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Fuggendo la pregionc ove Amor m’ebbe - 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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Fuggendo la pregionc ove Amor m’ebbe

  • After long years, escaping from the cell
  • Where Love, to work his will, imprisoned me,
  • O women, long the tale if I should tell
  • How I repented of my liberty.
  • My heart confessed it could not live a day
  • Apart from love and hope, and then there came
  • Craftier than I, a traitor on my way
  • In such false mask, he lured me to my shame.1
  • And many a time, sighing for what is past,
  • I cry, ‘Alas! the yoke and bond and chain
  • Were sweeter than to walk released and free.’
  • O wretched me! I know my fate at last,
  • Too late, delivered with still bitterer pain
  • From the sweet pangs that had encompassed me.
  • lxxxix

Again and again his passion returns. In 1339 or 1340 Simone Martini, a distinguished painter of Siena, was employed at the papal court at Avignon, and Petrarch induced him to paint a miniature of Laura which the poet could carry with him upon his journeys. Petrarch wrote two sonnets on this theme, of which the following is one.

[1 ]One of the commentators believes that Petrarch here hints at the attractions of another. This seems unwarranted.