Poetry likes to deceive its readers into thinking they are seeing what the poet’s words are describing. But there aren’t many poets who are better than Virgil at making you confuse what they’re saying with what they’re talking about.

In the sixth book of the Aeneid Virgil describes how the hero Aeneas, guided by two doves sent by his mother Venus, searches in a deep forest for the mysterious golden bough: this, the Sibyl of Cumae has told him, will allow him access to the Underworld, and a meeting with his dead father.

Here is Robert Fitzgerald’s translation:

Then he stood still to see

What signs the doves might give, or where their flight

Might lead him. And they fed, and then flew on,

Each time as far as one who came behind

Could keep in view. Then when they reached the gorge

Of sulphurous Avernus, first borne upward

Through the lucent air, they glided down

To their desired rest, the two-hued tree

Where glitter of gold filtered between green boughs.

Like Mistletoe…

Eventually the doves settle in a tree, and Aeneas can dimly perceive the gleam of the golden branch. The line translated by Fitzgerald as “Where glitter of gold filtered between green boughs” is in Latin

discolor unde auri per ramos aura refulsit

There’s been lots of discussion of this line, because Virgil uses a very strange expression for the gleam of the bough: auri … aura literally means “the breath (or “breeze”) of gold”. Perhaps the strangeness is the point: how better to convey an outlandish metallic tree branch than with a verbal expression that’s hard to grasp?

But there’s something else going on here. In the four words auri per ramos aura, “the glint of gold through the branches,” he has two words of very similar look and sound, auri and aura (“of gold” and “glint”), separated by the branches, per ramos. And what that gives the reader, besides everything else, is the momentary impression that the text they’re reading is the dense forest, through which the golden gleam of the bough shines, and then is hidden by trees, and then shines again.