Both of these passages are about ephemeral amounts of time between two lovers. In ‘Say Goodbye,’ the time period is a single evening that ends the next day, when the woman “go[es] back to [her] man” and the two lovers are just friends as they were before the evening began whereas in Catallus’s poem, once “the brief day ends”, there will be an endless night, meaning death. So, Catallus’s poem is much more metaphorical: the “brief day” being the longevity of the lovers’ relationship up until death.
I chose these two passages because the contrast between a goodbye after an evening affair and death as a goodbye that ends a relationship is very interesting. In both cases a romantic love is ending abruptly and in both cases the framework of day turning to night or vice versa is used, yet despite these similarities, the magnitude of the goodbye is vastly different.
For Dave Matthews, the goodbye is one that signifies how the two lovers relate to one another: as lovers in the evening versus as friends the next day. But for Catallus, the goodbye is a goodbye to life itself, though he frames it as a goodbye between lovers, showing just how important the love between them is to the narrator- important enough to diminish the fact that the lovers are dying and emphasize instead that they are leaving each other
Suns can set and rise again;
for us, once the brief day ends,
we must sleep one endless night.
Give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred,