The Poetry of Petrarch

The Canzoniere, 1–366

All you who hear in scattered rhymes the sound

of heavy sighs with which I fed my heart

during the time of my first youthful straying

when I was not the man I’ve since become:

for the mixed style in which I speak and weep,

caught between empty hopes and empty sorrow,

from anyone who knows of love firsthand

I hope to find some sympathy—and pardon.

I can see now that I was made the subject

of lots of gossip among lots of people;

inside myself I’m often filled with shame;

shame is the fruit of all my clever ravings;

so are repentance and my knowing clearly

that every worldly pleasure is a dream.

To make a graceful one his sweet vendetta,

redress a thousand slights in one quick swoop,

Love stealthily picked up his bow, much as

a man who schemes a time and place to hurt.

My vital power was buttressed in my heart

and well defended, there and in my eyes,

until the harsh stroke landed, where before

all arrows that had come had glanced away:

that sudden onslaught and its fell success

left my poor power bewildered and in pain.

It had no time for weapons; it grew weak,

it couldn’t help me climb the weary mountain,

it couldn’t whisk me from that scene of slaughter.

It meant to help, would like to now, but can’t.

It was the day the sun himself grew pale

with grieving for his Maker—I was seized

and made no effort to defend myself;

your lovely eyes had held and bound me, Lady.

It didn’t seem a time to be on guard

against Love’s blows, so I went confident

and fearless on my way. My troubles started

amid the universal sense of woe.

Love found me wholly undefended, with

the way from eyes to heart completely open,

eyes that are now the conduit for tears.

He got no glory by it; I was helpless.

And he let you escape with no attack

when you were well defended, fully armed.

He who showed endless providence and art,

the master craftsman of this shining world,

who made the hemispheres, this one and that,

and proved a Jove, more mild than a Mars,

who came here to illuminate the leaves

that had concealed the truth for many years,

took John and Peter from their fishing nets

and gave them portions of his Paradise;

He, for his birth, did not bestow himself

on Rome, but chose Judea, since he cared

among all states to elevate the humblest.

And now he’s given us a sun from one

small village, so that we thank Nature and

the place that gave the world this fairest lady.

When I breathe out my sighs and call your name,

that name that Love has etched upon my heart,

I start it out with something LAUdatory

to get those first sweet accents into sound;

your REgal state, which I encounter next,

doubles my strength for such high enterprise,

but “TAper off!” the ending roars, “her fame

must rest on shoulders better fit than yours.”

Thus LAUd and REverence are quickly taught

whenever someone calls you, you so worthy,

oh so deserving of respect and praise,

unless Apollo feels no morTAl tongue

should ever be presumptuous to speak

of his sweet laurel boughs, forever green.

My mad desire has gone so far astray

pursuing her, who turned away to flee,

and, free and clear of all the snares of Love,

runs easily ahead of my slow pace,

that when I try to call desire back

and take him home by some safe path, he balks,

nor can I round him up or shepherd him

since Love has made him riotous by nature;

and when he takes the bit by force from me,

then I submit to him and to his mastery;

he carries me toward death against my will

and brings me sometimes to the laurel tree

whose bitter fruit, once gathered and consumed,

deepens one’s woes instead of soothing them.

Gorging and sleep and lounging on pillows

have banished every virtue from this world,

and thus our better natures, habit-hobbled,

have let their functions wither and decay;

all heavenly lights by which we see the way

to shape our human lives have been snuffed out;

whoever wants to bring us streams from Helicon

is pointed out and called a prodigy.

Who cares for laurel now? And who loves myrtle?

“Naked and poor, Philosophy, go beg!”

the mob howls now, absorbed by its own greed.

You will have few companions on your way:

It’s therefore all the more important, friend,

you not abandon your great-hearted quest.

Below the foothills where she first put on

the lovely garment of her earthly limbs—

that lady who can often rouse from sleep

the tearful man who sends us to you now—

we passed our lives in tranquil peace and freedom,

as every living thing desires to do;

we had no fears as we went on our way

of stepping into snares that caught us up.

But for the woeful state to which we’re brought

out of our carefree life and to this death,

we have one solitary consolation:

revenge on him who brought us to this end,

for he remains in someone else’s power,

facing his own end, bound with a stronger chain.

When sun, the planet marking off the hours,

returns again to live in Taurus’ house,

vigor spills forth out of his flaming horns

and tricks the whole world out in fresher colors.

And not just things, spread out before our gaze,

the hills and shores, ablaze with their new flowers,

but underground, where daylight never goes,

he makes the depths of earth grow fertile too,

and they produce these fruits and others like them.

The same way she, who is a sun herself,

turns her sweet eyes upon me and stirs up

the thoughts and words and deeds that deal with love:

but any way she rules or governs them,

spring still can never happen in my heart.

Glorious Column, raising up our hope,

and carrying great Latium’s reputation,

who never turned aside from the true path

despite Jove’s anger and wind-driven rain:

we have no palaces, arcades, or theaters;

we have instead a fir, a beech, a pine—

the green grass all around, the neighbor mountain

which we climb up and down, making our poems;

these lift our spirits up from earth to Heaven;

and then the nightingale laments and weeps

from shadows every night so sweetly that

our hearts grow heavy, filled with thoughts of love.

Yet all this good you spoil and make imperfect

because, my lord, you do not come and join us!

I’ve never seen you put aside your veil,

for sun or shadow, Lady,

not since you learned about the great desire

that drives all other feelings from my heart.

When all my loving thoughts were unexpressed

(those thoughts that bring my heart desire for death),

compassion toward me shone upon your face;

but ever since Love made you notice me,

your blond hair has been veiled, your loving gaze

has pulled itself away and turned to others.

What I desired in you has been taken;

that veil controls me now,

and plots my death in weather warm or icy

because it shades the sweet light of your eyes.

If my life can withstand this bitter torment,

surviving tribulation long enough

to see your later years, my lady, dimming,

the light extinguished from your lovely eyes,

your head of fine gold hair transformed to silver,

your garlands laid aside with your green dresses,

your face drained very slowly of that color

which makes me hesitate and then lament,

then Love may also grant me timely courage

to speak at last of my great suffering,

to tell you of its years, its days, its hours;

if time should be adverse to my sweet wishes,

at least it won’t prevent my pain receiving

some small relief from my belated sighs.

When now and then among the other ladies,

Love makes his home within her charming face,

the ways in which each one can’t match her beauty

renew desire, and my passion thrives.

I bless the place, the time, I bless the hour

that raised my eyes so high; and thus I say:

“Soul, you must give both deep and hearty thanks

that for that honor you were first picked out.

“The loving thoughts that she aroused in you

can make you climb up toward the highest good,

and teach you to hate things most men desire;

she’ll fill your mind with a courageous joy,

and lead you thus toward Heaven, a straight path

along which I am moving, high with hope.”

My weary eyes, when I direct you toward

the lovely face of her who’s murdered you,

be careful, please, I beg you:

Love will assail you, and that makes me sigh.

Nothing but Death can stop my thoughts from taking

the loving road that leads them forward to

a harbor and sweet haven where they’ll heal;

but your light, eyes, can be disrupted, lost

to lesser things, for you are made less perfect,

the power that sustains you is too weak.

So go and cry a little now, I say,

before the hours of tears that lie ahead,

take some brief solace here

before you undergo long martyrdom.

At every step I make I turn around

then shove my weary body on ahead,

and take a little comfort from your air

that helps me to plod on, crying “Alas!”

I stop, then, in my tracks, to recollect

the awesome presence that I’ve left behind,

the road ahead so long, my life so short,

and bow my head and burst out into tears.

While I’m lamenting, every now and then,

a doubt arrives to torment me and haunt me:

how can these limbs survive without their spirit?

Love has an answer, though: “Don’t you recall?

This is the privilege reserved for lovers,

released from all their human qualities.”

White-haired and pale, the old man takes his leave

of this sweet place where he has lived his life;

his little family watches in dismay

as their dear father disappears from sight;

and so he drags his ancient flanks along,

through these last days and hours of his life;

his years a burden, and his travel tiring,

goodwill is what he draws on to survive;

he comes to Rome—he must pursue his fancy,

he wants to gaze upon the face of Him

he hopes he’ll see eventually in Heaven.

In just that way, alas, I go and search

in others, Lady, hoping I might find

somehow, somewhere, your much-desired shape.

Bitter tears come raining down my face

accompanied by an anguished wind of sighs,

all times I turn my eyes in your direction

who’ve made me quite alone, lost to the world.

It’s true your smile, mild and full of peace,

retains the power to calm my passion down

and free me from the flames that torture me

while I’m intent and fixed on watching you;

but then my spirits are transformed to ice

because we part and those two fatal stars

direct their movements elsewhere, leaving me.

Unlocked and set at large at last, my soul

pulls up within my heart to try to follow,

and its uprooting brings on wild havoc.

When I am turned around to see the place

where shines my lady’s face, so full of light,

and in my thoughts the light remains and thrives,

burns down and melts, inside me, bit by bit,

I think my heart is going to crack in half,

and fear that I am going to lose my light,

and feel my way, still groping in the dark,

a blind man with no place to go, yet going.

I run away to dodge the blows of death

but not so fast that passion doesn’t come

right at my side, the way it always does;

I go in silence, since my fatal words

would make men weep and what I really want

is solitude in which to shed my tears.

Some animals there are with eyes so strong

they have no fear of sunlight; others, though,

because they can’t exist in such bright light,

don’t venture forth until the dusk arrives;

and others still, imbued with mad desire,

plunge toward the fire to enjoy its gleam,

and come upon a force that burns them up;

alas, it seems that I am of this species.

For I lack strength to gaze straight at the light

this lady radiates, and lack the sense

to shield myself in shadows and late hours;

therefore, despite my weak and tearful eyes,

my destiny leads me to seek and see her,

drawn to the thing that I know will consume me.

Sometimes, ashamed that I have not been rhyming

to praise your beauty, oh, my gentle Lady,

I let my mind go back to your first sight;

no other beauty moved me after that,

but it’s a weight my arms can’t really carry,

roughness my file does not know how to hone;

and when it feels its lack of strength, my wit

freezes in place and will not go on working.

Time and again, right on the verge of speech,

my voice has stayed inside me, holding back:

what sound could ever reach to such a height?

Time and again, when I began to write,

I found my pen and hand and intellect

were all defeated in the first assault.

A thousand times, oh, my sweet warrior,

to make a pact of peace with your fair eyes,

I’ve offered up my heart, but you don’t deign

to glance down from your elevated mind;

if any other lady wants my heart

she lives in weak and much-mistaken hopes;

and since I hate whatever you don’t care for,

I think he never can be mine again.

Now if I drive him off and you won’t take him,

he’ll have no help in his unhappy exile;

he cannot live alone, nor be with others,

so probably his course of life will fail,

and that would be a fault in both of us;

you more, I think, since he loves you the most.

For any animal who dwells on earth,

(except those few who hate to be in sun),

the time for labor is throughout the day;

but then when Heaven kindles all its stars

some go back home, some nest within the forest

and take their rest at least until the dawn.

And I, when lovely day begins to dawn

and scatters shadows from around the earth,

arousing animals in every forest,

can find no truce from sighing with the sun;

and when I see them lighting up, the stars,

I go around and weep and long for day.

When evening comes and drives away the day,

and darkness here is someone else’s dawn,

I gaze in sorrow at the cruel stars

that made my body out of feeling earth,

and curse the day on which I saw the sun

until I seem a man raised in a forest.

There is no more ferocious beast in forest

who wanders there by night or roams by day

than she for whom I weep in shade and sun,

past bedtime, always, staying up till dawn,

for though I’m mortal, something made of earth,

my fixed desire comes down from the stars.

Before I come to join you, you bright stars,

or fall back into Love’s dense trackless forest,

and leave my body crumbling back to earth,

you’d think that she might pity me, one day;

one day would balance years, and by the dawn

requite me for the setting of our sun.

To watch it set along with her, that sun,

no one around to witness us but stars,

and just one night; then let day never dawn,

and let her not become a tree, in forest,

escaping, as she did that fatal day

when Lord Apollo followed her on earth!

I will be under earth first, in dry forest,

and day itself be lit by tiny stars,

before the sun will come to such sweet dawn.

In the sweet season of my early youth

of passion born and growing like green grass

that would become in time my source of pain—

since singing helps to make my pains less bitter

I’ll sing how then I lived at liberty

while Love was merely scorned in my abode.

And then I’ll tell how that offended him

and what ensued that served to make of me

a kind of grim example for the world:

although my harsh undoing

is written elsewhere, by a thousand pens,

and almost every valley has been filled

with echoes of my sighs to prove my pain.

But if my memory doesn’t help me here

the way it usually does, perhaps my torments

will help excuse me, plus one single thought

which causes so much anguish by itself

it makes me turn my back, forget myself,

because it holds my very being fast

and leaves the rest of me an empty shell.

I’ll say that since the day when Love had tried

his first attack, some years had passed, so that

my youthful countenance was altered some

and round my heart the thoughts were frozen fast

to make a surface hard as any diamond

that my firm manner did not serve to weaken;

no tear yet wet my breast, nor broke my sleep,

and what was insubstantial in myself

seemed like a miracle, observed in others.

Alas, what am I? What was I?

The evening crowns the day, the death the life;

that cruel mastermind of whom I speak

seeing his arrows launched against me

had not yet managed to pierce through my clothes

made his alliance with a potent Lady

against whom wit, and force, and cries for mercy

have not availed to help me, then or now;

these two transformed me into what I am,

a living man turned into a green laurel

that sheds no leaves throughout the winter season.

What I became, when my awareness grew

of this great change I’d undergone, was this:

I saw my hairs transforming into leaves,

the leaves I’d hoped to wear as my own crown,

and then the feet on which I stood and ran,

according to the dictates of the spirit,

became two roots beside the churning waters

not of Peneus but a prouder stream,

and my two arms transformed to wooden branches!

It gave me no less fear

that hope, all covered in white feathers then,

lay thunderstruck and dead, beyond recovery,

punished for mounting much too far and high;

I knew not where I could recover him.

And thus it was I went alone, and weeping,

by night and day around the place I lost him,

searching the riverbanks, peering in waters,

and since that time my tongue has sung his loss

when it has had the strength; I sing the song

the swan sings, dying, and I have his color.

I walked along beloved riverbanks

from that time on, and when I wished to speak

I sang in my new voice, beseeching mercy;

but I could never make my amorous woes

resound in such a way, both soft and sweet,

to humble her ferocious heart toward me.

What was it like to hear? The memory burns me.

But even more than I’ve already done

I need to sing that sweet and bitter enemy.

Necessity demands it,

although she’s quite beyond the power of words.

She who can steal a soul with one swift glance

opened my chest and took my heart in hand,

saying, “Don’t speak of this.” I saw her next

in such a different form I didn’t know her

(oh human sense!) and blurted out the truth,

all fearful, when she changed back to herself

and turned me, oh alas, into a stone:

a partly living, deeply frightened, stone.

She spoke, with such an angry countenance,

it made me tremble from within the stone:

“I am perhaps not who you think I am!”

And I said to myself, “If she should free me

from being stone, no life will make me sad;

come back, my lord, and make me weep again.”

I don’t know how I did it, but I moved

my feet and went away, blaming myself,

suspended between death and life all day.

But since my time grows short

my pen cannot keep up with my intention

and I’ll omit much that is in my mind

and speak of just a few more special things

that will be wonders to whoever hears them.

My heart was in the grip of death, nor could

my silence act to free it from her hand

or bring me any other kind of help.

Speaking out loud had been forbidden to me,

so I cried out with paper and with ink,

“I’m not my own. If I die, it’s your loss.”

I thought that this might change me, in her eyes,

from one devoid of mercy to deserving,

and that hope made me bold; sometimes, however,

while true humility may quench disdain,

it can inflame it too; I learned that later

while dressed in darkness for a season long;

for at those prayers my light had been extinguished,

and I, not finding anywhere her shadow

or even any trace of where she’d stepped,

like someone bent on sleep

lay down exhausted on the grass one day.

Complaining of the absence of the light,

I let myself dissolve in angry tears

and let them fall wherever they might land;

no snowbank ever shrank beneath the sun

more quickly than I melted there, becoming

a fountain springing from a beech’s foot;

I kept that up a long and tearful time.

Whoever heard of man becoming fountain?

And yet I speak of an undoubted fact.

The soul’s nobility derives from God—

for no one else can be such source of grace—

and keeps her thus in likeness to her maker;

and therefore she does not refuse to pardon

whoever comes with humble face and heart

to ask for mercy after much offending.

And if she manages, against inclining,

to be importuned long, she mirrors Him—

and does this to make sinning still more feared,

for one is not repenting

if he’s already bound for the next sin.

Because my lady, finally moved to pity,

had turned to gaze on me and could well see

how much my punishment had matched my sin,

she kindly let me change to my first state.

But nothing in this world can be relied on;

for when I pled again, my nerves and bones

were changed to hardest flint, and thus I stayed

transfixed, a voice, still burdened as before,

calling on Death and only her by name.

A wandering doleful spirit, I complained

for many years, in caves both strange and empty,

about my unleashed boldness, I recall,

and came eventually to my release

and got my limbs and human movement back

but maybe just so I’d feel sorrow more.

I let desire draw me on so far

that one day, while I hunted in the woods,

I saw that lovely, cruel, and wild creature

naked at noon and bathing.

No other sight means anything to me

and I so stood and gazed at her, while she

felt shame, and then, to undertake revenge

and camouflage, employed her hand to splash

some water in my face. At this I changed:

I’ll tell the truth, though it may seem a lie;

I felt myself drawn out of my own shape

and I became a stag, alone and wandering

from forest unto forest, with my dogs

pursuing me and baying as I fled.

Oh, song, I never got to be the cloud

of gold that came down in a precious rain

to quench Jove’s fire, or at least in part;

but I have certainly become a flame,

and I have been the bird that soars above

to raise and celebrate her with my praise;

and never would I trade for some new shape

that laurel I was first, in whose sweet shade

all other pleasures vanish in my heart.

If that much-honored branch that shelters us

from Heaven’s anger when the great Jove thunders

had not refused to grant me that green crown

that decorates the writers who make poems,

I might have liked those goddesses of yours

the current world abandons so unjustly;

but that great slight has driven me away from

the goddess who invented olive trees;

the sands of Ethiopia don’t boil

under the fiercest of its noonday suns

more than I do at loss of what I love.

You need to find a fountain that’s more tranquil,

for mine’s bereft of any other moisture

than I provide it with my falling tears.

Love used to cry, and I would cry with him

since I was then so often in his company,

to see your soul by strange and bitter habits

escaping all his knots and cunning snares;

and now your soul has been put right by God

on its true path, and I give heartfelt thanks,

and lift my hands to Heaven, deeply grateful

for mercy that attends to human prayers.

If coming back into the life of love

you’ve found your path disrupted by deep ditches,

and by steep hills that make the going hard,

it’s all to show the hard and thorny path,

the steep and alpine slant of the ascent,

by which you can rise up to worth and goodness.

No ship that ever landed, weather-racked,

storm-drenched from battling waves, its grateful folk

kneeling on land to offer thanks, faith-hued,

could be more glad than I am at this time;

no one set free from prison, who had felt

the rope around his neck, could be more happy

than I to see that fell sword sheathed which had

made war against my lord for such a spell.

All you who praise Sir Love with rhyme and craft,

come celebrate this one who weaves love poems

but strayed awhile from the path we tread;

you know there’s more elation up in Heaven

for rescuing one spirit lost—he’s more

than nine and ninety who are perfect still.

Charlemagne’s inheritor, who wears

his predecessor’s crown upon his brow,

has taken arms by now to break the horns

of Babylon, and those who take her name;

Christ’s Vicar, with his ancient holy burden,

the keys and mantle, looks to his first nest,

and if misfortunes don’t come to delay him,

he’ll see Bologna soon and then great Rome.

Your lamb, remaining meek and noble both,

beats back the savage wolves, as it should be

with those who put asunder lawful loves;

console her, therefore, she still waits for you,

as Rome herself does, weeping for her bridegroom;

and now for Jesus buckle on your sword.

Oh, blessed and lovely soul, which Heaven waits for,

you who go dressed in our humanity

(though not, like others, too much burdened by it):

so that the road ahead may seem less hard,

that road by which we pass on to His realm,

beloved of God, obedient handmaiden,

behold just now the comfort for your ship,

already sailing from this bad, blind world

unto a better port,

the comfort of this sweet and western wind.

This wind will lead you, freed from former bonds,

through shadowed valleys where we all bewail

our woes and woes of others, taking you

by best and straightest course

to that true Orient toward which you’re bound.

It may be that devout and loving prayers,

along with sacred tears that mortals shed,

have had their hearing with the highest Pity;

or maybe their sheer numbers or their force

were never needed for eternal Justice

to keep its course and never swerve aside.

But that good King who governs in his grace

in Heaven turns his eyes now toward the place

where He was crucified;

and in the breast of this new Charles breathes

a vengeful spirit that, too long delayed,

made Europe sigh; and thus He aids his bride,

He whose voice alone

fills Babylon with fear and makes it shake.

All those who dwell between Garonne and Alps,

between the Rhône and Rhine and the salt sea,

flock to the banners of high Christian calling;

and all who ever cared for valor’s meaning

from Pyrenees on to the far horizon

will empty Spain to follow Aragon;

and England, and the islands bathed by ocean

between the Pillars and the starry Bear—

as far as knowledge reaches

of muses and their home on Helicon—

all varied in their languages and dress

and in their arms, all spurred by love

to their high undertaking now. What love,

however worthy or well sanctioned,

of men and women ever

gave rise to such a just and lasting anger?

There is a portion of the world that lies

always in ice and under freezing snow,

too distant from the visits of the sun;

there lives a people, under cloudy days,

who seem to be the enemies of peace

and have no sense of fear concerning death.

If they, now more devout than once they were,

gird on their swords in their Teutonic rage,

you’ll see how much

you need to prize Chaldeans, Arabs, Turks,

all those who put their trust in pagan gods

from here on to that sea with bloody waves:

a people cowardly, undressed, and lazy,

who fight by archery

and thereby trust the wind to guide their wars.

It’s time, therefore, that we withdraw our necks

out of the ancient yoke, and rend the veil

that has been wrapped around our eyes;

display your noble genius, which you get

from Lord Apollo, whose immortal grace

informs your eloquence and shows its power

in both your speech and writing, rightly praised.

If reading of Amphion and great Orpheus

no longer makes you marvel,

you will perhaps be even less impressed

when Italy and all her sons awake

and at the sound of your clear summoning

take up their arms for Jesus; for if she,

this ancient mother Italy, sees true,

no other quarrel of hers

had cause so lovely to compel her service.

To profit from true treasure you have turned

the ancient pages over, and the modern,

soaring toward Heaven, though in earthly body,

and thus you know how from Mars’ own son’s reign

on to the time of Emperor Augustus,

whose brow was three times crowned with laurel green,

Rome gave her blood unstintingly to help

when others had been injured; why not now

be grateful, pious, not

just generous, and set about the task

of righting and avenging cruel wrongs

in company with Mary’s glorious son?

How then can any enemy have hope

to stand against us

if we have Christ among our fighting ranks?

Consider Xerxes and his reckless daring

when with peculiar bridges he outraged

the sea itself, to tread upon our shores,

and all the Persian women dressed in black

to mourn their husbands’ deaths, the while the sea

at Salamis grew red with blood. That omen,

the miserable ruin of those people,

who came, unhappy, from the East, foretells

victory to you and yours;

and so can Marathon and those hot gates

the Lion and his few men held, and more

of which you’ve heard and read. Therefore it’s fit

that you subject both mind and knee to God,

who has reserved

your years in order that you may do good.

My song, you will see Italy, and see

the honored shore concealed from me not just

by mountain, river, sea

but by great Love, who with his noble light

gives me desire where he most inflames me;

nature, I fear, cannot give way to habit.

Go on then, song, with your companions. Love,

who makes us laugh and weep,

does not dwell just beneath the veils of ladies.

Green garments, blood red, black, or purple,

you never dressed a lady

who twists her hair up in a golden braid

as beautiful as is this one, who strips

my will from me, and from the path of freedom

leads me astray so far that I can bear

no lesser yoke of any kind.

And if at times my soul will arm itself

to remonstrate—it judges poorly

when plunged in doubt from all its lamentations—

she’ll call it back and then her very look

will summon it, resistless; from my heart

each frenzy is erased, and each disdain

grows sweeter at the sight of her.

For everything I’ve suffered, all for love,

and will still suffer till she heals

my heart, that one who wounded him, a rebel

to all mercy, who still can make him yearn,

there shall be vengeance; that’s if pride and anger

don’t act to lock humility from showing

that lovely way that leads to her.

The hour and the day I gazed upon

those lights, the lovely black and white

evicted me, and Love took up my place

to form the root of this new painful life,

and she in whom our age admires itself;

to see her without being awed, you’d need

to be made out of lead or wood.

No teardrop, then, that might pour from my eyes

(because those arrows in my side

bathe my poor heart in his first wound’s own blood)

no tear, I say, can lessen my desire;

the punishment is just: heart makes soul sigh

and it is simply right and fully just

that she should help to tend my wounds.

Kind stars that did attend the great event

when one womb had been singled out

and gave its lovely fruit unto this world!

Celestial is what she is, on earth,

and as the laurel keeps its leaf she keeps

her chastity: no wind or lightning storm

can seem to break or bend her.

I know full well that praising her in verse

would test the skill of anyone

who sought, however worthily, to write;

what cell does memory own that truly can

contain the virtue that we see in her,

all beauty in her eyes, sign of her worth,

the sweet key that unlocks my heart?

While the sun turns, Love has no dearer pledge,

Lady, than thou art.

I saw a maiden underneath a laurel,

and white she was, and cold as is the snow

which sunlight hasn’t shone upon for years;

and seeing her most lovely face, voice, hair

pleased me so much that she is in my eyes

wherever I may go, on slope or shore.

My thoughts will only then have come ashore

when green leaves are no longer on the laurel,

or when my heart is stilled, dried-up my eyes,

or fire freezes and there’s burning snow;

there are not, on my head, sufficient hairs

to number days I’d wait, or even years.

But time has wings and thus they flee, the years,

and soon we come, quite soon, to life’s last shore—

we may or we may not have grown white-haired—

and still I’ll seek its shadow, that green laurel,

in fiercest sun or in the coldest snow,

until my last day comes and shuts my eyes.

There never have been such exquisite eyes,

no, not in this our time, nor in past years;

they melt me just the way that sun melts snow,

which makes a weeping river by the shore

around the foot of a hard-hearted laurel

with diamond branches and with golden hair.

I fear that I must change my face and hair

before some pity rises in her eyes,

my idol, fashioned from the living laurel;

unless I’m counting wrong it’s seven years

since I’ve gone sighing here from shore to shore

by day and night, in heat and in the snow.

On fire inside, although my outside’s snow,

alone with all my thoughts and graying hair,

weeping forever, traversing each shore,

hoping that pity might invade the eyes

of someone who may live a thousand years

if that is the true life span of the laurel.

Topaz and gold, in sun, against the snow,

are less than is that hair and those fair eyes,

that lead my years so swiftly to the shore.

This noble soul that starts to move away,

called to the afterlife before her time,

will dwell, if prized the way she should be prized,

in Heaven’s choicest regions, those most blessed;

if she should stay where Venus borders Mars,

the sun itself will surely be bedimmed

since choicest souls will flock to see the sight,

and gather round to gaze on this soul’s beauty;

if she is set below the sun’s fourth sphere,

she’ll steal away the beauty of three planets

as fame and great acclaim accrue to her;

at the fifth circle, she’ll not dwell with Mars

but will soar higher, I feel sure, until

she’ll outshine Jove and every other star!

The closer that I come to the last day

which puts an end to all our human misery,

the more I see that Time runs swift and light,

and that my hopes in him are vain and fatuous.

I tell my thoughts: “Not too much further now

will we go on like this, speaking of love;

the hard and heavy burden that we carry

is melting like fresh snow—and we’ll have peace,

“because at last we’re going to drop the hope

that’s made us rave so long, so angrily,

the laughter and the tears, the fear and sorrow:

“we’ll see it clearly then, we’ll know how much

people run after things that are unstable,

and how their sighs are always sighed in vain.”

The star of love was flaming in the East

already, and that other one which makes

Juno forever jealous, in the North,

wheeling its outspread rays, all bright and lovely;

the frail old woman was awake to spin,

half-dressed and barefoot, waking up the coals,

and lovers felt the stinging of that moment

that they are so much given to lamenting;

when, worn down to the very nub, my hope

came to my heart by unaccustomed means

(for sleep had closed my eyes, tears kept them wet)—

and changed she was, so different from before!—

and seemed to say: “Why are you languishing?

You still can see these eyes for some time yet.”

If fair desire’s still alive, Apollo,

that burned within you once by Thessaly’s waves,

and if through all the years you still have not

forgot those golden tresses that you loved,

among these frosts, these cruel and bitter times,

that last as long as you conceal your face,

redeem the honor of these sacred leaves

where you were trapped, and then I was trapped too;

and by the power of that amorous hope

that once sustained you in your bitter life,

come clear this atmosphere of mist and vapor;

then both of us can see a marvelous thing—

our lady sitting out here on the grass

her arms raised up to give herself some shade.

Alone and pensive, crossing empty fields,

I make my way with slow, reluctant steps,

my eyes alert in case I need to flee

if I see human footprints in the sand.

This is my only way to shield myself,

from people’s knowing glances, since they read

my miserable bearing, all joy spent,

and know the fires that must rage within.

So I believe the mountains and the shores,

rivers and forests too, all know by now

the sort of life I lead, concealed from people;

yet there’s no path so savage or so wild

that Love won’t always come and join me there,

discoursing with me, as I do with him.

If I could hope by death to free myself

from love that makes me sad and casts me down,

by now I would have used these hands of mine

to lay these limbs in earth and shed their weight;

but since I fear that death would be a passage

from one war to another, grief to grief,

I’m at the pass and find it closed to me.

I half remain, alas, and half cross over.

It’s high time that the heartless cord release

the bowstring and its final, fatal arrow,

already wet and red with others’ blood,

and I beg Love for this, and beg that deaf one

who’s painted me with all her colors and

does not remember she should call me to her.

It is so weak, the thread by which it hangs,

this heavy life of mine;

if someone doesn’t aid it,

it will come quickly to its journey’s end;

for ever since the cruel departure that

I took from my sweet love,

one hope alone remains

and this in fact has kept me still alive;

it said: “While you’re deprived

of your beloved’s sight

maintain yourself, sad soul;

how do you know you won’t return again

to better times and days,

or if your solace gone might be regained?”

This hope had me sustained a little while;

it’s ebbing now. I’ve lived in it too long.

Time runs on by, and hours are so swift

to finish up their journey,

I scarce have time to notice

that I run on toward death; one ray of sun

will just have left the East when you already

see it touch the mountains

of the opposite horizon,

coiling across a huge and mighty distance.

The lives of men are short,

heavy their bodies, frail

their mortal human flesh,

so when I find myself cut off again

from her fair face,

the wings of my desire paralyzed,

my strength deserts me and I do not know

if I can live much longer in this state.

Each place I visit makes me sad when I

don’t see those lovely eyes,

soft eyes that took away

the keys of all the thoughts God gave me once;

and just so my harsh exile will hurt more

whether I walk, or sleep,

or sit, I call aloud,

and all that I’ve seen since displeases me.

How many mountains, waters,

how many seas and rivers

hide me from those two lights

that turned my total darkness to a sky

as clear and bright as noon,

so that recalling them destroys me more;

so that my cruel and deeply burdened life

can teach me how much happier I was then.

Alas, if speaking of it stokes the fire,

renews the burning passion

that was born that day

I left behind my better part, my self,

and if neglect can help love fade away

who takes me to the bait

that helps my sorrow grow,

and why not turn my silence into stone?

Certainly glass or crystal

were never more revealing

than is my soul, disconsolate,

displaying through my eyes the savage sweetness

living here in my heart,

my poor eyes always ready with their tears

seeking for her by day and then by night

who is alone the cure of their desire.

Strange pleasure that in human minds is found:

to love whatever thing

that’s new and different and

that will produce the thickest crowd of sighs!

And I am one of those whom weeping pleases;

it seems I strive to make

my eyes produce a family

of tears to match the sorrows in my heart.

Since speaking of her eyes

calls up the passion in me,

and nothing else I do

affects me quite so deeply, I must visit

often where my sorrow

wells up and overflows its boundaries,

and thus my eyes are punished with my heart

because they led me on the road of love.

Those golden tresses which should make the sun

go filled with envy, and

that clear gaze, serene,

from which the burning rays of Love shine hot,

so hot they’re like to bring untimely death,

and words well chosen, rare,

seldom encountered in this world

that gave themselves to me so courteously,

are taken from me, lost;

and I forgive more easily

all wrongs against me but

the one that takes the kind angelic greeting

that roused my heart;

and thus I think I’m never going to hear

a sound that will encourage me

except the sound that’s made by heaving sighs.

And just so I can weep with more delight,

her slender hands, so soft,

her gracious arms, so white,

and her sweet gestures, just a little haughty,

her lovable disdain, her humble pride,

her youthful and delicious breast,

a citadel of lofty thoughts,

hid from me now by wild and mountainous regions,

and I don’t know if I can hope

to see her once before I die

because from hour to hour

my expectation rises and then falls;

it’s never going to see

she whom high Heaven honors, she, the home

where chastity and every virtue dwell,

the place where I have prayed I might dwell too.

Song, if in her sweet place you run into

our lady, I believe

that you believe she will

reach out to touch you with her lovely hand,

the hand I am so far from;

don’t touch that hand, but at her feet, in reverence,

tell her I’ll come as quickly as I can,

either as spirit bodiless, or flesh and blood.

There never was a lake or river, Orso,

nor sea which all the rivers empty into,

nor shade of wall or hill or leafy branch,

nor cloud that spreads above and then rains down,

nor any object else, that blocks out sight,

nor other hindrance I’d complain about,

except the veil that veils two lovely eyes

and seems to say: “Go suffer now, and weep.”

And then that lowered gaze that kills my joys,

whether from pride or from humility,

will be the cause of my untimely death.

And I complain as well of a white hand

that always has been quick to do me harm,

rising against my eyes just like a reef.

I fear their fierce attack, those lovely eyes

where Love and my own death reside together

and I flee them the way a boy flees whipping;

it’s years now since I first leaped up and ran.

There is no place too high, too hard to climb,

to which desire will not take me now,

to shun the one who dissipates my senses

and leaves me, usually, as cold as stone.

Therefore, if I’ve been slow to visit you,

not to be near the one who makes me suffer,

it’s something you can probably forgive.

Indeed, just coming back at all, my friend,

to what I flee, and mastering my fear,

is no small pledge of my fidelity!

If Love and Death don’t manage to cut short

the new cloth which I’ve now begun to weave,

and I can free myself from this birdlime

while I am joining one truth with the other,

perhaps I can make something doubly good

between the modern style and ancient speech,

(I tell you this, of course, with trepidation)

that you will hear it all the way to Rome.

But since I lack, to finish up this project

a number of inestimable threads

that were abundant for my cherished father,

why should you keep your hands closefisted now,

against your custom? Please, open them

and you will be amazed by the results.

Apollo loved a tree in human form;

when it departs and leaves its proper place,

old Vulcan sets to work: he sweats and pants,

his forge producing bitter bolts for Jove,

who throws them down; it snows and then it rains,

without respecting Caesar more than Janus;

earth weeps, the sun stays far away

because he sees that his dear friend is elsewhere.

Now Mars and Saturn, evil stars, grow bolder;

Orion, armed, begins to shatter tackle,

the tillers and the shrouds of seamen break.

Aeolus vents his anger: Neptune, Juno

learn how it hurts us when that lovely face,

the one the angels wish for, isn’t here.

But now that her sweet smile, soft and humble,

no longer hides away its novel beauties,

the ancient blacksmith who’s Sicilian

flexes his arms in vain at his old forge;

for Jove has dropped his weapons from his hands

(tempered in Mongibello though they were);

his sister earth is bit by bit renewing

herself beneath Apollo’s friendly gaze.

And from the shore there comes a western wind

so mariners can sail without precautions, while

it wakes the flowers in the grassy meadows;

the harmful planets flee in all directions

dispersed before that lovely face of hers

on whose account I’ve shed so many tears.

Latona’s son had looked nine times already

from his high balcony, in search of her,

who made him sigh in vain in times gone by

and now moves sighs of like kind from another;

he tired of searching when he couldn’t find

where she was living, near or far, and seemed

like one gone mad with grief who hunts around

to find a much-loved thing that he has lost.

And thus it was that, staying to himself,

he did not see that face return which I

will praise, if I live, on a thousand pages;

it’s true as well, that pity had transformed her:

her brilliant eyes were just then shedding tears—

and thus the air retained its former state.

The man whose hands were ready to turn Thessaly

crimson with civil blood sat down and wept

to mourn his daughter’s husband’s death; he knew

that severed head by its familiar features;

the shepherd too, who broke Goliath’s brow,

wept for the rebel son from his own family,

and losing all control in grief for Saul,

took out his anger on a wild mountain.

But you who never blanch because of pity,

you’re well defended from Love’s deadly bow,

he draws and shoots his arrows all in vain;

you see me torn to death a thousand times

and no tears issue from your lovely eyes;

instead they flash annoyance and disdain.

My enemy, in whom you watch your eyes

gazing on that which Love and Heaven honor,

enamors you with beauties not his own

happy and sweet beyond all mortal limits.

By listening to him, Lady, you have run me

out of the place where I desired to be—

miserable exile!—even if I’m not worthy

to occupy the place where you now dwell.

But had I been nailed firmly in its place,

the mirror would not then have so defined you

and made you harsh, pleased with yourself, and cold.

You’ve heard the tale, remember, of Narcissus?

The vanity you practice has one outcome—

though grass does not deserve a flower so fair.

The gold, the pearls, the flowers red and white

that winter should have withered and made languid,

are thorns that prick, both poisonous and sharp,

I feel along my breast and in my sides.

Therefore my tearful days are clearly numbered,

since sorrows of this size do not grow old;

but most I blame those mirrors, murderous—

they’ve worn you out with gazing at yourself.

My lord they’ve silenced, he who pled my case;

he gave up and grew still because he saw

that your desires ended in yourself;

those mirrors come from waters deep in Hell,

that tinged them with forgetfulness forever,

and they gave birth to my incipient death.

Inside my heart I felt my spirits dying,

those spirits that receive their life from you;

and since all earthly creatures have an instinct

to fight off death whenever it approaches,

I let desire, now reined tight, go loose,

and off it went: the path was all grown over,

the path it wants to travel, night and day,

the one from which I try to pull it back,

and there it brought me, tardy and confused,

into the very sight of your bright eyes,

eyes I avoid in order not to pain them.

I cannot live much longer, since your glance

has much to do with whether I survive;

I’ll die, unless I follow my desire.

If fire never puts a fire out,

nor river can grow dry receiving rain,

but things increase by contact with their ilk,

and even oppositions spur each other;

then you who rule our thinking, oh, great Love,

you who have made me one soul in two bodies,

why do you come in an outmoded shape

and make desire shrink by its own surplus?

Perhaps the way the Nile, thundering down,

makes deaf all those who live too near its noise,

the way the sun blinds those who stare into it,

the way desire, with no sense of limits,

is lost when its objective’s too immense,

flies fast, flies hard, and is by that made slow.

Although I’ve tried to hinder you from lying

and honored your achievement, tongue (you ingrate),

you haven’t won me honor back; so far

it’s mostly been a share of wrath and shame;

the more I call on you to help me out,

entreating mercy, the colder you become,

and if you speak, the words are jumbled up

like someone who is mumbling in his sleep!

You doleful tears, you stay with me all night,

just when I feel the need to be alone,

and then you flee the presence of my peace.

You sighs, who bring me anguish, you as well,

you limp along, so crippled and so slow!

My eyes alone can speak about my heart.

At that time when the sky goes slanting quickly

off to the West, and when our day flies off

to people who are likely waiting for it,

a good old woman maybe finds herself

alone and far from home; she’s tired, but

her steps redouble on her pilgrimage;

and then, although alone

and at her twilight hour,

she may well be consoled

by brief repose and by forgetfulness

of all her labor all along the way.

But I, alas, what pain I have by day

seems to grow greater still

when light eternal takes its leave of us.

And when the sun rotates his flaming wheels

to make way for the night, and there descend

a host of shadows from the highest mountains,

the tiller of the fields collects his tools,

and with some simple tunes he hums or sings,

alleviates the burdens of his mind;

and then he sets his table

with poor and simple food

(the acorns people praise

while studiously still avoiding them).

Let those who can, be merry when they like,

but I have never had a restful hour,

much less a happy one,

for all the changing of the skies and planets.

And when the shepherd sees the gorgeous rays

of that great planet sinking toward its nest

and all the eastern pastures growing dark,

he rises to his feet and leaves the grass

and leaves the springs and beech trees, takes his crook

and gently uses it to move his flock;

then far from other people

he finds a hut or cave

and strews its floor with greens

and stretches out to sleep without a care.

Oh, cruel Love! It’s then you urge me most

to hunt the wild creature who destroys me

her voice, her spoor, her tracks;

but you don’t help me catch her as she flees.

And mariners will shelter in a cove

when sun is gone, they’ll stretch their tired limbs

and rest upon hard wood and under canvas.

But I, though sun may go beneath the waves,

and manage to leave Spain behind his back,

Granada and Morocco and the Pillars,

while men, and women too,

the world and all its creatures,

find rest and calm their ills,

I find I cannot shed my mounting grief:

I mourn because each day extends my losses,

and my desire, nearly ten years old,

just keeps on growing greater,

and I don’t see who’s going to free me from it.

And (since it eases me to speak of this)

I see the oxen coming home at evening

unyoked, returning from the fields they plowed.

My sighs—why aren’t they ever taken from me,

why am I not unyoked at any time?

Why must my eyes be wet both night and day?

Oh, miserable me!

What was I doing when

I fixed my eyes at first

upon her lovely face as if to sculpt it

and place it in imagination where

it could not be removed except by Death,

who takes away all things?

I’m not sure I believe that Death can do it.

Song, if being with me

from morning until evening

has made you of my party,

you won’t go round and show yourself too much;

and you’ll pay little heed to those who praise you;

consider as you move from hill to hill

how fire burns me down

all from this living stone on which I lean.

That light that blinds, even when far away,

had it come any closer to my eyes,

then just the way that Thessaly transformed,

I would have changed my kind and shape completely.

And since I can’t take on her form and look

more than I have so far, face marked with care

(not that it wins me any grace or mercy),

I’d sooner I became the hardest stone,

diamond, perhaps, or maybe lovely marble,

all white with fear, or maybe jasper crystal,

which would enchant the stupid, greedy rabble;

and then I would be free of this harsh yoke

that makes me envy that old man, so tired,

whose shoulders make a shade for all Morocco.

Diana’s form did not delight her lover,

when just by chance he got a look at her

bathing all naked in the cooling waters,

more than the cruel mountain shepherdess

delighted me while rinsing out the veil

that keeps her golden curls from the wind;

she made me then, despite the sun’s hot rays,

shiver a little with the chill of love.

Noble spirit, you who rule those limbs

within which dwell a lord who’s wise and brave

and unappeasable and peregrine:

now that you’ve grasped the honored staff of office

with which you can both chastise Rome and teach

her citizens to seek the one true path,

I speak to you because I don’t see else

a ray of virtue in this darkened world,

or anyone ashamed of doing evil.

What Italy expects or yearns for, I

don’t know; she doesn’t seem to feel her woes;

she’s idle, old, and slow;

will no one wake her, will she sleep forever?

I wish that I could grab her by her hair!

I have no hope that from her slothful sleep

she’ll raise her head, however much men shout,

she’s so oppressed, so sorely burdened now;

but Rome, our chief, perhaps by destiny,

is now entrusted to your arms, and you

can use them to awake her, shake her up.

So thrust your hand into those unkempt locks,

those tangled, ancient tresses, and help raise

this poor and slothful creature from the mud.

I who by day and night bewail her torment

entrust my hopes to you, the greater part,

for if the race of Mars

is ever going to see its ancient worth

it seems to me it’ll do it in your era.

Those ancient walls the world still fears and loves

and trembles at when it remembers times

now past and gone, turning to look at them;

the stones that once enclosed remains of men

who will be well remembered in the future

unless the universe itself dissolves,

and everything is swallowed up in ruin,

all hope, through you, to renovate themselves.

Oh, faithful Brutus, oh, great Scipios,

how pleasing to you must be these events,

if news of them has come to you down there,

how suitably your office has been filled!

How glad Fabricius is,

to have some word of it, so that he says:

“My Rome will once again be beautiful!”

If Heaven cares at all for earthly things,

the souls who are the citizens up there

and who have left their bodies on this earth

all beg you to conclude the civil strife

because of which the people are not safe,

and pilgrims cannot visit holy sites,

sites that were once well tended, but in war

have actually become the dens of thieves,

and only goodness finds the doors barred there

where every sort of evil act is practiced

among the statues and denuded altars

(how sharp the contrast is!),

they even signal their attacks and fights

by using bells hung up to worship God.

The weeping women, the defenseless crowd

of callow youths and old exhausted men

who hate themselves and their protracted lives,

the friars, robed in black or gray or white,

and all the other legions of the sick

and the unfortunate, who call “God! Help!”

and all the poor and destitute, exposing

their sores and wounds, by thousands and by thousands,

enough to bring a Hannibal to tears.

If you look closely at the house of God

that’s all in flames today and you put out

some of those sparks you see,

you’ll pacify those wills that are inflamed

and earn some praises for your works in Heaven.

The bears, the wolves, the lions, eagles, snakes

give frequent trouble to a marble column

and often to themselves do harm as well;

because of them that noble lady weeps

who’s called on you to pull up by the roots

the evil weeds that are not going to flower.

A thousand years and more have passed since she

was first established in that place by those

souls of nobility who’ve long since died.

Ah, new inhabitants, all much too proud,

Lacking in reverence to so great a mother!

Espouse her, father her:

all kinds of help is looked for at your hand;

the greater Father’s bent on other works.

It rarely happens that injurious Fortune

fails to oppose high deeds and undertakings,

for she agrees unwillingly to glory.

Now smoothing out the way for you to come

she makes me overlook her past offenses

because for once she’s acting in support;

because, within the memory of the world,

no mortal man has ever had a path

as clear and open as this is to you

to make yourself the benefit of fame;

for you can raise her up, if I’m correct,

restore this noble monarchy at last.

Such glory for you when

they say: “Some helped her in her youth and strength:

He rescued her from death in her old age.”

Above the rock Tarpeian, Song, you’ll see

a mounted knight whom all Italia honors,

who cares for others more than for himself.

Tell him: “One who has yet to see you close,

who loves you from a distance, through your fame,

says Rome forever will

with eyes of sorrow, brimming with her tears,

beg you for help from all her seven hills.”

Because she bore Love’s ensign in her face

a foreign beauty moved my foolish heart

and made all others seem to me less worthy;

but as I followed her across green grass

I heard a voice say loudly, from far off:

“How many steps you’re wasting in that wood!”

I stood then in the shadow of a beech,

all pensive, and began to gaze around me,

and realized that this path was full of peril;

and just as it struck noon I came back home.

That fire which I thought had spent itself

—the season cold, my age no longer fresh—

now flares back up, with anguish to my soul.

They had not been extinguished, I see now,

those embers: they were simply covered over;

I fear my second error may be worse!

The tears I shed, by thousands and more thousands

run from my eyes, their source within my heart,

and that’s where all the sparks and tinder are:

not just the former fire, something fiercer!

Shouldn’t a fire reasonably be quenched

by all the water that my eyes pour forth?

Love—and I clearly should have sensed this sooner—

wants me distempered by a paradox,

and uses snares of such variety

that when I most believe my heart is free

he most entraps it with that lovely face.

If I do not deceive myself too much,

counting the hours with my blind desire

that still torments my heart, now is the time

mercy and I were promised—and it’s passing.

What shadow is so cruel it withers seed

just when the longed-for fruit is right at hand?

What beast is loose, and roaring in my sheepfold?

What wall is raised between the hand and harvest?

Alas, I do not know. But I do know

that Love has led me into joyous hope

so he could make my life more sorrowful;

and now I recollect what I have read:

no one deserves to be considered happy

until his day of final parting comes.

My good luck is both late and very sluggish;

my hope’s uncertain, passion swells and rises,

so leaving’s painful, waiting’s painful too;

and then they vanish, swift as running tigers.

The snow, oh misery, will be black and warm,

the sea without its waves, Alps full of fish,

the sun will go away and lie down there

where Tigris and Euphrates share a source,

before I find my peace or truce in this,

or Love and Lady change their well-known ways,

who plot, conspire, and are cruel to me;

and if I chance to come to any sweetness,

my taste will not enjoy it, trained to bitter;

that’s how their favors promise to reward me.

Use one of these to rest your cheek, my lord,

made weary by your weeping, it’s my gift;

take care in time to come, protect yourself:

that god you follow leaves you pale and wan;

the second helps to block that left-hand road

where Love’s own couriers ply their cunning trade;

be your same self, August and January,

since time for that long path is running short;

the third will help you mix a drink of herbs

to purge your heart of all its sore afflictions;

the taste is sweet, though sour at the first.

And put me there where pleasures are stored up,

that I need not fear Styx’s ferryman—

if that is not a hope that’s too immodest.

Although another’s fault removes from me

what drew me first to love,

it doesn’t take away my firm desire.

Among the golden tresses hid the noose

by which Love caught and bound me,

and from those lovely eyes came freezing ice

that passed into my heart,

and with the power of such sudden splendor

that just the memory of it

empties my heart of all but that desire.

The lovely sight of that blond hair is gone,

alas, quite taken from me,

the gaze of those two chaste and lovely lights

has fled and left me saddened,

but since by dying well I gain some honor,

neither my suffering nor my death

can make me wish that I were free again.

The noble tree I’ve loved so many years

(times when its lovely branches gave me shelter)

helped my weak wit to flower in its shade

and added that way to my store of troubles.

For when I’d come to feel a total trust,

it turned its very wood from sweet to bitter;

my thoughts began to gather round one subject

and now can only prate of their misfortunes.

What might some lover say, who’d gotten hope

from reading youthful rhymes of mine and then

lost everything he had because of her?

“Then let no poet gather from it, nor

Jove give it favor! Let the sun’s anger

beat down and shrivel all of its green leaves!”

The day, the month, the year, oh, bless them all,

the season and the time, the hour and moment,

the gorgeous countryside, the very spot

where two eyes struck me first and bound me fast;

and bless the first sweet palpitation that

swept over me as I grew one with Love,

and bless the bow that shot, arrows that pierced,

and wounds so deep they went down to my heart.

And bless the flock of words I’ve scattered round

as I pronounced my lady’s name again,

the sighs and all the tears and the desire;

and bless the pages, too, pages where I

have gained some fame for her, with all my thoughts

which are of her alone, excluding others.

Father of Heaven, after days now lost,

after the nights spent raving with desire

that burned incessantly within my heart

when I saw graceful gestures that destroyed me,

be pleased that finally, by your great light,

I may embrace a different way of life,

my bitter adversary now disarmed,

his nets at last all spread for me in vain.

It’s now eleven years, my gracious Lord,

that I’ve been subject to this ruthless yoke

that is most fierce, always, to the submissive:

on my unworthy misery, please have mercy,

and lead my thoughts back to a better place,

remind them: this day you were on the cross.

Casting your eyes upon my strange new pallor

which makes most people cognizant of death,

you felt a twinge of pity, and from that,

spoke to me kindly, keeping me alive.

The fragile life that dwells inside of me

was freely given, gift of your bright eyes

and your soft voice, the accents of an angel;

I recognize my being stems from them,

for they woke up my soul, the selfsame way

you rouse a lazy creature with a stick.

You hold the keys, dear lady, of my heart

there in your hand, a fact that makes me happy,

prepared to launch my boat in any wind,

because what comes from you is my sweet honor.

If you got free by any strange behavior—

your eyes downcast, a bending of your head,

or flight more swift than anybody else’s,

frowning the while at my honest prayers—

if by that means, or any other way,

you could escape and get out of my breast,

where Love goes right on grafting laurel branches,

I’d say disdain on your part would be just;

because no noble plant should have to grow

in arid soil like mine; it’s natural

that you’d desire to live somewhere else:

but since it’s fate and since it seems you can’t

be somewhere else, have care, my dear,

not to despise your present habitation.

Alas, I was not careful at the first,

the day Love came to wound me, he who has

controlled my life and step by step climbed up

to seat himself upon its very summit.

I didn’t understand his file’s power

would work to take away the strength and firmness

that I’d built up in my well-hardened heart,

but that’s just what my excess pride has brought me.

Defense of any kind is too late now,

except to measure how much or how little

Love pays attention to our mortal prayers:

and I don’t pray, since it’s impossible,

that my poor heart might burn less furiously;

I simply pray that she should share the fire!

The burdened air and unrelenting cloud

compressed from without by the rabid winds

must soon transform themselves into a rain;

following that we’ll have crystalline rivers

and instead of lush grass in the valleys

there’ll be nothing to see but frost and ice.

Down in my heart, which is colder than ice,

lie heavy thoughts, the looming kind of cloud

that rises sometimes from these hollow valleys,

closed off all around from the loving winds,

surrounded at times by stagnating rivers,

while there falls from the sky the gentlest rain.

It passes in almost no time, hard rain;

and warmth takes care of the snow and the ice,

which gives a proud appearance to the rivers;

and no sky ever had so thick a cloud

that when it encountered the fury of winds

it didn’t flee from the hills and valleys.

But I am not helped by the flowering valleys;

I weep when it’s clear, I weep in the rain,

and in freezing winds and in warming winds;

on the day that my lady melts her ice

and comes out of her veil, that usual cloud,

the sea will be dry, and the lakes and rivers.

As long as the sea receives the rivers

and beasts still favor the shady valleys,

she’ll have before her lovely eyes a cloud

that makes my eyes give birth to constant rain,

and her breast will be full of that hard ice

that genders in mine such sorrowful winds.

Well may I pardon each one of those winds

for the love of one between two rivers,

who shut me in green, and in the sweet ice,

so that I’ve drawn, in a thousand valleys,

the shade where I’ve been; neither heat nor rain

can alarm me, nor sound of shattered cloud.

But cloud never fled from the driving winds

as on that day, or rivers from the rain,

or ice when the sun opens the valleys.

By the Tyrrhenian Sea, on its left bank,

where waves are shattered, crying in the wind,

I suddenly caught sight of that high branch

of which I have to write on many pages.

And Love, that boiled within my breast just from

the memory of her hair, was urging me

ahead when suddenly I tumbled into

a stream concealed by grass, like some dead body.

Alone between the forest and the hills,

I winced with shame; it doesn’t take much, really,

to act upon a tender heart like mine.

At least I’ve switched from wet eyes to wet feet:

a change of style might prove to be useful

if I can go dry-eyed through gracious April.

The sacred prospect of your city makes

my evil past a matter for complaint,

exclaiming: “Get up, wretch, what’s going on?”

and shows the way that I could mount to Heaven.

Another thought, however, jousts with this one,

and says to me, “Why are you fleeing?

Don’t you recall that this is near the time

we should return and gaze upon our lady?”

I hear his reasoning and turn to ice

like one who suddenly has heard bad news

and felt the shock run down and wring his heart.

The first thought comes again, the second flees.

I don’t know which will win, but I do know

that’s how they fight, and not just this one time.

I know quite well that natural advice

has never been much good against you, Love,

so many little traps and phony promises,

so often the fierce nip of your sharp claw.

But lately, and I marvel at this fact

(I speak of it as one who was involved,

it happened to me on the salty seas

between the rugged Tuscan coast and Elba),

I got free of your hands and took a journey,

a stranger and a pilgrim, incognito,

whirled round by winds, among the waves and skies,

when suddenly your ministers appeared

as if to show me I can’t fight my fate

and it’s no good to hide or run away.

Alas, I don’t know where to put the hope

that now has been betrayed so many times!

For if there are no listeners with pity,

why crowd the heavens with such frequent prayers?

But if it happens I don’t lose the chance

to finish up these songs

before my death comes round,

may it not make my lord displeased to hear

me say one day, among the grass and flowers:

“It’s just and right that I rejoice and sing.”

It stands to reason I should sing sometimes

since I have sighed so often and so long,

and it would take forever to make up

smiles equivalent to all my sorrows.

But if some verse of mine could give delight

to those amazing eyes,

some sweet thing I composed,

oh, then I’d be above all other lovers!

And further blessed when I might say sincerely:

“A lady bids me, so I wish to speak.”

My yearning thoughts, you’ve led me, step by step,

to muse in such an elevated fashion:

but look, my lady has a heart of stone

so hard that I can never penetrate it.

She doesn’t even deign to glance so low

as to take note or heed

our words; Heaven’s opposed,

and I am worn out from opposing it,

so hard and bitter I am well prepared to say:

“I’m ready to be harsh now in my speech.”

What am I saying? And where am I now?

And who deceives me but myself and my

inordinate desire? Scan the skies

from sphere to sphere: no planet makes me weep.

And if a mortal veil obscures my sight

why blame that on the stars

or any lovely thing?

There’s one who lives in me both night and day

and pains me, having weighed me down with pleasure:

“Her presence sweet, her soft and lovely gaze.”

All lovely things that help adorn our world

came forth in goodness from the Maker’s hand:

but I, who cannot see beyond the surface,

am dazzled by the beauty right at hand,

and if I ever manage to return

to the true, first splendor

I cannot keep it fixed

because my eye is weakened by my guilt,

not by the day it saw angelic beauty:

“In the sweet season of my early youth.”

Because our life is brief

and my wit quails at this high enterprise,

I do not have much confidence in either;

but my pain will be known, I hope,

there where I wish it understood, and where

it must be heard, a pain cried out in silence.

Amazing eyes, where Love has made his nest,

I turn to you again: my feeble style,

sluggish in itself, is driven by great joy;

for anyone who speaks of you

acquires noble habits from his subject,

and lifts on wings of love,

leaving ill thoughts behind him as he goes.

Raised by such wings, I’ve come to you to say

things I have carried hidden in my heart.

Not that I do not see

how much my praise does injury to you;

but I cannot resist the great desire

I’ve carried in me since

I saw you first, saw what no thought can match,

let alone speech, my speech or any other’s.

First cause of my sweet bitter state,

I know you are the one who understands me.

When in your burning rays I melt like snow,

your noble scorn, perhaps,

finds my unworthiness to be offensive.

Oh, if my prudent fear did not

temper the burning fire that consumes me

how much I’d welcome death! Under those rays,

I’d rather die than have to live without them.

That I am not undone,

so frail an object in a fire so mighty,

is not perhaps from any worth of mine;

but just a little fear I have

which chills the hot blood raging in my veins

strengthens my heart that it may flame on longer.

Oh hills, oh valleys, rivers, forests, fields,

oh, you who’ve witnessed my unhappy life,

how many times you’ve heard me call for death!

Ah, destiny of sorrow,

staying destroys me, fleeing does not help!

But if a greater fear

did not constrain, some short and speedy means

would find a way to end this bitter anguish,

the fault of someone totally indifferent.

Sorrow, why do you lead me

off of my path, to say what I don’t wish to?

Please let me go where pleasure wants to take me.

Oh, eyes serene beyond

the mortal race, I don’t complain of you,

nor yet of him whose knots have bound me fast.

You can see clearly all the different colors

that Love paints in my face from time to time

and you can guess how he treats me, within,

where day and night he stands

with all the power he’s amassed from you,

you lights both blessed and joyous

except that you can never see yourselves,

though when you turn my way you get some sense

of what you are from seeing my response.

If you could know as we

who gaze at it, the beauty that I speak of,

so goddesslike, incredible, divine,

your measurement of joy

would vanish from your heart; therefore, perhaps

your vigor is protected from your beauty.

Happy the soul who sighs for you, however,

you heavenly lights to which I owe my life

since nothing else affords me earthly joy.

Alas, why am I seldom

rewarded with what never satisfies me?

Why not more often notice

how Love of you is tearing me to pieces,

and why remove so suddenly the good

that helps my soul survive its awful times?

I say that now and then,

thanks to your aid I feel within my soul

a strange new sweetness, unaccustomed,

and one that takes away

all other burdens of depressing thoughts,

trading a thousand thoughts for one alone.

This little bit of life restores my joy,

it’s all I need, and if I could sustain it,

there’d be no state on earth to equal mine.

But such an honor might

make others envious, swell me up with pride;

therefore, alas, it’s needful

to limit laughter with a bout of weeping

and interrupt those flaming thoughts to bring

me to my senses, back to myself again.

The amorous disposition

that dwells within you shows itself to me

and draws all other joys out of my heart;

and that’s when words and deeds

come forth from me and help inspire hope

that, though flesh die, I may become immortal.

When you appear, my grief and anguish flee,

and when you leave, they come right back again;

my memory, however, still infused

with love, can bar the door,

and they can’t penetrate beyond my skin.

Thus if I bear good fruit

of any kind, the seed comes first from you;

I am dry land that you can till and cultivate,

and if some good results, the praise is yours.

Song, you don’t calm me down, but rather

you kindle me to say what steals my self:

be sure then that you’ll not exist alone.

Gentle my lady, I can see

a sweet light in the movement of your eyes

that points the way by which I might reach Heaven;

and, as it always does,

within, where I sit down alone with Love,

your heart is shining almost visibly.

This is the sight that moves me to do good

and guides me forward toward a glorious goal;

this separates me from the vulgar crowd.

No human tongue could hope

to indicate what those two holy lights

can make me feel,

both when the winter scatters frost around

and later, when the year grows young again,

as in the time when I first learned desire.

I think: “If up above,

where the eternal mover of the stars

shows forth his handiwork to us on earth,

there’s something else this fair,

unlock the doors of this my prison here

which bars me from the path to such a life!”

Then I revert to my recurrent war,

with thanks to Nature and my day of birth

which destined me for so much precious good,

and she who raised my heart

by filling it with hope (for up to then

I was a burden to myself,

but since, I have been pleasing even me),

filling my heart with thought so high and gracious,

the heart whose key those lovely eyes possess.

A state so joyous, neither

Love nor turning Fortune ever gave

to gratify their friends in this wide world;

I would not trade them for

one glance from eyes that nourish my repose

the way a tree grows upward from its roots.

Lovely angelic sparks that bless my life,

that kindle and ignite the bliss which burns,

sweetly consuming me: while other lights

will fade and then go out,

yours grows more bright and clear with time; it shines

and then, down in my heart,

such sweetness rains that every other thing

and every other thought is left behind,

and nothing’s there except yourself and Love.

No matter how much sweetness

existed in the hearts of lucky lovers

and managed to be stored up in one place,

it simply won’t compare

to what I feel at those rare times when you

direct toward me the black and white of Love;

and I believe that from my infancy,

my swaddling clothes and crib, this remedy

was sent by Heaven to redress my faults and ills.

Your veil, then, does me wrong,

so does your hand, when either comes between

your eyes and my delight,

and thus by day and night, to ease my breast,

my giant passion spills itself around,

taking its cue from your retiring face.

Because, distressed, I see,

that Nature’s gifts to me aren’t worth a thing,

don’t make me worthy of so dear a glance,

I force myself to be

someone who may be worthy of high hope

and of the noble fire in which I burn.

Then if through toil I can make myself

quick to do good and slow to do the opposite,

disliking all the things the world desires,

perhaps the reputation

could help me to a kind and lenient judgment;

the end of all my weeping,

my sad heart knows, will come from nowhere else,

will come from lovely eyes, trembling at last,

the final goal of every courteous lover.

Song, your sister has gone on ahead;

I feel another coming from your home,

and to that end I’m going to rule more paper.

Since it’s my destiny

that burning passion forces me to speak

just as it always forces me to sigh,

Love, you who rouse me to it,

please be my guide and help me find the path

and harmonize my rhymes with my desire;

but not so much as to untune my heart

with too much sweetness, as I fear it might be

from what I feel where others’ eyes can’t reach;

speech kindles me and spurs me,

nor do I find, as used to be the case,

my wit will quench the fire

that rages in my mind (for which I fear

and tremble); I melt to hear the sound

of my own words, a man of ice in sun.

At first I thought I’d find

through speech some respite for my hot

desire, some truce or armistice;

this hope emboldened me

to discourse of my feelings; now, however,

it leaves me, in my need, and quite dissolves.

But I must still pursue my undertaking,

continuing to sound my notes of love,

so potent is the will that drives me forward;

reason is dead and gone,

who used to hold the reins but couldn’t manage.

Let Love at least instruct me

what I should say, how I might sing so that

if it should strike the ear of my sweet foe,

she might befriend, not me perhaps, but pity.

I say: “While in those days

when men went out pursuing greater honor

their industry betook them many places,

to far-off lands, across

the hills and seas, seeking for honored things,

hoping to pluck the rarest flowers of virtue,

I find that Nature, God, and Fortune

have worked to put all virtues in one place,

those holy lights that give my life its meaning,

which means I need not travel,

passing across this country or that shore,

because I come back always

to lights that are the fountain of my life,

and if I start to gravitate toward death,

it is their sight that brings me back to health.”

As in the tearing winds

the weary helmsman lifts his head at night

to those two lights that always mark the pole;

so in this tempest I endure,

this storm of love, that pair of shining eyes

become my constellation and my comfort.

Alas, but most of what I get I steal

now here, now there, as Love incites me to,

rather than any sort of gracious gift;

the little worth I have

I take from them as my perpetual norm;

since first I saw them I’ve

not gone one step toward good without their help;

I’ve made them stand upon my very summit,

for on my own I have no sense of worth.

I never could imagine,

much less elucidate, the full effects

those soft eyes have upon this heart of mine;

all other life-delights

pale in comparison for me, I know,

and every other beauty comes behind.

A tranquil peace, one free from any pain,

like that which is in Heaven, for eternity,

comes forth from them and from their lovely smile;

if I could see, see steadily,

how Love so sweetly manages their life,

for just one day, up close,

with not one turn of a supernal sphere,

nor be distracted by myself or others,

or even by the blinking of my eyes!

Alas, I go on wanting

that which can’t be, by any means or way,

and I live on desire, well past hope.

If that one knot could be

untied, the one that Love has bound my tongue with

when too much light has overcome my sight,

if it were loosened, I’d be bold to speak

words that might have such a strong effect

that everyone who listened to them wept.

But my deep wounds, by their

intensity, distract my injured heart

and I grow pale and wan,

and my blood hides away, I know not where,

and I am not myself; it seems to me

this is the blow that Love has killed me with.

Song, my pen has surely gotten weary

from all this sweet conversing with you here,

although my thoughts continue talking to me.

I’m weary now of thinking how my thoughts

of you are always weariless, and how

I have not yet abandoned life to flee

from this great burden of depressing sighs;

and how I’m always going on about

your face, your hair, your penetrating eyes,

and how my tongue and voice are never tired

of sounding out your name by night and day;

and how it is my feet are not worn out,

from following your footsteps everywhere,

a waste of time and energy for sure;

and asking where the ink comes from, the pages

I fill with words of you (if I offend,

the blame is Love’s, not a defect of art).

Those lovely eyes that hurt me are the only

things that could heal the wound they’ve made; but not

the power of herbs, nor any magic art,

nor healing stone from far beyond our sea;

they’ve cut me off from any other love

and only one sweet thought can soothe my soul,

and if that’s all my tongue can talk about,

then mock the escort, do not blame the tongue.

These are those lovely eyes that made my lord’s

exploits victorious on every side,

and most especially upon my flank;

these are the lovely eyes whose burning sparks

shine always in my heart, which helps explain

why I do not grow tired praising them.

Love took me in with all his promises,

coaxing me back into my former prison,

then handed all the keys to her, my enemy,

who always keeps me banished from myself.

I wasn’t quite aware of what was happening

till I was in their power; now, distressed

(who will believe this even if I swear it?),

I have regained my liberty, though sighing;

and like true prisoners, who go on suffering,

I wear my chains, or most of them; my heart

is plainly written in my eyes and forehead.

You’ll say, as soon as you perceive my color,

“If I have any judgment in these matters

this man was just a little way from death.”

A thousand years could Polyclitus study,

along with others famous in his art,

and never glimpse a fraction of the beauty

that has made such a conquest of my heart.

But certainly my Simon was in Heaven,

the place from which this noble lady comes;

he saw her there, he captured her on paper,

to show her lovely face down here on earth.

This work could only be imagined there

in such a place as Heaven, not with us,

here where the body always veils the soul;

a noble act, and he could not have done it

after he got back here, to heat and cold,

and saw the world once more with mortal eyes.

When Simon came upon that high conceit

and took his pencil up on my behalf,

had he been able to grant voice and mind

as well as form to that amazing image,

he might have saved my breast from many sighs

that make what others love feel base to me.

For in her picture here she looks quite modest

and her expression seems to promise peace;

when I address her, then, to make my case,

she seems to listen with a willing air,

if only she could answer to my words!

Pygmalion, you should celebrate your statue,

since you received, maybe a thousand times,

what I desire to have just even once!

My fourteenth year of sighs: if its beginning

is any forecast of its end and middle,

no breeze or cooler spell can rescue me,

as my desire seems to burn and grow.

Love, who is never absent from my thoughts,

under whose yoke I never can breathe easy,

renders me less than half of what I should be,

turning my eyes once more toward what destroys them.

And thus I go on day by day; I weaken,

and no one knows about it except me

and she whose simplest glance can melt my heart;

I’ve coaxed my soul to come along this far,

and it can’t go much further on, I think,

since death’s approaching and life runs away.

He who decides to entrust his life

to treacherous waves and close to the rocks,

preserved from death just by a little boat,

cannot be very far from his own end;

he ought then to turn back to find the port

now while the tiller still governs the sail.

The gentle breeze to which I trusted sail

and tiller, embarked on an amorous life

and hoping to come to a better port,

has steered me up against a thousand rocks,

and I carried the cause of my woeful end

not just around me but right in the boat.

Closed in for a long spell in this blind boat,

I drifted on and did not watch the sail

that carried me off to a premature end,

but it pleased Him then, who had given me life,

to summon me back, away from the rocks,

and let me glimpse it far away: the port.

As in the night a light in some far port

is seen way out at sea by ship or boat

unless it is obscured by storm or rocks,

so I could glimpse, beyond the swollen sail,

ensigns and banners of some other life

that made me sigh, desiring my own end.

It’s not that I am certain of that end,

for while I’d like, come dawn, to reach that port

the journey’s long within so short a life;

and I’m afraid, when viewing this frail boat,

and see that it’s too full of wind, my sail,

a wind that’s driving me on toward the rocks.

May I escape alive from doubtful rocks

and may my exile come to a good end;

how happy I’d be then to furl the sail

and cast my anchor in a friendly port!

But I am burning in a blazing boat,

finding it hard to leave my former life.

Lord of my end, Lord of my very life,

before I split my boat upon the rocks

guide safely to the port my tattered sail.

I am so weary from my ancient bundle,

the sins I lug, and all my evil habits,

I fear I’ll lose my way and fall at last

into my mortal foe’s most potent grasp.

It’s true, a great friend came to free me once;

His was the highest and most gracious courtesy;

and then He flew away, out of my sight,

and I have tried in vain to find and see Him.

But His voice echoes still, down in this world:

“Oh, you who labor, here’s the way for you;

come to me now unless the pass is blocked.”

What grace, what love, oh, what high destiny,

will give me wings and make me like a dove,

so I can rest and rise up from the earth?

I do not tire, Lady, of my love,

nor will I ever, long as I shall live;

but my self-hatred now has reached its limit

and I am sick of all the tears I shed;

I’d rather that my tombstone was left blank

than that your name be carved on marble as

the source of loss, at that time when my spirit

is parted from the flesh it lives with now.

If one heart full of faithful love, therefore,

can please you without tempting you to torture,

then let it please you to have mercy on it;

if your disdain should seek to glut itself

some other way, it’s wrong and it will fail;

for that I’m thankful to myself and Love.

As long as my two temples are not white

(though time is learning how to grizzle them),

I will not feel secure to risk myself

where Love employs his arrows and his bow.

Not that I really fear he’ll hurt me more,

maim me or kill me while I am still snared,

or split my heart, since he’s already pierced it,

and filled it with his cruel poisoned darts.

Tears do not run down from my eyes these days,

but they do know the way there, notwithstanding,

and nothing acts to block their path just yet;

the fiery ray can surely make me hot,

but it can’t burn me now; the cruel image

bothers my sleep but cannot break it off.

“Go on and weep, my eyes: accompany

the heart whose death you’ve helped to bring about.”—

“Yes, that’s exactly what we do, but we

have to lament another’s error more.”

“It was through you that Love first made his entry,

and still he comes, as if it were his home.”—

“We opened up to him because of hope

that stirred within the man who’s dying now.”

“Oh, you can claim these faults were just the same,

but you went first and you were very greedy

for that first sight that brought us both to ruin.”

“What makes us sad beyond these other things

is just how rare true justice is these days,

when some must take the blame for others’ faults.”

I’ve always loved, I go on loving still,

and I’ll love even more, day after day,

that sweet place I return to, full of tears

at times when Love comes over me with sadness;

and I am fixed to love the time, the hour,

that took away my base and mundane cares,

most of all she whose lovely face makes me

in love with goodness by her great example.

But who’d have thought these things would so converge,

knocking my heart this way and that, here, there,

all these sweet enemies I love so much?

What force you conquer me today with, Love!

And had not hope grown greater with desire,

I would fall dead where I most want to live.

I’ll always hate the window from which Love

has shot a thousand arrows at me now,

because they haven’t killed me, none of them,

and yet it’s good to die when life has peaked;

but staying longer in my earthly prison

has brought me countless evils, sad to say;

I’m pained the more because they’ll stay with me:

the soul can’t be untangled from the heart.

Oh, miserable soul, you should have known

by now, through long experience, that none

can turn Time back, and none can rein it in!

I’ve warned you many times with words like these:

“Begone, sad soul; for he who is well past

his happiest days is not departing early.”

As soon as bowstring’s loosed and arrow flies,

an expert marksman knows at some great distance

which shot is wasted, which shot has a chance

to find the target he intends to strike;

the same way, Lady, as you felt the shot

pass from your eyes straight to my inner parts

you knew you’d hit the heart and that it would

weep from its wound, tears everlastingly;

and I am sure, observing this, you said:

“Unhappy lover, where’s his passion headed?

Here is the arrow Love will kill him with.”

Now, though, because they see how pain can rule me,

what my two enemies will do is not

design my death, just elevate my torment.

Since what I hope for is so long in coming

and what remains of life is much too brief,

I wish I’d had the sense to turn back sooner

and faster than a gallop, made retreat;

I do flee now, of course, but weak and lame

where passion has deformed me on one side,

escaped to safety, bearing on my face

the scars I got in Love’s unlovely wars.

And thus I counsel: “You who go that way,

turn back your steps, and you whom Love inflames,

do not go on in those ferocious fires,

for even though I live, I am but one

of thousands. None escaped. The enemy

was strong, though wounded in her heart.”

I fled the prison in which Love had held me

for all those many years, slave to his will;

it would take long to tell you all, my ladies,

how much I found my liberty unwelcome.

My heart was telling me that he could live no more

out on his own, and then along the way

I saw the traitor Love so well disguised

he could have fooled a wiser man than I.

This led to many sighs and to my saying:

“Ah me, the yoke and all the chains and shackles

were sweeter far to me than going free!”

Oh, miserable me, I saw too late,

and now I struggle to escape the error

in which I wrapped myself so willingly!

Her golden hair was loosened to the breeze

that twined it in a thousand lovely knots;

a bright light burned unmeasured in her eyes

that are so sparse and grudging of it now;

it seemed to me (I’m not sure if she meant it)

her faced showed pity, coloring a bit;

and I, who had love’s tinder in my breast,

is it surprising I went up in flames?

Her walk was not a mortal being’s walk,

it had an angel’s form, and her words too

were different from a merely human voice:

a spirit all celestial, a living sun

was what I saw; and if she’s not so now,

a wound’s not healed because a bowstring’s loosened.

The gracious lady whom you loved so much

has suddenly departed from our midst,

and, as I dare to hope, risen to Heaven,

since all her actions were so sweet and gentle.

It’s time to find the two keys of your heart,

which she possessed in life, recover them,

then follow her, a straight and open road:

no further earthly weights need hold you down.

Since you’re disburdened of your greatest care,

you won’t have trouble setting down the rest,

and rising like a pilgrim, unencumbered;

now you can see how all created things

run toward their deaths, and how carefree the soul

needs to become to make the dangerous crossing.

Weep, ladies, weep, and let Love weep as you do;

weep, lovers all now, all across the land,

since he is dead, who meant to do you honor

within this world, as long as he was living.

And as for me, I hope my biting sorrow

will not be such that it obstructs my tears,

that it will have the courtesy to let me

sigh all the sighs that will unpack my heart.

Weep, rhymes, as well, let all the verses weep,

because our loving master, master Cino,

has now departed newly from our midst.

Weep too, Pistoia, and your perverse people;

you’ve lost a neighbor who was kind and gentle;

and Heaven rejoice, where he has now arrived.

How many times Love has instructed me:

“Write what you’ve seen, write it in golden letters,

how I can make my followers change color

and in one moment leave them dead or living.

“There was a time you felt it in yourself,

a loud exemplar in the lovers’ chorus;

and then a project freed you from my grasp,

and then I overtook you as you fled,

“and if those lovely eyes wherein I showed you

my very self, sweet fortress where I lingered

when I broke up the hardness of your heart,

“if they restore my bow, that shatters all,

perhaps your face will not remain so dry,

for I am fed by tears, as you well know.”

When through my eyes, down to my deepest heart,

the image of my lady overmasters me,

all else departs, which leaves the stricken soul

unable to empower lifeless limbs;

and from that miracle a second comes:

sometimes the power that is driven out,

fleeing itself, comes to a separate place

that takes revenge and makes the exile sweet;

two faces, then, take on the same dead color,

because the vigor that gave life to them

resides no longer where it used to be.

I recollected this the other day

seeing a pair of lovers so transformed

their faces looked the way mine usually does.

If I could get my thoughts down in these verses

the way I have them captured in my heart,

there’s no soul living that could be so cruel

as to lack pity nor dissolve in grief.

But you, blessed eyes, from whom I took that blow

against which there’s no armor, shield, or helmet,

you see me wholly, outside and within,

even when no laments express my sorrow.

Because your vision lights me up inside

as sunlight does through glass, let that suffice

to show my love without my even speaking.

Mary and Peter were not harmed by faith;

alas, it’s just my own that is so hurtful.

I know you understand this, no one else.

I’m so defeated by this endless wait

and by the drawn-out war of my own sighs,

that I have learned to hate what I desired

and all the snares that bound my willing heart.

That lovely smiling face of hers, however,

I carry as a picture in my heart

and everywhere I look it’s what I see,

which drives me back into my first tormentings.

I went awry when first my former road

was blocked to me, my road of freedom;

it makes no sense to chase what takes the eyes;

my soul ran free before, and much at risk,

where she now goes around at someone’s bidding,

despite the fact that she’s sinned only once.

Ah, liberty, sweet freedom, how you’ve shown,

by leaving me, my former situation

when that fell arrow made the first great wound

from which I cannot ever hope to heal!

My eyes grew so enamored of their woe

that reason’s curbs and reins are no avail

for they dislike all other mortal works

because I trained them to from the beginning!

I cannot seem to listen but to those

who speak about my death; her name alone

is what I fill the air with, its sweet sound;

Love doesn’t send me elsewhere, and my feet

do not know any other road; my hands

can use a paper only for her praise.

Your charger, Orso, can be given reins

that will control his course, but who can curb

your heart till he cannot get loose again

if he desires honor, hates the opposite?

Don’t sigh; he cannot lose his fame and worth

even if you’re prevented from attending,

because his glory argues his inclusion

and says that no one else precedes him there.

May it suffice that he’ll be in the field

on the elected day, bearing the arms

he rightly owns by time, love, strength, and birth.

And he’ll cry out: “My lord and I both burn

with noble aspiration, though his absence

means he can’t follow me, which makes him sick.”

Since you and I have proved so frequently

how false our hopes have been, lift up your hearts

and help them find a state where they are happy

because they seek the highest good of all.

This mortal life is really like a meadow

whose grass and flowers also hide a serpent,

and anything that entertains our eyes

is there to snare our minds and souls the more.

You therefore, if you ever hope to have

a peaceful mind before your final day,

must emulate the few and not the mob.

Someone could well accuse me: “Brother, you

keep pointing out the way, astray yourself,

and maybe even now more lost than ever.”

100

That window where one sun is visible

when it shall please her, and the other one

that’s visible at noon, and then the window

that cold air rattles when the north wind blows,

also the stone where, when the days are long,

my lady sits conversing with herself,

and all the places where her lovely body

has cast its shadow or set down its foot,

and that cruel pass where Love took me in ambush,

and this fresh season that, year in, year out,

passes the anniversary of my wounding,

that face of hers as well, and all those words

that are fixed deep within my heart—these things

have made my eyes too apt to weep these tears.

101

Alas, I know that she who pardons no man

makes all of us her melancholy prey

and that the world quite rapidly forgets us

and only briefly keeps its faith with us;

there isn’t much reward for so much yearning

and now the last day thunders in my heart.

But Love still doesn’t want to set me free

and still exacts his tribute from my eyes.

I know our days, our minutes, and our hours

pack off our years, and I am not deceived

but subject to a power more than magic’s.

My passion and my reason have been fighting

seven plus seven years; reason will win

if souls down here can understand what’s best.

102

When the Egyptian traitor handed him

the honored head of Pompey, Caesar wept,

or so we’re told; he hid his boundless joy

behind external tears, concealing it;

and Hannibal, when he could see that Fortune

had turned so cruel to his afflicted empire,

laughed in the midst of his lamenting people,

to vent his bitterness another way;

and thus it happens—every soul may cloak

the passion of the moment with its opposite,

a face that’s clear or else a face that’s dark.

Thus if at any time I laugh or sing

you may be sure I do it as a way

to cover up my weeping from the world.

103

Hannibal won but later did not know

how to make proper use of his good victory;

be careful then, my lord, that you yourself

do not experience something of that sort.

The mother bear is raging for her cubs

who found a bitter harvest this past May;

her teeth and claws grow harder, and within

she fuels her rage and plots revenge on us.

So therefore, while her recent sorrow burns,

do not put up your honorable sword;

but let it take you where your fortune beckons:

along the straight and narrow road where you

can earn a fame and honor that will last

beyond your life a thousand thousand years.

104

The longed-for virtue that was flowering in you

when Love began to battle with you, now

produces fruit that’s worthy of the flower

and makes my hope begin to be fulfilled.

My heart then prompts me to put pen to paper

and write a verse to amplify your fame,

for even sculpture may not last enough

to give a person life through solid marble.

Do you believe that Caesar or Marcellus,

Paulus or Africanus, grew so famous

because of any hammer’s work, or anvil’s?

No, my Pandolfo, such stuff’s far too frail

to last for long, whereas our kind of study

makes men immortal and brings lasting fame.

105

I never wish to sing the way I used to

I wasn’t understood somebody scorned me,

one can be heartbroken in a pleasant place.

Sighing all the while does no good.

It’s snowing in the mountains everywhere;

and dawn is quite close by so I’m awake.

A sweet and honest act is something noble;

a lady who is lovely pleases me

if in her face she shows a haughty disregard

unless she’s proud and stubborn.

Love needs no sword to govern his domain.

Whoever’s lost his way let him turn back;

and he who has no house can sleep on grass;

who has no gold, or loses it,

can quench his thirst by drinking from a glass.

My trust was in St. Peter but no more,

figure me out if you can I understand.

A rotten tribute is a heavy load to bear.

As fully as I can I free myself.

I hear Apollo’s son fell in the Po, died,

and that the blackbird has now crossed the stream.

Hey, come and take a look (I’d rather not, myself),

it’s not a joke, a rock among the waves

or else, in branches, birdlime! And I’m hurt

when overbearing pride can hide

a wealth of virtues in a lovely lady.

Some people come when no one’s called to them;

others you beg for disappear and flee;

and some melt from the ice

and others long for death, both night and day.

Proverb: “Love who loves you” ancient fact;

I know exactly what I say I’ll drop it,

people need to learn some things at their expense.

A humble lady makes her sweet friend grieve.

Assessing figs is difficult; it’s prudent

to undertake no task too hard to do,

and pleasant homes exist in every country.

Hope, when it is infinite, usually kills,

and there were times when I would dance that dance.

What little bit is left of me

ought to please someone if I give it to him.

I put my faith in Him who rules the world

and shelters His disciples in the woods

to lead me with His flocks,

wielding His shepherd’s crook of mercy.

Not everyone who reads can understand,

and he who sets up nets may well catch nothing;

who tries to be too subtle breaks his neck.

Don’t let the law be lame when folks are waiting.

To have good health you might go many miles.

Some things seem marvelous and then we hate them;

a cloistered beauty is the sweetest, softest.

Blessed be the key that slipped into my heart

and turned the lock and gave my soul its freedom

from very heavy chains

releasing from my breast unnumbered sighs.

There where I grieved the most another suffers,

and makes my sorrow sweet by having shared it;

and so I offer thanks to Love,

because I feel it not and yet it’s there.

And in the silence, words wise and proficient

become the sound that takes all other care

the darkened prison where there shines a light;

nocturnal violets growing on the bank,

and wild beasts at large within the walls,

and fear, sweet fear, and lovely customs,

and from two fountains grows a peaceful river

flowing where I want it gathering there;

Love and Jealousy walked off taking my heart,

the stars of that fair face

that lead me forward on a level path

along toward my own hope my pain concluded.

Oh, hidden sweetness and your close companions—

now peace, now war, now truce,

do not desert me in this earthly garb.

For all my injuries past I weep and laugh

because I set such store in what I hear;

I like the present some and look for better,

and I go counting years silent and crying.

And I construct my nest on a fair branch

in such a fashion thanking the grand refusal

that finally overcame the hardened feelings

and in my soul engraved: “I would be heard of

and pointed at for that,” and she’s erased

(I’m driven to extremes

that I am going to say it): “You were not bold enough!”

She pierced my side and then she healed it too,

I write more in my heart than on this paper,

she makes me die and live;

she makes me freeze and then she makes me burn.

106

A little angel, new, on nimble wings,

came down from Heaven to the springtime shore

where Fortune had me walking, all alone.

Because she saw I had no company or guide

she spread a lasso she was making out of silk

out on the grass with which the way was green.

She caught me then; I wasn’t sorry later

because so sweet a light was in her eyes.

107

I don’t see anymore how to escape;

her eyes have been at war with me so long

that I’m afraid, alas, the ongoing torment

will kill my heart, which never knows a truce.

I’d like to flee, but those inspiring rays

shine in my mind by night and then by day,

so bright that in this fifteenth year they dazzle

more than they did even on that first day;

and their resemblances are scattered round

so that I cannot turn without a glimpse of light,

that light or else a like one, lit from it.

From just one laurel tree a forest grows

so green my enemy, with magic arts,

leads me at will, astray among the branches.

108

More fortunate than any other earth,

you ground, where Love once made her pause her foot

and turn those holy lights in my direction

that make the air around her all serene:

a solid diamond statue would wear out

before I could forget her deed, so sweet

that it has filled my mind till now

and never will desert my memory;

however many times I see you yet

I’ll still bend over you to trace her foot

recalling where it made its gracious turn.

But since Love doesn’t rest in worthy hearts,

ask my Sennuccio, when you see him next,

for just a little tear, or for a sigh.

109

When Love, alas, decides to reassault me

(a thousand times, it seems, by night and day)

I come again to where I saw those sparks

that make the fire in my heart immortal.

The visit calms me down, and now those sparks,

at nones, at vespers, dawn and angelus,

can fill my thoughts, which have become so tranquil

that I am free of cares or painful memories.

The gentle breeze that from her shining face

moves when she speaks her words, so clear and wise,

creates fair weather when she breathes it forth,

and is so much a thought of Paradise

that its pure air can always bring me comfort

and my hurt heart breathes easy nowhere else.

110

Pursued by Love to my accustomed place

I was like one who is prepared for war,

who fortifies the entrances and passes,

and thus I stood, armed with my ancient thoughts.

I turned and saw a shadow on the ground

off to the side, created by the sun,

and recognized it: hers, who as I judge,

is worthy to be thought of as immortal.

I said to my own heart, “Why do you quail?”

and yet before that thought was fully shaped

the rays that melt me were unleashed in full;

the way that thunder comes along with lightning

that’s how those eyes, so brilliant, hit me,

along with a sweet greeting from her lips.

111

The lady whom my heart is always watching

appeared to me where I sat all alone

with lovely thoughts of love, and I, in homage,

moved toward her with a pale and reverent brow.

As soon as she was conscious of my state

she turned to me and with her color changed

in such a way as would have disarmed Jove

in greatest fury, killing his dread wrath.

I trembled as, conversing, she passed by

because I couldn’t bear to hear her speech

or look directly at her brilliant eyes.

And now I find myself fulfilled with pleasure

as I look back upon that kindly greeting

and feel no pain, nor am I like to soon.

112

Sennuccio, just see how I am treated here

and what my life is like: I live in flames

and burn and suffer just the way I used to,

because the slightest breeze can spin me round.

I saw her humble, then I saw her haughty,

now harsh, now gentle, cruel, then full of mercy,

now clothed in virtue, now decked out in mirth,

one minute tame, the next a wild thing.

Here she sang sweetly, here she was seated,

here she turned back and here she paused her step,

here with her lovely eyes she pierced my heart;

she said a word here, smiled here, I think,

and here she frowned. Wrapped in these thoughts, alas,

is how our lord Love keeps me, night and day.

113

Here where I half exist, my dear Sennuccio

(would I were here completely, and you happy),

I came to flee the storm and mighty wind

that suddenly have made the season harsh.

Here I am safe, and wish to tell you why

I do not fear the lightning as I did,

and why my passion hasn’t lessened any

but looks as though it never will be quenched.

No sooner had I come into Love’s region

and saw the birthplace of the sweet, pure breeze

that calms the air and sends away the thunder,

than Love, who rules my soul, relit the fire

and drove away my fear. What might I do

if then I got to look into her eyes?

114

From wicked Babylon, that’s lost all shame,

from which all good has long since fled away,

now sorrow’s dwelling, mother of all errors,

I’ve run away, to rescue my own life.

I’m here alone, and as Love leads me on,

I gather rhymes and verses, herbs and flowers,

conversing and recalling better times,

the only thing that can sustain me now.

I do not care about the mob, or Fortune,

nor very much about myself, nor do

I feel much heat, inside myself or out;

I ask for just two people in my life:

I’d have her heart be pacified and kind

and him I’d want with his foot whole again.

115

Between two lovers once I saw a lady

all virtuous and proud; she had with her

that lord who rules among both men and gods;

the sun was on one side, I on the other.

When she could see that she had been left out

from the bright sphere of her more handsome friend,

she turned her eyes to me, quite happily,

and I could wish she’d always be no fiercer.

The jealousy that on first sight was born

to see a rival of such height and power

transformed itself to joy within my heart;

his face, meantime, so tearful and so sad,

was covered over by a little cloud,

and he was much annoyed at being bested.

116

Full of that sweet, ineffable delight

that came to my eyes from her lovely face

on that day when I’d willingly have closed them,

never to gaze again at lesser beauties,

I went away from what I yearn for most;

I’ve trained my mind to contemplate her only

and it sees nothing else; what isn’t she

it hates and scorns from long-established habit.

Into a valley closed off on all sides

that cools my weary sighs, I came alone

except for Love, all full of care and late;

I find no ladies here, just rocks and fountains

and then the very likeness of that day

that shapes my thoughts, wherever I may look.

117

If the rock that mainly shuts this valley

(from which it seems to take its very name)

responded with its scornful nature, turning

its back to Babel and its face toward Rome,

my sighs would have a better path to travel

toward where their source of hope is living now;

right now they travel scattered, yet arrive

where I have sent them, not one fails to get there;

and over there they have so sweet a welcome

not one of them, I note, ever returns,

they have such rich enjoyment where they stay.

My eyes sustain the pain, for when dawn comes

their passion for the lovely places lost

brings tears to me and labor to my feet.

118

I’ve now passed through my sixteenth year of sighs

and somewhere up ahead I’ll reach the last one;

and yet it sometimes seems to me as though

this suffering began just recently.

The bitter now is sweet, my losses useful,

living itself’s a heavy weight—I pray

my life outlasts this fortune and I fear

Death may close those eyes that give me speech.

I’m here, alas, and wishing I were elsewhere,

and wish I wished for more, yet cannot wish,

and since I can’t do more, do what I can;

and these new tears, shed for these old desires,

prove that I’m still the thing I used to be,

a thousand things have changed, but I have not.

119

A lady much more splendid than the sun—

more blazing and quite comparable in age—

using her famous beauty

attracted me while young into her ranks.

This one is in my thoughts, my works, my words,

for she’s among the great world’s rarest things;

along a thousand roads

she’s always gone before me, proud and gay.

For her alone I turned from what I was,

endured her gaze up close, and afterward,

in honor of her love,

set myself difficult tasks and undertakings

so that, if I achieve the longed-for harbor,

I hope through her to live,

long after people take me to be dead.

This lady led me on for many years

full of a youthful burning longing,

and, as I understand,

only to ask me for more certain proof—

she’d let me glimpse her shadow, veil, or robes,

sometimes herself, but with her face concealed;

and I, alas, believing

I saw a lot, passed through my younger years

contentedly—the memory makes me happy,

especially now that I can see her better.

A short time past, I’m saying,

she showed herself more fully than before,

showed much to me, and turned my heart to ice,

and that is still the case,

and will be always, till I’m in her arms.

But neither fear nor cold could hinder me

from giving so much daring to my heart

that I fell at her feet

to draw a greater sweetness from her eyes;

and she, who had removed the veil from mine

addressed me, saying: “Now, friend, you can see

how beautiful I am,

and ask me for whatever fits your years.”

“Madonna,” said I, “for a long time now

I’ve set my love on you; it so inflames me

that while I’m in this state,

I cannot wish that anything be altered.”

And then, with voice of such a wondrous temper,

she answered, with a look

that left me always between fear and hope:

“Few are there in this world, among the crowd,

who hearing the discussion of my worth

have not felt in their hearts,

at least a short time, something of a spark;

“but my opponent, who hates all that’s good,

douses those sparks, whereby all virtue dies;

another lord takes over

who promises a life more easygoing.

“Love, who unsealed your mind at first,

tells me the truth about you, and I see

your great desire makes you

worthy of some most honorable end;

and as we are already special friends,

as sign, you’ll see a lady

who’ll make your eyes more fortunate and happy.”

I tried to say “That is impossible,”

when she said: “Look up now (lifting your eyes

to a more secret place)

upon a lady who has shown herself to few.”

Quite suddenly ashamed, I bowed my head,

feeling within a new and greater fire,

and she was much amused,

saying to me: “I see now where you stand;

“just as the sun, with its more powerful rays,

makes every other star retire and vanish,

likewise the sight of me

is much diminished by this greater light.

But I don’t fault you or dismiss you for it,

for she and I (she first),

were born together from a single seed.”

That helped to break the knot of shame

that had been tight around my tongue when I

first felt abashed

because I knew that she had noticed it,

and I began: “If what I hear is true,

blessed be the father and blessèd be the day

that have adorned the world with you,

and all the times when I have run to see you!

“And if I ever strayed from the true path

it pains me more than I can ever show;

but if you think me worthy

to hear more of your nature, why, I burn to!”

She watched me pensively and answered,

her sweet regard so steady

that face and words both sped straight to my heart.

“Because it pleased our everlasting father

to have it so, we each were born immortal.

Poor things, what good is that

to you? Better for you if we did not exist.

“Beloved, lovely, young and full of charm:

that’s what we were at first; we’ve come to this:

that this one beats her wings

and wants to fly to her old hiding place;

“but on my own I’m just a shade. And now

I’ve told you everything that you can grasp.”

She moved away then, saying,

“Don’t worry; I’m not leaving you just yet,”

and gathered up a garland of green laurel

and with her own hands made

a wreath of leaves and put it round my temples.

Song, to whoever calls your speech obscure,

answer: “I do not care, because I hope

another messenger

will soon announce the truth in clearer voice;

I came ahead to wake men up, if he

who sent me on this errand

did not mislead me when he launched me forth.”

120

Those verses full of pity where I saw

your ingenuity and deep affection

displayed such strength that I was quickly moved

to take my pen and make a swift response,

assuring you that I’m among the living,

have not yet felt her final bite whom I

and all the world await, though there’s no doubt

that I was at her threshold, without fear;

then I returned—I’d seen, written above it,

the information that my term of life

(although I couldn’t read the day or hour)

had not yet finished its determined course.

I want you thus to calm your troubled heart

and seek some other man more worth this honor.

121

Now look at this, Love: how a youthful woman

scorns your supremacy, cares naught for my illness,

and feels secure between two enemies.

You are in armor, she has just a gown,

loose-haired and barefoot in the grass and flowers,

ruthless toward me, and arrogant toward you.

I am a prisoner, but if pity has preserved

your bow for you, and one or two sharp arrows,

for both yourself and me, my lord, revenge!

122

For seventeen long years the heavens have rolled

since I at first caught fire, still not quenched;

but when I start to contemplate my plight

I feel a chill within these flames of mine.

The proverb’s true: your hair is going to change

before you’ll change your habits; senses wane,

but human passions keep their strength and force:

the bitter shadow of the heavy veil.

Oh me! Alas! And when will that day come

when I can gaze back at my misspent years

and step out of the fire, the long sorrow?

Or will I ever even see the day

when that sweet face’s air, those eyes,

will please me much, but only as they ought to?

123

Her lovely paleness made a cloud of love

that covered her sweet smile—so majestic

it stirred my heart and brought him out to meet it

right in the middle of my rapturous face.

I learned then how they apprehend in Paradise,

as mercy showed quite clearly in her thought

while I alone was able to perceive it

because I gaze at nothing else on earth.

Each look angelic, every humble gesture

that ever came forth from a loving lady

would seem like scorn compared to what I speak of.

Her lovely gaze was fixed upon the earth,

and as her silence spoke it seemed to say:

“Who separates me from my faithful friend?”

124

Love, Fortune, and my mind—which now avoids

all that it sees and turns back to the past—

afflict me so that sometimes I must feel

envy for those who’ve reached the other shore.

Sir Love torments my heart, and Fortune

takes from it all its comforts, while my mind

weeps foolishly and pines; as a result,

I live at war, contending with my sorrow.

I do not hope that sweet days will return;

instead I think they’ll go from bad to worse,

the midpoint of my course is now well past.

I see all hope, alas, crash through my hands;

it isn’t made of diamond, merely glass,

and all my thoughts, I see, must break in two.

125

If the thoughts that hurt me,

since they’re so sharp and pungent,

could dress themselves for once in their true colors,

the one who burns me up

and flees might share the pain,

and wake Love up from where he’s sleeping now;

my weary footsteps wouldn’t

be so lonely then,

across the hills and fields;

my eyes would be less wet

if she burned too, who stands there now like ice

and leaves me not a jot

that isn’t flame or fire.

Because Love fights and bests me

and strips away my skill,

I speak in acrid rhymes that lack all sweetness;

but branches do not always

reveal in leaf or flower,

or in rough bark, their native strength and vigor.

Let Love, who sits in shade,

and let her eyes as well,

see what my heart conceals;

if sorrow overflows

and happens to bring tears and lamentations,

that must pain me, and others,

because I can’t be smooth.

Sweet and delightful rhymes

that I resorted to

upon Love’s first assault, I with no weapons:

will no one come to shatter

the stone around my heart

so I can pour my feelings forth again?

Because it seems to me

there’s someone in my heart

who always wants to paint

and speak about my lady;

I can’t describe her by myself; I come

undone, I fall apart,

my comfort runs away.

Like a child held down,

and with his tongue tied up,

who cannot speak and yet feels he must talk,

desire drives me on

and I must speak, in hope

my enemy will hear before I die.

If she gets all her pleasure

from her own face alone

and shuts all others out,

then maybe you, green shore,

will listen to my sighs and send them on

so it will be recalled

that you were good to me.

You know quite well no foot

has ever touched the earth

that matches hers in beauty when she trod you;

therefore my tired heart

and my tormented body

return to share their cares with you again.

I wish you had concealed

some lovely footprints still

among the flowers and grass,

so that my bitter life

might come in tears and find a place to rest!

My doubtful wayward soul

finds comfort as it can.

Each place I chance to look

I find a sweet repose

and think: “Her eyes’ bright light shone on this spot.”

Each grass or flower I pick

persuades me it was rooted

in earth on which she took her usual walk

along the river meadows,

fresh, flowering, and green,

and sometimes stopped to rest.

So nothing’s really lost,

and knowing more would likely spoil things.

Oh, blessèd spirit, what

can you pass on to me?

Poor little song, you turned out pretty rough!

I think you sense your worth:

stay right here in these woods.

126

Clear waters, fresh and sweet,

where she who is my lady,

my only one, would rest her lovely body;

gentle branch that pleased her

(with sighing, I remember)

to make a column she could lean against;

grass and flowers which her gown,

graceful and rich, concealed,

and her angelic breast,

sacred, brilliant air

where Love had those fair eyes unlock my heart:

listen all together

to these my mournful words and dying speech.

If it’s my destiny

and Heaven deems it so

that Love will shut these weeping eyes of mine,

let kindness act to see

my body buried here

and let my soul go naked to its home;

my death will be less harsh

if I can keep my hope

until that fearful pass,

because my weary spirit

could never sail to a more restful port,

or in more tranquil grave

flee from my poor, exhausted flesh and bones.

The time will come, perhaps,

when she’ll come back again

to her old haunts, that wild gentle thing,

and she will seek me out

as on that blessèd day

and turn her loving and expectant gaze

to search me out—oh, pity!—

and see that I am dust

among the stones. Then Love

will make her sigh so sweetly

that she will win me grace at last in Heaven

and force my fate to change,

wiping her eyes upon her lovely veil.

From lovely branches fell

(how sweet to recollect this)

a rain of flowers on her precious bosom,

and she sat humbly there

in such a cloud of glory,

a loving nimbus that surrounded her;

some flowers on her skirt

and some in her blond hair—

like pearls set on gold

they seemed to me that day;

while one was landing gently on the earth,

another twirled around,

as if to say, “Now here is where Love reigns.”

How often I would murmur

at that time, full of awe:

“This person clearly had her birth in Paradise!”

Her bearing, clearly godlike,

her face and words and smile,

so filled me with forgetfulness,

and so divided me

from images of truth,

that I would utter, sighing,

“How did I get here? When?”

believing that I must have gone to Heaven.

That’s why this grass delights me;

there is no other place where I find peace.

If you had beauties equal to desires,

you could go boldly

out of this wood and move among mankind.

127

In that direction where I’m spurred by Love,

I must conduct these aching, painful rhymes,

which take their cue from my afflicted mind.

Which one goes first and which shall be the last?

He who converses with me on my woes

leaves me uncertain by confused dictation.

I find my painful story is inscribed

down in my heart, written in his own hand,

and I go back to read it there; however,

I’ll speak it out as well,

because my sighing brings relief, and talking helps.

I say: Although I look

at many different things, gazing intently,

I only see one lady, her fair face.

Because my cruel misfortune banished me

far from my greatest good, to show me

how proud, disturbing, and implacable it is,

memory’s all that Love will let me live on:

thus when I see a world of youthful aspect,

starting again to clothe itself in green,

to that same season I can call a girl

whose beauty’s now transformed her to a lady;

when once the sun has mounted to its zenith,

it warms the world below,

it’s like the flame of love deep in the heart;

but while the shorter day

laments the sun’s retreat, a stepping backward,

I see her coming to her perfect days.

When I see leaves upon a branch, or gaze

at violets, growing on the earth in spring,

when cold grows less and better stars grow potent,

I still see green and violet in my eyes,

the colors Love was armed with when he came

to start the war he still pursues today,

and that sweet tender bark that covered then

those youthful limbs and now, today, encloses

the noble soul who dwells there and whose beauty

makes other pleasures seem

just vile: I recollect so strongly

her humble bearing then

which had begun to flower, sooner than her years,

and still remains the source and balm of woe.

Sometimes I look at freshly fallen snow

on distant hills, all brilliant in the sunlight,

and think of how Love’s sun can melt my snow,

considering that face that’s more than human,

which has the power to wet my eyes far off

and up close dazzles them and kills my heart;

between that white and gold are colors that

come always, yet I think no mortal eye

but mine has glimpsed or understood their hue;

as for the hot desire

that flames within me when she sighs or smiles,

everything disappears

and my forgetfulness becomes eternal:

summer can’t change it, winter keeps it here.

And after rain at night I never see

the wheeling stars pass through the clearing air,

showing their lights between the dew and frost,

without considering her lovely eyes,

the one support on which my wan life leans,

the way I saw them once behind a veil;

and as the sky displayed their beauty then

I see them still, they glitter with her tears

and that same brilliance makes me burn forever.

Chancing to see the dawn,

I sense the advent of the light that holds me;

watching the evening sunset,

I seem to watch her as she takes her leave

and plunges all the world in utter darkness.

If ever I saw white and crimson roses

gathered by virgin hands and then arranged

fresh in a golden vase, I thought at once

that I was looking at the face of her

who easily excels all other wonders

by virtue of three excellences gathered:

blond tresses loose about her neck and throat

where any milk will suffer by comparison,

and then her cheeks, which glow with a sweet fire.

And if I see the wind

stirring the white and yellow meadow flowers

I think about the place

where that first day I saw that golden hair

disheveled in the wind as I caught fire.

Maybe I thought that I could count the stars

and catch the ocean in a little glass

when I conceived this most peculiar notion

of saying in a page or two how many

places this woman, flower of all beauty,

has shed her dazzling light upon the world,

because I never want to part from her;

nor shall I leave her—if I tried to flee

she’d block my way to Heaven or on earth;

she’s always present to

my weary eyes, her image quite consumes me,

and thus she stays with me,

I’ll never see another, nor desire to,

nor could my sighs form any other’s name.

Song, you know very well that what I say

is nothing when compared to all the thoughts

I have to carry with me night and day;

and yet the love I bear

has helped me to survive this endless war;

I’d have been dead by now

bewailing all the sorrows of my heart,

except that thoughts of her have kept me living.

128

Italy, my Italy, though speech cannot

cure all the mortal wounds

that seem to me to fill your lovely body,

maybe my sighs at least can hope to aid

the Tiber and the Arno,

the Po as well, where I sit grieving now.

Ruler of Heaven, I pray

the mercy that first brought You here to earth

may turn now to Your loved and sacred country.

You see, my noble Lord,

what petty causes can bring savage wars;

these hearts that fierce, proud Mars

makes closed and hardened now,

open them, Father, soften and free them;

and let Your truth be heard

through me, although my tongue is hardly worthy.

All you whose hands, by Fortune’s means, now hold

the reins of power for

these lovely regions, for which no pity moves you,

what are these foreign swords doing among us?

And why should our green plains

be colored red by this barbaric blood?

A foolish error blinds you:

you see so little, thinking you see much,

looking for love and trust in venal hearts;

who has the most retainers

is most surrounded by his enemies!

Oh, deluge gathered up

in what strange wilderness

to come and flood our sweet and verdant fields!

And if by our own hands

we bring this on, who do we think will save us?

Nature provided well for our protection

when she put up the shield

of Alps between us and the raging Germans;

but blind desire, set against itself,

has found a clever way

to make this healthy body sick again.

Now inside the same cage,

the savage beasts are mingled with the flocks

which means the gentler, better ones will groan;

and all this comes about

from the descendants (sharpening our grief)

of those same uncouth people

whom Marius split open,

so much that memory still recalls his deed

when, thirsty and worn out,

he drank from streams that were half blood, half water.

I will not speak of Caesar, who once turned

the green fields red with blood

that poured from veins he’d opened with our steel.

It seems (who knows by what malignant stars)

the heavens hate us now,

and thanks to you, to whom so much was trusted.

Your warring wills lay waste

the fairest regions that the world can find.

What fault, what judgment, or what destiny

makes you attack your neighbors

and persecute the poor and the afflicted,

seeking in foreign parts

to hire mercenaries

who want to sell their souls and shed some blood?

I’m trying to speak the truth,

not out of hate for others or contempt.

And can’t you see, after so many proofs,

Bavarian deceit

that throws its hands aloft and jokes with Death?

The mockery outweighs the shame of loss.

But your own blood is shed

more freely, since these quarrels are your own.

From dawn to nine o’clock

please think about yourselves and you will see

that anyone who holds himself so cheap

can’t be expected to hold others dear.

Oh, noble Latin blood,

throw off these harmful burdens, do not make

an idol from a name

that’s empty and all vain;

and if that savage people from the north

look smarter than we are,

that shows our sin, it doesn’t stem from nature.

“Is this ground not the ground that I touched first?

And isn’t this my nest

in which I found myself so sweetly nursed?

Is not this my own country, which I trust,

a kind of mother to me,

the place where both my parents have been buried?”

By God, let this sometimes

fill up your mind and let you look with pity

upon the tears of all the sorry people

who put their hope in God

and next in you. If you would demonstrate

some signs of piety,

men would arise again

and take up arms; the battle would be short,

since ancient valor still

exists, not dead yet in Italian hearts.

My lords: consider how time flies with us

and how our lives, so brief,

are running past, while Death is at our backs.

You’re present now, but think of your departure,

when naked and alone at last,

your souls must venture on that dangerous path.

As you pass through this valley,

suppose you overcome your hate and anger,

those winds that blow against a peaceful life;

and take that time you spend

in giving pain to others and convert it

to some good action of

the hand or of the mind,

some worthy praise, some well-rewarding study:

down here one can rejoice

and find the road to Heaven free and open.

My song, I ask that you

speak out your message diplomatically,

because you go among a haughty people

whose wills are full, I fear,

of ancient and uncivilizing customs,

always the enemies of truth.

But you must try your luck

among the few who cherish magnanimity;

say to them: “Who’ll protect me?

I wander, crying out: Oh, peace, peace, peace!”

129

From thought to thought, from peak to mountain peak,

Love moves me forward, while each beaten path

I find contrary to a tranquil life.

If on some solitary slope I find

a spring or river, or a shady valley

between two hills, my soul seeks refuge there;

as Love dictates, it laughs

or weeps, now fearful, now assured, and then

my face, which follows as the soul leads on,

is cloudy and then clear,

but stays the same for just the briefest moment.

So anyone who knows of life would say:

“This man is burning and his state’s erratic.”

Among high mountains and in tangled woods

I find some rest; populous places, though,

are deadly enemies, they hurt my eyes.

And every step I take gives birth to new

thoughts of my lady, which can change to pleasures

the torments that I bear because of her;

and then I wouldn’t trade

the bitter sweetness of this life of mine,

because I say: “It seems that Love preserves you

against a better time;

though worthless to yourself, perhaps you’re dear

to someone else.” I take this thought and sigh:

“Could that perhaps be true? But how? Or when?”

Where some tall pine or hillside makes for shade

I often stop, and staring at a stone

I try to call her lovely face to mind.

Then coming to my senses once again

I find my breast awash with pity, saying:

“Alas, how came you here? How far she is!”

But while I can stay fixed,

my yearning mind on that first thought, and gaze

at her, and let myself forget myself,

I feel Love close at hand

and do not mind the error of my soul;

she’s all around me, she’s in everything,

and all I ask is that illusion last.

I’ve seen her many times (who will believe me?)

in clearest water, and on greenest grass,

and in the trunks of birches, seen her living,

and in a cloud, so white and lovely that

Leda would say her daughter’s beauty fades

the way a star does when the sun comes up.

And when I find myself

in wilderness or on deserted beaches,

the thoughts of her are even more amazing.

But when the truth dispels

that sweet deception, in that very place

I sink down cold, dead stone upon live rock,

a statue which can weep and think and write.

Up where the shadow of no mountain reaches,

upon the highest and most open peak

is where my strong desire seems to draw me.

There I can use my eyes, surveying all,

to take the measure of my losses, then

weep to release my gathered clouds of sorrow,

because I gaze and think

of how much air is standing there between us:

her lovely face, so near and yet so distant.

I softly tell myself:

“What do you know, you fool? Perhaps out there

someone is sighing at your distant absence.”

And in this thought my soul begins to breathe.

Oh, song, beyond the Alps,

where skies are both more happy and serene,

you’ll see me by a running stream once more,

where you can sense the breeze

distilling from a fresh and fragrant laurel;

that’s where my heart is, with the one who stole it:

what’s left of me is just a kind of ghost.

130

Since Mercy’s road is closed to me, I’ve come

along a desperate way, far from those eyes

in which were stored (I know not by what fate)

the rich reward of all my faithfulness.

I feed my heart with sighs, that’s all it asks,

I live on tears, I think I’m born to weep;

I don’t complain of that, since in my state

weeping is sweeter than you might believe.

One image has me rapt, and one not made

by Zeuxis or Praxiteles or Phidias,

but by a better craftsman, higher mind.

What Scythia or what Numidia

can keep me safe, if Envy, still not sated

by my rough exile, finds me out in hiding?

131

I’d sing of Love in such a novel fashion

that from her cruel side I would draw by force

a thousand sighs a day, kindling again

in her cold mind a thousand high desires;

I’d see her lovely face transform quite often

her eyes grow wet and more compassionate,

like one who feels regret, when it’s too late,

for causing someone’s suffering by mistake;

and I’d see scarlet roses in the snows,

tossed by the breeze, discover ivory

that turns to marble those who see it near them;

all this I’d do because I do not mind

my discontentment in this one short life,

but glory rather in my later fame.

132

If it’s not love, what is it then I feel?

But if it’s love, by God, what sort of love?

If good, why kill me with its bitterness?

If bad, why is each torment then so sweet?

If I burn willingly, why weep and howl?

And if against my will, what good’s lament?

Oh living death, oh you delightful pain,

how can you rule me if I don’t consent?

And if I do consent, why then I’m wrong

thus to complain. Amid contending winds

I am at sea, and my frail boat is rudderless,

empty of wisdom, and so prone to error

that I myself do not know what I want,

burning in winter, shivering in summer.

133

Love sets me up, a target for his arrows,

like snow in sun, like wax in fire, like clouds

before the wind; and I’m already hoarse

begging for mercy, Lady. You don’t care.

The deadly shot came at me from your eyes,

nor time nor place protect me from its blow;

from you alone come forth (you take it lightly!)

the sun and fire and wind that make me thus.

Thoughts are the arrows, and your face, the sun;

passion’s the fire; armed with those weapons

Love spears me, dazzles me, and melts me down;

and your angelic song, your very words,

your own sweet breath (I can’t defend myself),

these make the breeze that drives my life to flight.

134

I find no peace, and yet I am not warlike;

I fear and hope, I burn and turn to ice;

I fly beyond the sky, stretch out on earth;

my hands are empty, yet I hold the world.

One holds me prisoner, not locked up, not free;

won’t keep me for her own but won’t release me;

Love does not kill me, does not loose my chains,

he’d like me dead, he’d like me still ensnared.

I see without my eyes, cry with no tongue,

I want to die and yet I call for help,

hating myself but loving someone else.

I feed on pain, I laugh while shedding tears,

both death and life displease me equally;

and this state, Lady, is because of you.

135

Whatever’s strange and rare,

existing in whatever wondrous region,

if truly understood will prove

to most resemble me: your doing, Love.

There where the day comes forth

there flies a bird that all alone, no mate,

dies willingly and then

renews itself and comes to life again.

Thus my desire acts,

turns to the sun and reaching then the summit

of its high thoughts, burns itself up again

and is consumed by fire

and so reverts to its original;

it burns and dies and incarnates itself

and lives again competing with the phoenix.

There is a stone out there,

somewhere in the Indian Ocean, that’s

so bold that it draws iron

and pulls it out of wood, and ships go down.

That’s me, among the waves

of weeping, where that lovely rock

has pulled me to its hardness

and brought my life to shipwreck once again.

Thus a stone has robbed

my soul (stealing my heart—hard once, it held

me up, where I now break and scatter),

a stone more greedy for

my flesh than iron. Oh, ignoble luck,

that in my flesh I’m hurried toward the shore

by that live lodestone of sweet calamity.

Out in the farthest west

there is a wild creature who’s more gentle

and quiet than the rest,

but sorrow, pain, and death live in her eyes;

the sight must be most wary

that turns in her direction; it can see

the rest of her quite safely

if it is careful not to meet her eyes.

But I’m disastrous, heedless,

I always seem to run straight toward my pain

and know how much I’ve suffered and will suffer;

but my desire, greedy thing,

both blind and deaf, transports me so that her

charming eyes and holy face will kill me

this wild beast angelic in her innocence.

Somewhere in the south

a fountain gushes (for the sun it’s named),

a fountain that by nature

boils at night and is ice-cold by day;

and it grows colder as

the sun mounts up and as the light grows stronger.

That is what happens to me,

for I’m a fountain occupied by tears:

I lose that lovely light

that is my sun, it leaves, I’m sad, alone,

my eyes are desolate and dark night comes,

that’s when I burn; but if

the gold and living radiance of that sun

appears to me, I change, inside and out,

and turn to ice so frozen I become!

Epirus has a spring,

whereof it’s written that, despite its cold,

spent torches can

rekindle there, and flaming ones go out.

My soul, which had not yet

been damaged by the flames of love, approached

to just a little distance

from the cold one for whom I ever sigh,

and then burst into flames;

such pain the stars and sun have never seen,

it would have moved a marble heart to pity;

and having caused the blaze,

then frozen lovely virtue put it out.

How often she has lit and quenched my heart

I know, who felt it and it makes me angry.

Far out beyond our shores

two springs are in the Fortunate Isles,

twin fountains; he who drinks

from one dies laughing, while the other rescues.

That kind of fortune marks

my life, because I could die laughing from

the pleasure that I take

if cries of sorrow didn’t temper it.

Love, you who guide me

even to shades of fame, hidden and dark,

let us not speak about this spring; it brims

but has its greatest flow

when Taurus joins together with the sun:

my eyes weep always, but they weep the most

in that same season when I saw my lady.

If anyone asks, dear Song,

what I am up to, say: “Next to a huge stone

in a closed valley where the Sorgue comes forth,

he sits; there’s no one there to see him,

except for Love, who never goes away, and

the image of a person who destroys him;

he, for his part flees all other company.”

136

May fire from Heaven rain down on your tresses,

oh, wicked one, since evil gives you pleasure;

once you ate acorns, drank from streams, who now

grow rich and great from others’ poverty,

you nest of treason, hatching from yourself

most of the ills that now afflict the world,

you slave of wine, of soft beds and of feasting,

in whom intemperance finds its highest power!

Young girls and old men chase around your chambers,

the while Beelzebub, living in their midst,

brings bellows, fires, and mirrors to their revels.

You were raised not on pillows, under shade,

but naked to the winds, barefoot in thorns;

may your life’s stench rise up until God smells it!

137

Rapacious Babylon has stuffed her sack

with God’s great anger and with wicked vices

until it’s fit to burst; she’s made her gods

Venus and Bacchus, not Jupiter or Pallas.

I wait for justice, struggling, growing weary;

yet I foresee a sultan who will rule her

and take his court (not soon enough for me)

where it belongs, way over there in Baghdad.

Her idols shall be scattered on the earth,

her lofty towers, enemies of Heaven,

burned with their keepers, both outside and in.

Then lovely souls and virtue’s intimates

will rule the world; we’ll see a golden age

and the return of ancient worthiness.

138

Fountain of sorrow, dwelling place of anger,

school of all errors and heresy’s temple,

once Rome, now false and wicked Babylon,

on whose account there are such tears and sighs:

confusion’s forge and foundry, cruel prison

where good expires, infamy is nourished,

hell for the living: it’s a great miracle

that Christ has not shown anger at you yet.

Begun in chaste and humble poverty,

you lift your horns against your founders now,

you shameless whore! Where do you place your hopes?

In your adulterers, in evil spawned

from ill-got gains? Constantine won’t return.

Let the sad realm that holds him take you too!

139

The more I spread my wings, filled with desire

to join you, flock of friends, the more my fortune

entangles me with birdlime, checks my flight,

and holds me back or makes me go astray.

My heart, whom I send out against his will,

is always with you in that open valley

where land and sea embrace so tenderly;

I left him weeping there the other day.

I went off to the left while he went straight;

force carried me, while he was led by Love;

he toward Jerusalem and I toward Egypt.

But patience is a comfort in our sorrow;

for by long habit, now routine between us,

we never are together very long.

140

Love that lives and reigns in all my thoughts

and makes his seat of power in my heart,

sometimes appears in armor on my brow

and camps there, setting up his banner.

Then she who teaches us both love and patience

and wants my great desire, kindled hope,

to be reined in by reason, shame, and reverence,

grows angry at our boldness, hot within.

Which makes Love flee in terror to my heart;

abandoning all enterprise, he weeps

and shakes; hides there, and will come forth no more.

What can I do, when my lord is afraid,

except stay with him till the final hour?

For he dies well who dies while loving deeply.

141

The way a simple butterfly, in summer,

will sometimes fly, while looking for the light,

right into someone’s eyes, in its desire,

whereby it kills itself and causes pain:

so I run always toward my fated sun,

her eyes, from which such sweetness comes to me,

since Love cares nothing for the curb of reason

and judgment is quite vanquished by desire.

And I can see quite well how they avoid me,

and I well know that I will die from this,

because my strength cannot withstand the pain;

but oh, how sweetly Love does dazzle me

so that I wail some other’s pain, not mine,

and my blind soul consents to her own death.

142

Toward the sweet shadow of those lovely leaves

I ran, in flight from a relentless light

that burned me, even here, from the third Heaven;

snow was already fading from the hills

thanks to the loving breeze which starts the season,

and in the meadows grew green grass and branches.

The world had never seen such graceful branches

nor had the wind blown through such tender leaves

as showed themselves to me in that first season;

and thus it was, in fear of that hot light,

I chose for safety not the shade of hills

but of that tree most favored by high Heaven.

A laurel, then, protected me from Heaven,

and thus quite often, longing for its branches,

I’ve strayed through woods and wandered over hills;

but never since have I found trunk or leaves

so honored by the bright supernal light

that they did not change color with the season.

Therefore, more firmly, season after season,

in answer to a call I heard from Heaven

and guided by a clear and mild light,

I came back always, pledged to those same branches,

both when the earth is scattered with their leaves

and when the sun is greening all the hills.

Woods, rivers, rocks, and fields and trees and hills,

all the creation, must give way to seasons,

vanquished by time, and thus from these green leaves

I ask forgiveness that, beneath the heavens,

ever-changing, I sought to fly those branches

and their birdlime, soon as I saw the light.

It was so pleasing to me first, that light,

that full of joy I traveled across hills

in order to approach those lovely branches.

Now life grows short; now place and season

direct me to another path to Heaven

and show me fruit as well as flowers and leaves.

Some other love, new leaves, another light,

another climb toward Heaven, other hills

I seek (the season’s right), and other branches.

143

Now when I listen to you speak, so sweetly,

like Love himself, inspiring his disciples,

my passion, kindled, showers out such sparks

that they might even set the dead on fire;

that’s when my lovely lady comes to mind

and those few times when she was kind to me

before I woke again, not to the sound of bells

but to the noise of sighs, my own, of course.

I see her turn, her hair stirred by the wind,

and it’s as if she walks into my heart,

so beautiful, the one who keeps its key.

But my profound delight, which ties my tongue,

has not the means or strength to publish her

and show what she is like, enthroned within.

144

I never saw the sun come up so fair

when all the sky is free of mist and clouds,

nor after rain the great celestial arc

spread itself out through air with many colors,

as on that day when I took on my burden

and saw her lovely face transform itself

blazing before me (and my words here fail me)

as something that no mortal life could match.

I witnessed Love, moving her lovely eyes

so gently then that every other sight

has ever since seemed dark to me in contrast,

Sennuccio; I saw Love, saw the bow

he drew—my life was safe no more, and yet

it seems to long to look on him again.

145

Oh, put me where the sun kills flowers and grass

or where the ice and snow can overcome him;

or put me where his chariot’s mild and light,

where he’s restored or where he’s kept from us;

give me bad fortune or a run of luck,

put me in clear, sweet air, or dark and heavy;

set me in night, in daytime long or short,

in ripe maturity or early youth;

put me in Heaven, earth, or the abyss,

or mountain peaks or in low, swampy valleys;

make me move freely or transfix my limbs;

give me obscurity or lasting fame:

I’ll still be what I’ve been, live as I’ve lived,

I’ll still continue my trilustral sighing.

146

Oh, noble spirit warm with burning virtue

for whom I fill so many pages still,

oh, sole unblemished home of chastity,

strong tower built on your deep worth’s foundation,

oh, flame, oh, roses spread on a sweet drift

of living snow, whose mirror makes me better,

whose pleasure makes me raise my wings to fly

up to that lovely face, brighter than sunlight:

with your name, if my rhymes could reach so far

and still make sense, I would fill Thule and Bactria,

the Nile and the Don, Atlas, Olympus, Calpe.

Since I can’t take it to the world’s four corners,

I’ll say it to the lovely country which

the Apennines divide, the sea and Alps surround.

147

When my desire, which rides me hard and rules me

with two hot spurs as well as a hard bit,

runs wild from time to time, outside the law,

as if to give my spirits what they want,

he finds a person who can read my brow

and see the fear and boldness of my heart;

and he sees Love, who comes to chasten him,

by flashing lightning from her angry eyes.

At that, like someone dodging thunderbolts

from angry Jove, he hastens to retreat,

showing how fear can quickly curb desire;

but cooling fires and shivering bouts of hope

that happen in my soul, so glass-transparent,

can sometimes brighten her sweet face again.

148

Not Tesin, Po, Varo, Arno, Adige, Tiber,

Tigris, Euphrates, Nile, Ganges, Indus, Hermus,

Danube, Don, Alpheus, Garonne that breaks the seas,

Timavus, Rhône, Rhine, Seine, Elbe, Loire, or Hebrus—

nor ivy, fir, pine, beech, or juniper—

could ease the fire that wearies my sad heart

like the fair stream that sometimes weeps with me

and the slim tree my verses celebrate.

I find this helps me during Love’s assaults,

which make me spend my time all dressed in armor

while life goes past me, taking giant leaps.

Then let this laurel grow on this fresh bank,

and may the man who planted it enjoy

sweet shade, soft waters, writing happy thoughts.

149

From time to time it seems her form and smile,

sweet and angelic, grow less harsh toward me,

the air of her fine face

clears like the sky, her happy eyes grow brighter.

These sighs, what are they doing with me now,

that used to come from sorrow

and once made very clear

the desperate, anguished nature of my life?

Happens I turn my face in her direction

to try to ease my heart,

it seems that Love is there

lending his aid and taking up my cause.

Yet I don’t think this war is going to end

or any tranquil peace come soothe my heart:

my passion burns the more

the more I’m tempted by my hopefulness.

150

“What are you doing, soul? What do you think?

Will we have peace? A truce? Or always war?”—

“I do not know our future, but I see

our torment doesn’t please her lovely eyes.”—

“What does that help, if with those eyes in summer

she turns us into ice, to fire in winter?”—

“Not she, but he who has control of them.”—

“What’s that to us, if she sees and is silent?”—

“Sometimes her tongue is silent while her heart

cries out, and though her face is dry and gay

she’s weeping where your gazing cannot reach.”—

“My mind is still not satisfied, and sorrow,

which gathers there, and stagnates, must burst out;

it’s hard for one who’s wretched to have hopes.”

151

No tired helmsman ever fled to port,

escaping angry waves and looming storm,

so readily as I flee my dark thoughts

to where my passion spurs me and inclines me;

no holy light has conquered mortal sight

more fully than has hers my own dim eyes

with rays sweet, fair, soft, black, and white, and mild

from where Love gilds and sharpens his fell arrows.

He isn’t blind; I see him, with his quiver,

naked except for where he’s veiled by shame;

a boy with wings, not painted but alive.

And he shows me what he conceals from many;

for bit by bit, within her lovely eyes,

I read the things I say or write of Love.

152

This humble wild thing, with tiger’s heart, or bear’s,

who comes in human form or angel’s shape,

spins me around too much, in tears and laughter,

in fear and hope, and makes my state uncertain.

If soon she doesn’t take me or release me,

but keeps me still reined in, between the two,

by that sweet poison running through my heart

and all my veins, Sir Love, my life is over.

My frail and weary strength cannot survive

among so many changes; all at once

it burns, it freezes, blushes and turns pale.

It hopes to flee, and thereby end its suffering,

like one who’s failing hour to hour; for he

is powerless who cannot even die.

153

Go forth, hot sighs, and reach to her cold heart,

break up the ice that fights against her pity;

if mortal prayers are listened to in Heaven,

let me have death or mercy for my torment.

Go forth, sweet thoughts, and speak of what exists

there where her lovely gaze cannot extend;

if still her cruelty offends, or my ill star,

why then, we’ll know we’re past all hope and error.

You both can say, although perhaps not fully,

that our condition is as dark and troubled

as hers is now quite peaceful and serene.

Be confident, and go, for Love comes with you;

my cruel fortune may yet terminate

if I can read good weather in my sun.

154

The stars, the heavens, and the elements

contested, using all their arts and care,

to make that living light where Nature and

the sun are mirrored; nothing matches it.

The work’s so high, so lovely and so new,

that mortal gaze cannot stay fixed on it

because her eyes, beyond all measure, can

rain down Love’s sweetness and his endless grace.

The air affected by their rays burns clear

with chastity, transfigured so completely

it’s quite beyond our reach of thought or word;

a place where base desires don’t exist,

just love of honor, virtue. When else, ever,

was low desire thus destroyed by beauty?

155

Caesar and Jove were never so much moved

(the one to wound, the other one to thunder)

that pity would not help put out their anger

and make them lay their usual weapons down:

my lady wept, and my lord wished me there

to see her and to hear her lamentations,

to fill me up with sorrow and desire,

to probe my very marrow and my bones.

That weeping Love depicted—no, he sculpted

so I could see it, and those words he wrote

upon a diamond set within my heart,

wherewith he comes back, often, with his keys,

strong and ingenious, and draws forth from it

the precious tears, the long and heavy sighs.

156

I saw on earth angelic attributes

and heavenly beauties unmatched in this world,

the memory both pleases me and pains me:

all else I see seems shadows, dreams, or smoke.

And I saw weeping those two lovely lights

that have a thousand times provoked the sun

to envy; and heard words mixed up with sighs

that would make mountains move and rivers stop.

Love, wisdom, valor, piety, and sorrow—

these made a sweeter music when she wept

than any to be heard throughout the world;

the heavens were so taken with the sound

that no leaf stirred upon a single branch

so great a sweetness filled the air and wind.

157

That always cruel and yet honored day

engraved its living image on my heart

in such a way no wit or skill can tell;

but I revisit it in memory.

Her gestures, marked with gracious pity, and

her bittersweet lamenting, which I heard,

made me unsure: a mortal or a goddess?

She made the sky grow clear and bright all round.

Her head was finest gold, her face warm snow,

her eyebrows ebony, her eyes two stars

where Love has never bent his bow in vain;

pearls and crimson roses formed the words

that gathered her exquisite sorrow up,

her sighs were flames, her tears were precious crystal.

158

No matter where I turn my weary eyes

as if to rest them from their endless longing,

I find that someone paints a lady’s portrait

as if to keep my passions fresh and green.

With graceful sorrow she breathes forth, it seems,

a deep compassion, wringing noble hearts,

and in my ears, beyond the sense of sight,

I seem to hear her speech and holy sighs.

Love and the truth were with me when I spoke

of beauties that were matchless in this world

and never yet encountered under stars;

nor had such sweet, devoted words been heard,

nor had the sun seen tears so beautiful

issuing forth from such attractive eyes.

159

What part of Heaven was it, what Idea,

where Nature found the pattern of that face,

that lovely visage that she brought down here

to show the capabilities up there?

What nymph beside a spring, what goddess in

what woods, has ever loosed such golden hair?

What heart has ever housed so many virtues

(although their sum is guilty of my death)?

They search in vain, who never saw her eyes,

if beautiful divinity’s their goal,

especially if they never saw them moving;

nor can they know how Love both kills and heals

if they have never listened to her sigh

or hearkened to the sound of her sweet laughter.

160

Both Love and I are full of sheer amazement,

like someone who has seen something fantastic,

watching her speak or laugh, gazing on her

who’s like herself but not like any other.

Out of the clear serene, her tranquil brow,

shine the two stars that guide me with their light

so much so that there is no other source

that might inflame someone to noble love.

It’s such a miracle when on the grass

she blossoms like a flower, or when she

presses her bosom to a green tree’s branch!

What sweetness in the spring to see her walking

alone and pensive, picking buds and weaving

a garland for her shining golden curls!

161

Oh, scattered steps, oh, ardent, craving thoughts,

oh, stubborn memory, wild eagerness,

oh, powerful desire, feeble heart,

and oh, my eyes, not eyes but running fountains—

oh, leaves that honor brows of fame and glory,

oh, single symbol of twofold importance;

oh, life of laboring, oh, sweet mistaking

that sends me questing, over shores and mountains;

oh, lovely face, where Love has placed his spurs

and reins as well, so he can prod and guide me

just as he pleases while I can’t unseat him;

oh, noble, loving souls, if you exist,

anywhere in the world, you shades and dust,

ah, stay so you can witness all my suffering!

162

Lucky, happy flowers, and well-born grass

whereon my lady’s apt to walk in thought,

and shore, that listens to her sweet words spoken

and keeps some imprint of her lovely foot,

and slender trees, green leaves on unripe branches,

delicate violets, pale in forest light,

the shady woods where sunlight filters through

and helps the saplings grow into tall trees,

oh, gentle countryside, and river pure,

bathing her lovely face and brilliant eyes,

taking your worth from their illumination;

how much I envy you your dear, chaste contact!

By now there’s probably no stone among you

that hasn’t learned to burn with my same passion.

163

Love, you who can see clearly all my thoughts

and those harsh steps where you alone can guide me,

look searchingly into my heart’s recesses,

open to you, though they are hid from others.

You know what I have suffered in your service

and still, day after day, you climb these mountains

with no attention to my great fatigue

or to the awful steepness of the trail.

I do see in the distance that sweet light

you drag me toward, while goading me so harshly,

but I lack wings like yours with which to fly.

And yet you satisfy my wild passions

by giving me a great love to consume me,

and I don’t think she minds my sighs at all.

164

Now that the heavens, earth, and winds are silent,

and sleep restrains the birds and wild beasts,

night drives her starry chariot overhead,

and in its heavy bed the sea lies waveless.

I am awake; I burn, think, weep; and she,

sweet pain who ruins me, is always there

before my eyes; I am at war, I’m wounded;

thinking of her is all the help I get.

Thus, from one clear and living fountain

come both the sweet and bitter in my life;

one single hand can pierce me and then heal me,

and since my suffering has no end in sight,

I die a thousand times a day and then

I am reborn, still distant from true health.

165

As her white foot moves forward through cool grass,

her sweet and quiet walking starts to spread

a power, emanating from her soles,

that acts to open and renew the flowers.

Love only bothers trapping noble hearts

and doesn’t try to wield his power elsewhere;

he makes such warmth rain down from her sweet eyes

that I forget about all other bait.

Her words are matched exactly with her gait

and with her gentle glance at things around,

and with her measured, modest, mild gestures.

From four such sparks, though not from them alone,

comes this great fire in which I live and burn,

for I’ve become a night bird in the sunlight.

166

If I’d remained within that selfsame cave

in which Apollo turned into a prophet,

Florence might have a poet of her own,

not just Verona, Mantua, Arunca.

But since my land no longer grows good reeds

from water of that rock, another planet

must be my guide as I reap thorns and thistles

from this bare field of mine with my hooked sickle.

Dry olive tree, the waters trickle elsewhere

that flowed down from Parnassus and helped make

it flower, flourishing in other times.

Bad fortune or my own mistakes deprive me

of all good fruit, if great eternal Jove

will not let grace from Heaven rain on me.

167

Maybe Love makes her drop her lovely eyes

toward earth, and uses his own hands to shape

her vagrant breath into a sigh, releasing it

in a clear, soft, divine, angelic voice;

sweetly my heart is being stolen from me,

my thoughts and wishes altering, within;

I say: “They’re going to finish plundering:

Heaven’s designed this martyr’s death for me.”

The sound, though, ties my senses up with sweetness

and keeps my soul, though eager to depart,

rapt in the act of listening, feeling blessed;

so I live on, and thus she winds the spool

of my appointed life, and then unwinds it,

this heavenly siren, peerless in our midst.

168

Love sends me that sweet thought, the one which is

a confidant of old between us two,

and comforts me, says I was never closer

to having what I yearn for than right now.

His words, I’ve found, are sometimes true and then

are sometimes false; I don’t know what to think,

and so I live somewhere between the two:

no yes or no rings honest to my heart.

Meantime the days go by, and in my mirror

I watch myself approximate that season

that contradicts his promise and my hope.

Well, let it come. I’m not the only one

who’s aging. My desire doesn’t age,

but how much time, I wonder, have I left?

169

Full of one longing thought that sends me far

from others, lone wayfarer in the world,

from time to time I even hide from me,

still seeking only she whom I should shun;

then she walks by, so cruel and so sweet

that my soul flutters, trying to take flight;

she leads a mob of armored sighs around,

this lovely enemy of Love and me.

If I’m not wrong, I can make out a gleam

of pity on her proud and cloudy brow,

which partly clears the sorrow in my heart:

I gather up my soul at that, and when

I feel I’m ready to explain my sorrow,

I have so much to say I can’t begin!

170

How many times, using my faithful guides,

have I learned courage from her kind expression,

to meet my enemy with skillful words

and take advantage of her humble bearing.

But then her eyes expose that thought as useless,

since all my fortune, all my destiny,

my good, my ill, my life, my death, are placed

by Love, who has that power, in her hands.

Result: I’ve never managed to bring forth

a word that anyone but I could fathom,

because Love’s made me quivering and weak.

And I see well how burning love can tie

one’s tongue up, steal away one’s breath: he who

can say he’s burning isn’t much on fire.

171

Love’s put me in the grasp of fair, cruel arms

that kill unjustly, and if I protest,

my suffering is doubled; better, then,

to die in loving silence, as I’m used to;

for she could burn the Rhine up with her eyes

and break his icy ridges when he’s frozen;

her pride is so connected to her beauty

that it displeases her to know she’s pleasing.

My own wit won’t reduce or wear away

the lovely diamond that makes up her heart;

the rest of her is moving, breathing marble;

but she can never, by contempt or by

the darkened looks she gives me, take away

the hopes I harbor or the sighs I sigh.

172

Oh, Envy, you old enemy of virtue,

so eagerly opposed to good beginnings,

along what path did you so silently

enter that lovely breast, with what art change it?

You pulled up my salvation by the roots:

you made her think I was a lucky lover,

she who had heard my chaste and humble prayers,

and now appears to hate them and reject them.

But even if, with cruel and bitter gestures,

she weeps about my luck, laughs at my weeping,

she cannot alter any thought of mine;

a thousand times a day she may destroy me,

and I’ll still love her and have hopes of her;

when she affrights me, Love will give me courage.

173

Admiring the clear sun of her great eyes,

where there is one who makes mine wet and bloodshot,

my weary soul takes leave of my poor heart

and sets out for its earthly paradise;

then finding that it’s full of sweet and bitter,

it sees the world is made of spiderwebs,

and it complains to Love accordingly,

about his searing spurs and his hard bit.

Between these opposite and mixed extremes,

with frozen passion, then with kindled longing,

it stays part happy and part miserable;

its happy thoughts are few, its sad ones many,

and mostly it repents its bold endeavors;

such is the fruit that springs from such a root.

174

Cruel star (if heavens have indeed the power

they’re thought to have), beneath which I was bred,

cruel cradle where I lay, newborn, and cruel

earth on which I later set my feet,

and cruel lady, she who used her eyes

(the bow that loved to have me as a target)

to make the wound I’ve mentioned to you, Love,

since with those very weapons you could heal it.

But you enjoy my pain, it pleases you;

that’s not her case, I think, she’s not that harsh;

the blow is from an arrow, not a spear.

And that consoles me: better pine for her

than be with someone else. By your gold arrow

you swear that that is true, and I believe you.

175

When I recall the time and place where I

first lost myself, and think of that dear knot

Love tied me up with, using his own hands

(making the bitter sweet, weeping a pleasure),

I’m tinder, sulfur, and my heart’s a fire

lit by those gentle words I always hear,

such flames that I enjoy the conflagration,

and live on it and care for little else.

The sun that seems to shine for my eyes only

still warms me with her beams when evening comes

just as she did quite early in the day;

and from afar she so ignites and kindles

that memory survives, still fresh and whole,

to make me see the time, the place, the knot.

176

Right through the midst of savage, hostile woods,

where even men at arms travel at risk,

I walk secure, and nothing can alarm me,

except the sun, whose rays are living Love.

And I go singing (oh, my foolish thoughts!)

of her, whom Heaven cannot keep me from;

she stays before my eyes, accompanied

by maids and ladies who are firs and beeches.

I seem to hear her when I hear the branches,

the breeze, the leaves, the birds’ complaints, the waters

that run with murmurs soft among green grass.

Seldom has silence or the lonely horror

of shady forests thrilled my heart so much,

except this fear that I may lose my sun.

177

In just a single day I have been shown

a thousand slopes and then a thousand rivers

by Love, who gives his followers winged feet

and wingèd hearts, to fly to the third sphere.

Sweet to be in this famous Ardennes forest,

alone, unarmed where Mars can lie in ambush;

a ship adrift, dismasted, rudderless,

filled with a host of grave and secret thoughts.

But now, at this dark day’s approaching close,

recalling where I came from, on what wings,

I start to falter at my own great daring;

the lovely country, the delightful river,

welcome me back and reassure my heart,

already turning to the source of light.

178

Love spurs me on and reins me in at once,

comforts and terrifies, burns and freezes me,

is kind, then scorns me, summons and dismisses,

thrills me with hope, then fills me up with sorrow,

now high, now low, he leads my weary heart;

until my wandering desire’s lost

and starts to hate its only source of pleasure,

and most peculiar notions fill my mind.

A kind thought shows my mind the river crossing

(not through the water pouring from the eyes)

where it might get to where it feels contentment;

but then, as if a great force turned it back,

it has to go along another path,

agreeing to slow death, against its will.

179

Geri, when my sweet enemy gets angry

the way she sometimes does, in her great pride,

I have one comfort keeping me alive,

and by its strength my soul can go on breathing:

whichever way she turns her eyes in anger,

as if she thought to take my life and light,

I gaze right back with such humility

that she relents and throws away her scorn.

Were that not so, I’d no more go to see her

than I’d seek out Medusa’s face, the one

that turned so many victims into marble.

You try this too; all other aids are useless,

as far as I can see, and flight won’t help

because our lord has speedy wings to chase us.

180

Po, you can bear my outer shell along

upon your rapid current’s forceful waves,

but the spirit housed within the shell is not

subject to your force, or to anyone’s;

he moves straight on ahead, he does not tack

to port or starboard, straight into the wind,

toward golden foliage, beating his strong wings

against the wind and water, sail and oars.

Monarch among the rivers, proud god, you

who greet the sun when it is bringing day

and leave behind a fairer light, to westward:

you carry on your horn my mortal part;

the spirit part, befeathered by his love,

is flying back to where he started from.

181

Love spread out in the grass a graceful net

of gold and pearls, underneath a branch

of that same evergreen I love so well,

despite the ways its shadows make me sad.

The bait was seed he scatters and then reaps,

bitter and sweet, my fear and my desire;

such gentle, quiet notes had not been heard

since that first day when Adam came awake;

bright light was growing all around and making

the sun itself grow dim; she held the rope

in hands that rival ivory and snow.

And so I fell, into the net, and I’ve

been trapped by her sweet bearing, and her words,

and by desire, pleasure, and my hope.

182

Love fires up my heart with ardent zeal,

then makes it shrink again with icy fear;

he makes my mind uncertain which is greater,

the hope or fear, the mighty flame or frost.

I shiver when it’s hot, I burn in cold,

I’m filled with fear and also with desire,

as if a lady seemed to have concealed

a full-grown man beneath her dress and veil.

My own especial pain’s the first of these:

I burn by day and night, an illness sweet

beyond all comprehension, verse, or rhyme;

the other pains are less; the flame itself

sees everyone alike; who thinks to fly

up toward her light would spread his wings in vain.

183

If that sweet glance of hers can murder me,

and little words, so soft and sweet and gentle,

and if Love gives her total mastery

when she just speaks or simply when she smiles,

then what, alas, will happen to me if

through some mistake of mine or some bad luck

she who protects me now should take away

the pity from her eyes and thus dispatch me?

That’s why I tremble, feel my heart freeze up,

if her expression changes in the least,

a fear that’s born of long experience:

All women are by nature changeable;

I know quite well that any state of love

may not persist for long within their hearts.