Francesco Petrarch

I go weeping for my time past,
that I spent in loving something mortal,
without lifting myself in flight, for I had wings
...

Diana was never more pleasing to her lover,
when, by a stroke of fate, he saw her naked,
shown in the deep pool of icy water,
than I was by the mountain shepherdess,
...

Being one day at my window all alone,
So manie strange things happened me to see,
As much as it grieveth me to thinke thereon.
At my right hand a hynde appear'd to mee,
...

I have not seen you, lady,
leave off your veil in sun or shadow,
since you knew that great desire in myself
...

I find no peace, and yet I make no war:
and fear, and hope: and burn, and I am ice:
and fly above the sky, and fall to earth,
...

O my own Italy! though words are vain
The mortal wounds to close,
Unnumber'd, that thy beauteous bosom stain,
...

Many times now, with my true thought,
I've dared to assail my enemy, quiet and humble
in her actions, her beauty seeming kind,
...

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,
...

Zephyr returns and brings fair weather,
and the flowers and herbs, his sweet family,
and Procne singing and Philomela weeping,
...

What infinite providence and art
He showed in his wonderful mastery,
who created this and the other hemisphere,
...

What do I feel if this is not love?
But if it is love, God, what thing is this?
If good, why this effect: bitter, mortal?
...

Ah me, the beautiful face, ah me, the gentle look,
ah me, the graceful noble manner of her:
ah me, the speech that made every harsh
...

The high column and the green laurel are broken
that cast a shade for my weary thoughts:
I have lost what I do not hope to find again
...

Life flies, and never stays an hour,
and death comes on behind with its dark day,
and present things and past things
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The eyes I spoke about so warmly,
and the arms, the hands, the ankles, and the face
that left me so divided from myself,
...

When I turn again to gaze on the years
that have scattered all my thoughts in passing,
...

Where is the forehead, that could make my heart turn
this way and that, with the slightest gesture?
Where are the beautiful lashes and the two stars
...

My thought raised me to a place in which
she was whom I seek, and cannot find on earth:
there, among those who are in the third circle,
...

Through the midst of inhospitable, wild woods,
where men at arms go at great risk,
I go safely, since nothing can frighten me
...

A pure white hind appeared to me
with two gold horns, on green grass,
between two streams, in a laurel's shade,
...