Gallus is dying of love, and the whole countryside knows it. These lines follow Virgil's tenth Eclogue, in which the Roman poet Gallus is abandoned by his beloved Lycoris and wastes away among shepherds, goats and mountains. The text comes down in pieces. Editorial notes interrupt it: "Two lines missing," "Several lines missing." Even the title, "The Same," reads like a pointer back to something that came before. What survives is a lament, a chorus of weeping landscapes, and one blunt verdict from the god Pan: you cannot cry love out of existence.
The opening sets up an unusual bargain. The singer asks the spring Arethusa for inspiration, then adds a sharp little question: "Who denies verse to Gallus?" The request has a condition attached, that the water should flow "Unmingled with the bitter Dorian dew." Sweet water is to stay apart from bitter, and the image quietly sets the tone. Gallus's grief is exactly this kind of bitterness, and the song will try to keep its sweetness anyway. The "green and purple gleam / Of Syracusan waters" gives the first and richest burst of colour, and the sentence glides over a line break ("So, when thou / Glidest") as though the syntax were itself a stream.
The sound is carefully built. The lines are mostly iambic pentameter, but the rhymes arrive in an interlocking pattern: "thou" and "now," then "dew," "pursue" and "knew," each separated by lines that rhyme elsewhere. Where whole three-line stretches survive, the pattern is tidy. "Dim" and "him" enclose "Maenalus," and "care" and "there" enclose "Alpine snow." Judging by these, the translation was working in a terza rima-like scheme, in which every stanza hands a rhyme on to the next. That suits a poem about being unable to let go. Against this smooth music come abrupt interruptions: "List!", "Begin," and the broken "their echoes answer..."
The imagery is a catalogue of sympathetic nature. "The laurels and the myrtle-copses dim, / The pine-encircled mountain, Maenalus, / The cold crags of Lycaeus weep for him." Even stone weeps, and the word "cold" makes the weeping more startling. Before this, the singer reproaches the Naiads, asking where they were "when unworthy love possessed / Our Gallus," and then piles up Greek place-names (Pindus, Parnassus, Aganippe) as if searching a map for the missing nymphs. The answer is that no one was there, but the landscape feels the loss anyway.
Lycoris appears only through a quoted jab: she follows another man "mid rude camps and Alpine snow" with a "willing step." The cruelty is in the contrast. The pastoral world is soft, with budding leaves, bees and meadows, and she chooses the roughest, coldest place for someone else. Then Sylvan bursts in, "crowned with rustic coronals," shaking "the budding wands / And heavy lilies" as he hurries. The detail is vivid and physical, and the rush of the visit contrasts with Gallus's stillness.
Pan delivers the poem's central idea. "Wilt thou not ever cease? Love cares not." He supports it with three images of appetite: meadows drinking streams, bees feeding on thyme, goats eating spring leaves. "Saturated" is a strikingly physical word here, because each of these creatures eventually has enough. Then the sentence turns on its last clause: "Nor Love with tears." Gallus has been trying to satisfy love by weeping, and Pan tells him that tears are the one drink it never takes. The poem ends on that last word, "tears."
The gaps were not part of any design, but they leave a mark on the reading. A poem about echoes that breaks off mid-sentence ("their echoes answer...") makes the reader do what the woods do: supply the missing sound. What remains is a small, strong case for pastoral grief. Nature can mourn alongside a lover, but it cannot cure him, and the final word comes from a god who sounds almost kind in refusing to pretend otherwise.