by David Young
What sweetness in the spring to see her walking
alone and pensive, picking buds and weaving
a garland for her shining golden curls!
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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!
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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!
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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<
br />
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Nature, and Love, and that sweet, humble soul
where all high virtues congregate and rule,
contrive to thwart me: Love intends to kill me,
promptly, ingeniously, as is his style;
Nature sustains that soul by just a thread,
so delicate that it can bear no strain;
she’s shy and shows no tendency to dwell