The poem encourages lovers to scorn the snide comments of others, and to live only for each other, since life is brief and death brings a night of perpetual sleep.
This poem is written in the Phalaecian hendecasyllabic meter (Latin: hendecasyllabus phalaecius)[1] which has verses of 11 syllables, a common form in Catullus' poetry.
14 soles occidere et redire possunt; 15 nobis, cum semel occidit brevis lux, 16 nox est perpetua una dormienda.
Furthermore, there is also a second chiasmus in these lines: In 1601, the English composer, poet and physician Thomas Campion wrote this rhyming free translation of the first half (to which he added two verses of his own, and music, to create a lute song): My sweetest Lesbia, let us live and love; And though the sager sort our deeds reprove, Let us not weigh them.
Soon thereafter, Sir Walter Raleigh included the following verse, apparently based on Campion's translation, in his The Historie of the World, which he wrote while imprisoned in the Tower of London:[3][4] The Sunne may set and rise But we contrariwise Sleepe after our short light One everlasting night.