As scholar and poet John Swinnerton Phillimore has noted, "The charm of this poem, blurred as it is by a corrupt manuscript tradition, has made it one of the most famous in Catullus' book.
In the original manuscripts, these thirteen lines were combined with Catullus 3, which describes the death of Lesbia's sparrow, but the two poems were separated by scholars in the 16th century.
Passer,[5] dēliciae meae puellae,[6] quīcum lūdere, quem in sinū tenēre,[7] cui prīmum digitum dare appetentī et ācrīs solet incitāre morsūs, cum dēsīderiō meō nitentī[8] cārum nesciō̆ quid lubet iocārī, et sōlāciolum suī dolōris,[9] crēdō, ut tum gravis acquiēscat ardor:[10] tēcum[11] lūdere sīcut ipsa possem et trīstīs animī levāre cūrās!
[citation needed] tam grātum est mihi quam ferunt puellae, pernīcī aureolum fuisse mālum, quod zōnam soluit diū ligātam.
The repeated "eee" sounds (corresponding to the letter "i" in Latin) evoke the songbird's peeping (pipiabat in Catullus 3), e.g., (quicum ... in sinu ... cui primum ... appetenti ... acris ... nitenti ...
[14] From the earliest days after the re-discovery of Catullus' poems, some scholars have suggested that the bird was a phallic symbol, particularly if sinu in line 2 is translated as "lap" rather than "bosom".
Scholars suggest that missing words (a lacuna), or a variant reading/rearrangement of the received text, would smooth the presently abrupt transition between lines 10 and 11.
Harrison, who believes the 13 lines are unified, has argued that "there seems to be no vital gap in content which short lacuna would supply" and if the missing words are many, then it is impossible to guess what they were and the poem must be accepted as simply broken into fragments.
The disjunction between Catullus 2 and 2b was first noted by Aquiles Estaço (Achilles Statius) in 1566; however, the first printed edition to show a lacuna between poems 2 and 2b (by the editor Karl Lachmann) appeared quite late, in 1829.
By these means little Tommy, for so the bird was called, was become so tame, that it would feed out of the hand of its mistress, would perch upon the finger, and lie contented in her bosom, where it seemed almost sensible of its own happiness.