Collection 4: "Pyramus and Thisbe" by Ovid

They had no confidant—and so used signs:
with these each lover read the other’s mind:
when covered, fire acquires still more force.

The wall their houses shared had one thin crack,
which formed when they were built and then was left;
in all these years, no one had seen that cleft;
but lovers will discover every thing:
you were the first to find it, and you made
that cleft a passageway which speech could take.

“O jealous wall, why do you block our path?
Oh wouldn’t it be better if you let
our bodies join each other fully or,
if that is asking for too much, just stretched
your fissure wide enough to let us kiss!
And we are not ungrateful: we admit
our words reach loving ears.”

And having talked
in vain, the lovers still remained apart.

Then, in low whispers—after their laments—
those two devised this plan: they’d circumvent
their guardians’ watchful eyes and, cloaked by night,
in silence, slip out from their homes and reach
a site outside the city.

Then, in low whispers—after their laments—
those two devised this plan: they’d circumvent
their guardians’ watchful eyes and, cloaked by night,
in silence, slip out from their homes and reach
a site outside the city.

Now Thisbe takes
great care, that none detect her as she makes
her way out from the house amid the dark;
her face is veiled; she finds the tomb; she sits
beneath the tree they’d chosen for their tryst.

But now a lioness
just done with killing oxen—blood dripped down
her jaws, her mouth was frothing—comes to slake
her thirst at a cool spring close to the tree.

Thirst appeased,
the lioness is heading for the woods
when she, by chance, spies the abandoned shawl
upon the ground and, with her bloodstained jaws,
tears it to tatters.

His face grew ashen.

He fell,
supine, along the ground.

The blood leaped high;
it spouted like a broken leaden pipe
that, through a slender hole where it is worn,
sends out a long and hissing stream as jets
of water cleave the air.

And as she hesitates,
she sights the writhing body on the ground—
the bloody limbs—and, paler than boxwood,
retreats; she trembles—even as the sea
when light wind stirs its surface.

And may you, mulberry, whose boughs now shade
one wretched body and will soon shade two,
forever bear these darkly colored fruits
as signs of our sad end, that men remember
the death we met together.