Dante Alighieri

on the 9th of June 1290 Upon a day, came Sorrow in to me, Saying, ‘I’ve come to stay with thee a while’; And I perceived that she had ushered Bile And Pain into my house for company. Wherefore I said, ‘Go forth – away with thee!’ But like a Greek she answered, full of guile, And went on arguing in an easy style. Then, looking, I saw Love come silently, Habited in black raiment, smooth and new, Having a black hat set upon his hair; And certainly the tears he shed were true. So that I asked, ‘What ails thee, trifler?’ Answering, he said: ‘A grief to be gone through; For our own lady’s dying, brother dear.’

To the dim light and the large circle of shade I have clomb, and to the whitening of the hills, There where we see no color in the grass. Natheless my longing loses not its green, It has so taken root in the hard stone Which talks and hears as though it were a lady. Utterly frozen is this youthful lady, Even as the snow that lies within the shade; For she is no more moved than is the stone By the sweet season which makes warm the hills And alters them afresh from white to green Covering their sides again with flowers and grass. When on her hair she sets a crown of grass The thought has no more room for other lady, Because she weaves the yellow with the green So well that Love sits down there in the shade,– Love who has shut me in among low hills Faster than between walls of granite-stone. She is more bright than is a precious stone; The wound she gives may not be healed with grass: I therefore have fled far o’er plains and hills For refuge from so dangerous a lady; But from her sunshine nothing can give shade,– Not any hill, nor wall, nor summer-green. A while ago, I saw her dressed in green,– So fair, she might have wakened in a stone This love which I do feel even for her shade; And therefore, as one woos a graceful lady, I wooed her in a field that was all grass Girdled about with very lofty hills. Yet shall the streams turn back and climb the hills Before Love’s flame in this damp wood and green Burn, as it burns within a youthful lady, For my sake, who would sleep away in stone My life, or feed like beasts upon the grass, Only to see her garments cast a shade. How dark soe’er the hills throw out their shade, Under her summer green the beautiful lady Covers it, like a stone cover’d in grass.

As I drew nearer to the end of all desire, I brought my longing's ardor to a final height, Just as I ought. My vision, becoming pure, Entered more and more the beam of that high light That shines on its own truth. From then, my seeing Became too large for speech, which fails at a sight Beyond all boundaries, at memory's undoing— As when the dreamer sees and after the dream The passion endures, imprinted on his being Though he can't recall the rest. I am the same: Inside my heart, although my vision is almost Entirely faded, droplets of its sweetness come The way the sun dissolves the snow's crust— The way, in the wind that stirred the light leaves, The oracle that the Sibyl wrote was lost.