Terence, this is stupid stuff Suffering Quotes

Terence's buddy is so annoyed with all his sad mopey poems that he complains they cause him physical pain. It's just a joke, but it ties into all kinds of imagery that links life and poetry and drinking to physical suffering. This poem is really keyed into the human body—what we put into it, how it feels, when it hurts, when it doesn't, etc. It helps to ground the whole poem, to keep it from floating away into some fancy world of abstract ideas.

It's a bummer when your stuff gets wet. That's an experience we've all had. The fact that Terence brings it up here is a sign of his genius for putting things in simple, comprehensible terms. He doesn't give us a long philosophical discussion of the loss of happiness. He just points out that, because he got drunk, his things got wet. We fill in the rest with our imaginations—how uncomfortable he must have been, how he got dry, etc.

In this line Terence compares writing his poems to hard, physically painful work. It's like squeezing juice out of a plant that cuts his hands. Even the land is "weary" and suffers along with him. It's all part of the deal. Life stinks, then you die. Okay, maybe it's not quite that bad, but Terence wants to remind us, over and over again, that there's plenty of sadness and suffering in life, and that's what we need to prepare ourselves for.

Here Terence gives us a really vivid (almost disgusting) feel for how suffering begets more suffering. Mithridates' scheming guests shake and turn white. In trying to make him suffer, they are the ones who wind up suffering. This graphic imagery ties into all the other ideas in this poem about how brutal and hard life is. You just can't get away from suffering. Even when you try to point it toward someone else, it boomerangs back to you.