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Ovunque gli occhi volgo - Francesco Petrarch, Some Love Songs [1915]

Edition used:

Some Love Songs of Petrarch, translated and annotated with a Biographical Introduction by William Dudley Foulke (Oxford University Press, 1915).

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Ovunque gli occhi volgo

  • Where’er I turn mine eyes
  • A joy serene I find,
  • While fancy whispers ‘Here her glance she threw’.
  • The flowers and grass I gather, I do prize
  • When memory brings to mind,
  • ‘She pressed the gracious soil whereon ye grew,
  • Wandering between the mountain and the stream.
  • Perchance she made of you a fragrant chair
  • Blooming and fresh and fair!’
  • Thus not one spot is lost in my sweet dream.
  • I think ’tis better so
  • Than if each place I did more surely know!
  • O spirit blest, what must thy graces be,
  • That thou canst make such worshipper of me!
  • cxxv

After 1337. Cochin, p. 90.

The fourteenth ode, here given in full, is in the original perhaps the most finished love song ever written. Only a very small part of its grace and beauty can be transferred to another tongue. The picture presented by the fourth stanza especially is one which has hardly a superior in lyric poetry.

De Sade believes this ode refers to some place near Avignon where Petrarch had met Laura, and to which he went frequently in the hope of seeing her (i. 207). Most commentators are satisfied that it refers to Vaucluse, since not only does the description correspond, but Petrarch in other poems also declared, as he does here in the second stanza, that it was in this place that he hoped to die.