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Solea da la fontana di mia vita - 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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Solea da la fontana di mia vita

  • From my life’s fountain I was wont to stray,
  • And wandering over lands and seas would go,
  • Not by desire impelled but destiny;
  • And ever went (such aid did Love convey)
  • To banishment (how bitter, Love did know),
  • Pasturing my heart on hope and memory.
  • Now I surrender and my arms resign
  • Unto a fortune pitiless and stern
  • That hath despoiled me of my hope benign;
  • And now to memory only must I turn,
  • Feeding my longing heart with dreams alone,
  • So faint with fasting hath my spirit grown.
  • * * * * * *
  • If my dull mind had been with me at need,
  • And my vain longings had not sought to bend
  • My thoughts another way, in the sweet face
  • Of my dear lady I could plainly read
  • That I had reached of all my joy the end
  • And the beginning of much bitterness,
  • And learning this and finding swift release
  • While still she lived, from my affliction sore—
  • This grievous veil of flesh,—in joy and peace
  • I might have gone before,
  • And watched them raise in heaven her dwelling fair;
  • Now I must follow her with snowy hair.
  • * * * * * *
  • Song, say to him who in his love is blest,
  • ‘If thou art well contented, die to-day,
  • For timely parting is not grief, but rest;
  • Who can die happy, let him not delay.’
  • cccxxxi

In the twenty-fifth canzone, Tacer non posso, e temo non adopre, the goddess of Fortune, who rules and foresees the destinies of men, converses with the poet in the fifth, sixth, and seventh stanzas, and thus describes the birth, the childhood and early womanhood of Laura, in a series of brilliant images, where the presence of only one dark cloud portended her approaching doom.