Poems and translations

Chapter 32: HE CEASES TO SPEAK OF HER GRACES AND HER VIRTUES WHICH ARE NO MORE

Open in WeRead

Explore more books like this:

About This Book

The collection gathers lyric and ballad-like poems that portray rural landscapes, local speech, and vivid characters through dark humor, elegy, and plainspoken lyricism; many pieces are concise narratives or monologues about love, death, loss, and social life, while others register mythic or meditative moods. A substantial section offers translations and adaptations from Petrarch, Villon, Leopardi, and medieval lyricists, varying between literal and free renderings. A prefatory essay frames the poet's interest in mixing exalted feeling with the material of ordinary life. The sequence balances songful rhythms with austere images and an abrupt, colloquial voice.

HE CEASES TO SPEAK OF HER
GRACES AND HER VIRTUES
WHICH ARE NO MORE

The eyes that I would be talking of so warmly, and the arms, and the hands, and the feet, and the face that are after calling me away from myself, and making me a lonesome man among all people.

The hair that was of shining gold, and brightness of the smile that was the like of an angel’s surely, and was making a paradise of the earth, are turned to a little dust that knows nothing at all.

And yet I myself am living; it is for this I am making a complaint to be left without the light I had such a great love for, in good fortune and bad, and this will be the end of my songs of love, for the vein where I had cleverness is dried up, and every thing I have is turned to complaint only.