The work mixes first-person prose recollections and lyric poems to chart a young man's ardent, spiritualized devotion to an idealized woman, beginning with youthful admiration, celebrating meetings and composing sonnets and canzoni, mourning her death, and transmuting personal desire into a principle of divine love and poetic vocation. Each poem is framed by explanatory prose that reflects on language, symbolism, and the moral meaning of love, while cataloguing poetic development and the consolations of memory and wisdom. The sequence anticipates later theological and imaginative concerns by transforming personal grief into ethical reflection and poetic practice.