Homage To Sextus Propertius 10 - Analysis

A drunken errand that turns into a trial

The poem’s central move is to turn a lover’s late-night wandering into a kind of prosecution, where desire, guilt, and Cynthia’s anger seem to summon a whole mythology against the speaker. He begins with tenderness—Light, light of my eyes—but immediately undercuts it: he is wandering at an exceeding late hour, intoxicated, and without a servant. That combination makes him both vulnerable and suspect, as if the poem is already asking whether this is love or merely appetite stumbling home.

The “minute crowd of small boys” arriving “from opposite” quickly becomes an uncanny tribunal. They carry little torches, arrows, and chains—tools that feel half childish, half divine. The speaker’s comic aside—I am afraid of numerical estimate—sounds like evasiveness under pressure, a mind trying to joke its way out of a threat it can’t quite name.

Naked gods, and the pleasure of punishment

The boys are naked, and one of the lot was given to lust, which lets the scene tip from slapstick into erotic menace. When they announce, That incensed female has consigned him to our pleasure, the speaker is no longer simply lost; he is being delivered, as if Cynthia’s anger has legal force. The noose over my neck makes it literal: love here is a sentence, not a refuge.

Their shouted instructions—Get him plumb in the middle! and Shove along!—sound like a gang hauling a criminal, but also like crude coaching for sex. Even their grievance is theological: He thinks that we are not gods. The poem keeps a productive ambiguity: are these actual deities of erotic retribution, or the speaker’s drunken conscience dressing up street-noise and jealousy as myth?

Morning: the shock of Cynthia’s untouched beauty

The hinge comes with a sudden plain fact: it was morning. The threats and torches give way to a bedroom, and the speaker’s intention becomes almost tenderly ordinary—he wanted to see if she was alone and resting. Yet what he finds knocks him into awe: Cynthia was alone in her bed. I was stupefied. The poem lingers on her beauty, insisting it surpasses even her public finery—No, not when she was tunick’d in purple. The “trial” imagery collapses into reverence.

That reverence is not calm; it has the dazed quality of someone waking from a fever dream: me recently emerged from my visions. His odd, almost pedantic statement—pure form has its value—sounds like a man trying to stabilize himself by turning Cynthia into an aesthetic object, as though calling her “form” could protect him from the messier realities of jealousy and sex.

Cynthia speaks: accusation without evidence

Cynthia’s voice snaps the speaker out of his worship. Her opening jab—You are a very early inspector of mistresses—casts him as suspicious, nosy, and hypocritical. She turns the question back on him: Do you think I have adopted your habits? The poem makes a point of evidence: There were upon the bed no signs, no voluptuous encounter, no second incumbent. The speaker gets what he wanted—proof of her fidelity—yet the scene does not resolve; it tightens.

Cynthia’s denial keeps escalating into the supernatural: No incubus has crushed his body against me, even if spirits are celebrated for adultery. This is the poem’s key contradiction: she denies adultery by invoking a more lurid version of it. The speaker’s “visions” return in her language, suggesting that in this relationship, suspicion is contagious; even innocence must borrow the imagery of corruption to defend itself.

The aftertaste: love as sleeplessness

The closing line—Since that day I have had no pleasant nights—lands like a verdict. Nothing “happened,” and yet everything has: the speaker’s desire has turned into insomnia, as if the real punishment is not the noose or the chains, but the mind’s inability to rest. The poem leaves him caught between Cynthia as pure form and Cynthia as incensed female, with no stable way to love her that doesn’t also feel like being dragged through the streets by gods disguised as boys.

A sharper question the poem won’t let go of

If Cynthia is truly alone—if there are no signs—why does the speaker end in lifelong bad nights? The poem’s logic suggests an uncomfortable answer: what torments him is not her behavior but his own, the way intoxication, lust, and suspicion keep staging their little pageants until even morning beauty can’t quiet them.