Читать книгу A history of Italian literature онлайн

88 страница из 109

The odes with which theCanzoniere is interspersed are no less beautiful than the sonnets, but are less adapted for quotation, since it is impossible to give any one in its entirety, and they must greatly suffer by abridgement. There is, however, a certain completeness in the first three stanzas ofChiare, fresche, e dolci acque, excellently translated by Leigh Hunt:

Clear, fresh, and dulcet streams, Which the fair shape who seems To me sole woman, haunted at noon-tide; Fair bough, so gently fit (I sigh to think of it), Which lent a pillow to her lovely side; And turf, and flowers bright-eyed, O’er which her folded gown Flowed like an angel’s down; And you, oh holy air and hushed, Where first my heart at her sweet glances gushed; Give ear, give ear with one consenting, To my last words, my last, and my lamenting.

If’tis my fate below, And Heaven will have it so, That love must close these dying eyes in tears, May my poor dust be laid In middle of your shade, While my soul naked mounts to its own spheres. The thought would calm my fears, When taking, out of breath, The doubtful step of death; For never could my spirit find A stiller port after the stormy wind, Nor in more calm, abstracted bourne Slip from my travailed flesh, and from my bones outworn Perhaps, some future hour, To her accustomed bower Might come the untamed, and yet the gentle she; And where she saw me first, Might turn with eyes athirst And kinder joy to look again for me; Then, oh, the charity! Seeing amid the stones The earth that held my bones, A sigh for very love at last Might ask of Heaven to pardon me the past; And Heaven itself could not say nay, As with her gentle veil she wiped the tears away.