Come, My Celia

• Come, my Celia, let us prove
• While we may, the sports of love;
• Time will not be ours forever;
• He at length our good will sever.
• Spend not then his gifts in vain.
• Suns that set may rise again;
• But if once we lose this light,
• ’Tis with us perpetual night.
• Why should we defer our joys?
• Fame and rumor are but toys.
• Cannot we delude the eyes
• Of a few poor household spies,
• Or his easier ears beguile,
• So removed by our wile?
• ’Tis no sin love’s fruit to steal;
• But the sweet theft to reveal.
• To be taken, to be seen,
• These have crimes accounted been.

This poem is a loose adaptation by the great British poet Ben Jonson (1572–1637) of one of the most famous poems of the great Latin poet Catullus (c. 84–54 BCE ). Jonson, who spent a few years in prison for the murder of a fellow actor in a duel, eventually became the leading figure of the British Cavalier poets. “Come, My Celia” was written for Jonson’s play Volpone, one of his greatest comedies and one that is often considered his masterpiece, a play first produced in 1605 and then printed in 1607. The context is that Volpone is attempting to seduce Celia, the virtuous wife of Corvino, whose “easier ears” he wishes them to beguile. The poem from which it is adapted is one of many poems by the Roman poet Catullus to his mistress Clodia Metelli, the wife of proconsul Quintus Caecilius Metellus Celer. The love poetry of Catullus, passionate, irreverent, and curiously modern in tone, remains much read throughout the world.