See, lady Moon, where my love came from. The moment I saw him I went mad, and my heart was struck through and through, poor me. My looks wasted away. I noticed nothing more of that procession, and I do not know how I got home. A burning fever shook me, and I lay in bed ten days and ten nights.

The most famous line of the poem is χὡς ἴδον, ὡς ἐμάνην: I saw, I went mad. Cholmeley takes it as three things happening one on top of another, the seeing, the madness and the wounded heart, and warns against reading it as "as I saw, so I went mad." Virgil borrowed it: ut vidi, ut perii (Eclogues 8.41). What follows reads like a case history. Her color goes, she cannot remember getting home, a fever shakes her, and she is in bed ten days and ten nights. LSJ gives καπυρός a sense of its own at this line, "drying, parching," of love. Elsewhere the word means dried in the air, like nuts or barley meal, and the Hippocratic book On Head Wounds uses it of brittle bone (19).