As of substantial things, away so fast,
Shall fleet, that mortals, at their speed aghast,
Watching the change of all beneath the moon,
Shall ask, what once they were, and will be soon?
The time will come when every change shall cease,
120 This quick revolving wheel shall rest in peace:
No summer then shall glow, nor winter freeze;
Nothing shall be to come, and nothing past,
But an eternal now shall ever last.
Though time shall be no more, yet space shall give
A nobler theatre to love and live.
The winged courier then no more shall claim
The power to sink or raise the notes of Fame,
Or give its glories to the noontide ray:
True merit then, in everlasting day,
130 Shall shine for ever, as at first it shone
At once to God and man and angels known.
Happy are they who in this changing sphere
Already have begun the bright career
That reaches to the goal which, all in vain,
The Muse would blazon in her feeble strain:
But blest above all other blest is he
Who from the trammels of mortality,
Ere half the vital thread ran out, was free,
Mature for Heaven; where now the matchless fair
140 Preserves those features, that seraphic air,
And all those mental charms that rais’d my mind,
To judge of heaven while yet on earth confined.
That soft attractive glance that won my heart
When first my bosom felt unusual smart,
Now beams, now glories, in the realms above,
Fed by th’eternal source of light and love.
Then shall I see her as I first beheld,
But lovelier far; and by herself excell’d;
And I distinguish’d in the bands above
150 Shall hear this plaudit in the choirs of love.
’Lo! this is he who sung ill mournful strains
For many years a lover’s doubts and pains;
Yet in this soul-expanding, sweet employ,
A sacred transport felt above all vulgar joy.’
She too shall wonder at herself to hear
Her praises ring around the radiant sphere:
But of that hour it is not mine to know;
To her perhaps, the period of my woe
Is manifest; for she my fate may find
160 In the pure mirror of th’ eternal mind.
To me it seems at hand a sure presage,
Denotes my rise from this terrestrial stage;
Then what I gain’d and lost below shall lie
Suspended in the balance of the sky,
And all our anxious sublunary cares
Shall seem one tissue of Arachne’s snares;
And all the lying vanities of life,
The sordid source of envy, hate, and strife,
Ignoble as they are, shall then appear
170 Before the searching beam of truth severe;
Then souls, from sense refin’d, shall see the fraud
That led them from the living way of God.
From the dark dungeon of the human breast
All direful secrets then shall rise confest,
In honour multiplied – a dreadful show
To hierarchies above, and saints below.
Eternal reason then shall give her doom;
And, sever’d wide, the tenants of the tomb
Shall seek their portions with instinctive haste,
180 Quick as the savage speeds along the waste.
Then shall the golden hoard its trust betray,
And they, that, mindless of that dreadful day,
Boasted their wealth, its vanity shall know
In the dread avenue of endless woe:
While they whom moderation’s wholesome rule
Kept still unstain’d in virtue’s heavenly school,
Who the calm sunshine of the soul beneath
Enjoy’d, will share the triumph of the Faith.
These pageants five the world and I beheld,
190 The sixth and last, I hope, in heaven reveal’d
(If Heaven so will), when Time with speedy hand
The scene despoils, and Death’s funereal wand
The Triumph leads. But soon they both shall fall
Under that mighty hand that governs all,
While they who toil for true renown below,
Whom envious Time and Death, a mightier foe
Relentless plung’d in dark oblivion’s womb,
When virtue seem’d to seek the silent tomb,
Spoil’d of her heavenly charms once more shall rise,
200 Regain their beauty, and assert the skies;
Leaving the dark sojourn of time beneath,
And the wide desolated realms of Death.
But she will early seek these glorious bounds,
Whose long-lamented fall the world resounds
In unison with me. And heaven will view
That awful day her heavenly charms renew,
When soul with body joins. Gehenna’s strand
Saw me enroll’d in Love’s devoted band.
And mark’d my toils through many hard campaigns
210 And wounds, whose scars my memory yet retains.
Blest is the pile that marks the hallow’d dust!
There, at the resurrection of the just,
When the last trumpet with earth-shaking sound
Shall wake her sleepers from their couch profound;
Then, when that spotless and immortal mind
In a material mould once more enshrin’d,
With wonted charms shall wake seraphic love,
How will the beatific sight improve
219 Her heavenly beauties in the climes above!
CANZONIERE
Fourteenth Century
GEOFFREY CHAUCER (c. 1343–1400)
The first fully recognizable adaptation of a Petrarch poem in English is Chaucer’s rendition of P132 as Canticus Troili, the perplexed lament of the young Troilus about his love for Criseyde. Chaucer adapts Petrarch’s sonnet to fill three of the rhyme royal stanzas of his Troilus and Criseyde, Book 1.400–421. That Chaucer should have chosen this particularly philosophic questioning of love as the first words his young hero speaks about his situation shows that Chaucer may have known Petrarch in the early Chigi form of the manuscript. There is even the possibility that the two poets might have met in 1368 since Chaucer was part of the entourage accompanying Prince Lionel to his wedding to Violante Visconti, daughter of the Duke of Milan; Petrarch was also in attendance at this wedding. Chaucer’s diplomatic mission to Italy in 1372 is a less likely occasion for their meeting since Petrarch’s presence in Arguà in the last years of his life was erratic owing to the war between Padua and Venice.
P132: S’amor non è, che dunque è quel ch’io sento?
Canticus Troili
‘If no love is, O God, what fele I so?
And if love is, what thing and which is he?
If love be good, from whennes cometh my woo?
If it be wikke, a wonder thynketh me,
When every torment and adversite
That cometh of hym may to me savory thinke,
For ay thurst I, the more that ich it drynke.
‘And if that ay myn owen lust I brenne,
From whennes cometh my waillynge and my pleynte?
10 If harm agree me, wherto pleyne I thenne?
I noot, ne whi unwery that I feynte.
O quike deth, O swete harm so queynte,
How may of the in me swich quantite,
But if that I consente that it be?
‘And if that I consente, I wrongfully
Compleyne, iwis. Thus possed to and fro,
Al sterelees withinne a boot am I
Amydde the see, bitwixen wyndes two,
>
That in contrarie stonden evere mo.
20 Allas, what is this wondre maladie?
For hete of cold, for cold of hete, I dye.’
Sixteenth Century
The Tomb Sonnet
The Tomb Sonnet, which follows, comes with a strange story that predates the ‘discovery’ of Laura by the Abbé de Sade by two centuries. The sonnet first appears in a 1545 edition of Petrarch, published at Lyons for Giovanni di Tournes, a Frenchman writing and publishing in Italian, who had just published the Délie of Maurice Scève the year before. He dedicates the book to Scève:
A non men virtuoso che dotto M Mauritio Scaeva, Giovanni di Tournes suo affettionatissimo
and proceeds to remind the dedicatee of a story told by him more than seventeen years before, when Scève was studying at Avignon. Two Italian friends came to him with a strange story of the tomb of Petrarch’s Laura. They went immediately to the Franciscan church, broke into the tomb of the de Sade family and discovered there only a few bones and a metal box, in which they found a medal of a woman ripping out her heart and this poem. The discovery must have spread quickly because François I, on his way to Rome, stopped at Avignon in order to visit the tomb and wrote a poem in praise of Laura, which is also included in di Tournes’s preface:
Questo è quell’Epitaphio, ch’ il Gran Re Francesco I fece di Madonna Laura
En petit lieu compris vous pouez voir
Ce, quicomprent beaucoup par renommée
Plume, labeur, la langue, & le devoir
Furent vaincuz par l’Aymant del’Aymee.
O gentill’ Ame, restant tant estimee,
Qui te pourra louer, qu’en se taisant?
Car la parole est toujours reprimee,
Quand le subiet surmonte le disant.
Di Tournes, needless to say, attributes the Tomb Sonnet to Petrarch. But this cannot be true because of the haste with which she was buried, on the very day of her death – 6 April 1348 – and the indisputable fact that Petrarch was in Verona and did not learn of her death until a month after the event, and the equally valid assumption of the utter inappropriateness of his putting any memorial in the tomb of the wife of another man. Who wrote this poem? It has been suggested that it was written by Scève himself. Who knows? – when the vandalism of these literary grave-robbers is never considered as any part of the story. Myth is being created, a myth that the eighteenth-century Abbé de Sade never alludes to. The sonnet is taken from the di Tournes edition of Petrarch and the three translations from Bohn’s Illustrated Library (1859): the first is anonymous (1777), the second by Capel Lofft and the third by Lord Woodhouselee (see also their own sections).
Questo è il Sonnetto ritrouato nel sepulchro di Madonna Laura in questo modo
Qui reposan quei caste & felice ossa
Di quella alma gentile & sola in terra.
Aspro e dur sasso hor ben teco hai sotterra
El vero honor, la fama, e belta scossa.
Morte hà del verde Lauro suelta e smossa
Fresca radice, e il premio di mia guerra
Di quatro lustri, e piu, s’ancor non erra
Mio pensier tristo: e l’ chiude in poca fossa.
Felice pianta in Borgo d’Auignone
Nacque e mori: e qui con ella giace
La penna, el stil, l’inchiostro, e la ragione.
O delicati membri, ô viva face,
Ch’ ancor mi cuoggi, e struggi, in genochione
Ciascun preghi, il Signor t’accetti in pace
O S E V L
Vanne Mortal bellezza indarno si sospira:
L’alma creata in ciel viura ineterno,
Pianga il Presente, & il futur secol’ priuo
D’vna talluce, & io de gli occhi, e il tempo.
Sonnet Found in Laura’s Tomb
Qui reposan quei caste e felice ossa
Here peaceful sleeps the chaste, the happy shade
Of that pure spirit, which adorn’d this earth:
Pure fame, true beauty, and transcendent worth,
Rude stone! Beneath thy rugged breast are laid.
Death sudden snatch’d the dear lamented maid!
Who first to all by tender woes gave birth,
Woes! That estranged my sorrowing soul to mirth,
While full four lustres times completely made.
Sweet plant! That nursed on Avignon’s sweet soil,
10 There bloom’d, there died; when soon the weeping Muse
Threw by the lute, forsook her wonted toil.
Bright spark of beauty, that still fires my breast!
What pitying mortal shall a prayer refuse,
That Heaven may number thee amid the blest?
Here rest the chaste, the dear, the blest remains
Of her most lovely; peerless while on earth:
What late was beauty, spotless honour, worth,
Stern marble, here thy chill embrace retains.
The freshness of the laurel Death disdains;
And hath its root thus wither’d. – Such the dearth
O’ertakes me. Here I bury ease and mirth.
And hope from twenty years of cares and pains.
This happy plant Avignon lonely fed
10 With life, and saw it die. – And with it lies
My pen, my verse, my reason: – useless, dead.
O graceful form! – Fire, which consuming flies
Through all my frame! – For blessings on thy head
Oh, may continual prayers to heaven rise!
Here now repose those chaste, those blest remains
Of that most gentle spirit, sole in earth!
Harsh monumental stone, that here confinest
True honour, fame, and beauty, all o’erthrown!
Death has destroy’d that Laurel green, and torn
Its tender roots; and all the noble meed
Of my long warfare, passing (if aright
My melancholy reckoning holds) four lustres.
O happy plant! Avignon’s favour’d soil
10 Has seen thee spring and die: – and here with thee
Thy poet’s pen, and muse, and genius lies.
O lovely, beauteous limbs! O vivid fire,
That even in death hast power to melt the soul!
Heaven be thy portion, peace with God on high!
Richard Tottel, Tottel’s Miscellany (1557)
Richard Tottel’s Songes and Sonnettes, written by the ryght honorable Lorde Henry H[o]ward, late Earle of Surrey, and other is the first and most important miscellany of poetry in the English Renaissance. Known today almost universally as Tottel’s Miscellany, it printed for the first time the work of Sir Thomas Wyatt, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, and other poets who were writing during the reign of Henry VIII. It became a prime source of Petrarchanism in that Wyatt and Surrey translated so many of his poems.
HENRY HOWARD, EARL OF SURREY (1517?–47)
The poems of Henry Howard take pride of place in Tottel because of his social status. Maternally and paternally he was descended from British kings, and in his teens he was made the companion of Henry VIII’s illegitimate son, Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Richmond, spent time with Richmond in the French court of Francis 1, had spectacular successes as a military and naval commander, and was beheaded for quartering the arms of his ancestor Edward the Confessor with his own. He is the first English poet to use blank verse, in his translations of Books II and IV of Virgil’s Aeneid, published by Tottel in 1557. He was very much influenced by the poetic example of Sir Thomas Wyatt, for whom he composed the most beautiful elegy in English before Lycidas, but Surrey wrote a smoother line.
P310: Zefiro torna, e ’l bel tempo rimena
2. Description of Spring, wherin eche thing renewes, saue onelie the louer
The soote season, that bud and blome furth bringes,
With grene hath clad the hill and eke the vale:
The nightingale with fethers new she singes:
The turtle to her make hath tolde her tale:
The hart hath hong his olde hed on the pale:
The buck in brake his winter cote he flinges:
The fishes flote with newe repaired scale:
The adder all her sloughe awaye she slinges:
10 The swift swalow pursueth the flyes smale:
The busy bee her honye now she minges:
Winter is worne that was the flowers bale:
And thus I see among these pleasant thinges
Eche care decayes, and yet my sorow springes.
P140: Amor, che nel penser mio vive et regna
6. Complaint of a louer rebuked
Loue, that liueth, and reigneth in my thought,
That built his seat within my captiue brest,
Clad in the armes, wherin with me he fought,
Oft in my face he doth his banner rest.
She, that me taught to loue, and suffer payne,
My doutfull hope, and eke my hote desyre,
With shamefast cloke to shadowe, and refraine,
Her smilyng grace conuerteth straight to yre.
And cowarde Loue then to the hart apace
10 Taketh his flight, whereas he lurkes, and plaines
His purpose lost, and dare not shewe his face.
For my lordes gilt thus faultlesse byde I paynes.
Yet from my lorde shall not my foote remoue.
Swete is his death, that takes his end by loue.
P164: Or che ’l ciel e la terra e ’l vento tace
10. A Complaint by night of the louer not beloued
Alas so all thinges nowe doe holde their peace.
Heauen and earth disturbed in nothing:
The beastes, the ayer, the birdes their song doe cease:
The nightes chare the starres aboute dothe bring:
Calme is the Sea, the waues worke lesse and lesse:
So am hot I, whom loue alas doth wring,
Bringing before my face the great encrease
Of my desires, whereat I wepe and syng,
In ioye and wo, as in a doutfull ease.
10 For my swete thoughtes sometyme doe pleasure bring:
But by and by the cause of my disease
Petrarch in English Page 11
