Odi et amo

Some poems are short because they have nothing to add. Catullus 85 is short because explanation would be a different, worse poem.

Odi et amo. quare id faciam, fortasse requiris.
nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.

Catullus 85

I hate and I love. Perhaps you ask why I do that. I do not know, but I feel it happening and I am in torment. The first sentence is two verbs and a conjunction. The second pretends to open a reason, then declines to have one. What remains is sensation: it is happening, and it hurts.

The last verb, excrucior, is physical. It belongs with crux, a frame of torture. A later Christian reader can hear the cross in it. That hearing is a real history of the Latin, and it is also an anachronism if you lay it on Catullus as his metaphor. Part of reading is noticing the echo and then putting it back in its century. The poem does not need the later cross in order to hurt.

Two lines, then, and a small lesson in not being helpful too quickly. Literature is allowed to stop when the next sentence would only be a paraphrase.