Francesco Petrarch

40.

BURNING WITH DOUBTFUL STRIFE

From you who hear in this fragment echoes

of all that upon which I once relied…

when I was that other man now being left

so far behind with his vain hopes and dark

sorrow…his hidden tears and twisted discourse.

From any who have also played this role

I might once have asked pardon or even pity.

But I now comprehend, albeit in departure,

just how I became of my own free will

the object of pointed gossip and grow ashamed.

Rave on and the burden remains the same:

first penitence and then full knowledge

that the world we use is only a dream.

Thereby, from thought to thought, burning with doubtful strife…

ever hopeful that my heart might somehow rise above these things…

I wander alongside streams that flow through deserted woodlands

seeking the path that winds above laurel-tangled mountainsides

to that vantage point where sad mists are sometimes swept aside.

Rendered from English translations of Poetic Fragments

in the Vernacular (ca. 1350). Like the numerous early Chinese

poets who specialized in mountain themes during the T’ang dynasty,

Petrarch was the poet during the early decades of the Renaissance

movement in Europe who extolled the spiritual aspects of mountain

scenery and the possibility of finding a place of refuge therein, if need

be, as well as spiritual fulfillment if one was “burning with doubtful strife.”

Those sentiments are still very much alive today in one guise or another.