet sparrow. Catullus wrote some of the most passionate love poems in Western literature about Lesbia (probably Clodia Metelli, a notorious aristocrat), and the dead sparrow poem is both genuine grief and sexual innuendo. Millay is collapsing 2,000 years: Lesbia and her sparrow are both dead now, dust in the same darkness.

The poem moves from Catullus's dead sparrow to everyone's death to this particular dead relationship. Each stanza zooms in: first all lovely things die, then all lovers die, then this specific love dies. The structure mirrors the logic—if death devours everything, why pretend this relationship was special?

Millay published this in 1920, during her Greenwich Village years when she was famous for her affairs and her refusal to pretend love was eternal. The poem's argument is almost cruel: since we're all going to die anyway, why lie about whether this was 'real love'? The love is dead, so call it dead. The classical reference gives her permission to be ruthless—if Catullus and Lesbia are forgotten, why should we memorialize this breakup?

Annotation as Burial

The word annotation does strange work here. An annotation is a marginal note, a scholarly footnote—something minor explaining something major. The 'petulant hand' that once touched her, once mattered, is now just a footnote to history. It's a devastating image: your lover becomes a piece of textual apparatus.

Notice the poem's own form: three quatrains, tidy and contained, like annotations on the Catullus poem. Millay is annotating ancient love poetry with modern cynicism. The meter is mostly iambic trimeter (three beats per line), quick and epigrammatic—the rhythm of epitaphs and epigrams, not love songs.

The final stanza's logic is pure Millay: 'Need we say it was not love, / Now that love is perished.' She's not denying it was love—she's saying the question doesn't matter anymore. Dead love and fake love look the same from the grave. It's the emotional equivalent of her famous line 'I shall forget you presently, my dear'—refusal to sanctify what's over.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Passer Mortuus Est

Death devours all lovely things.

Lesbia with her sparrow

Direct reference to Catullus's poems about Lesbia and her pet sparrow—some of the most famous love poems in Latin literature. The sparrow dies in Catullus 3.

Lesbia with her sparrow—

Shares the darkness. Presently

Every bed is narrow.

Every bed is narrow

A coffin. The bed of love becomes the bed of death—everyone ends up alone in a grave, no matter how many lovers they had.

Unremembered as old rain,

sheer libation

A libation is wine poured for the dead in ancient ritual. 'Sheer' means both transparent and absolute—the offering evaporates, forgotten like old rain.

Dries the sheer libation,

And the little, petulant hand

petulant hand

The lover's once-living hand, probably gesturing in some irritable moment, is now just a footnote—an 'annotation' in history's margin.

Is an annotation.

After all, my erstwhile dear,

My no longer cherished

The blunt grammar matches the blunt fact: not 'whom I no longer cherish' but a flat label. You're a category now, not a person.

My no longer cherished,

Need we say it was not love,

Now that love is perished.

The CenturyEdna St. Vincent Millay