3/4: preparing a poem

This is the third time I've taught a Catullus course, and for the most part I'm pretty committed to teaching certain Catullus poems rather than other ones. But it's good to mix things up a bit, and tonight I prepared a poem that I've never taught before. I translated it in graduate school (way back when), and I heard a paper about it at a conference a number of years ago. It was fun to come to my own terms with it this evening and decide how it fits into the portrait of Catullus we've built up in our class conversations thus far. (It seems like a sweet poem on the surface, but I think it might be a little mean. We'll see what the students say about it tomorrow.)