Francesco Petrarch Poems

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,
...

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

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 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,
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Many times now, with my true thought,
I've dared to assail my enemy, quiet and humble
in her actions, her beauty seeming kind,
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O my own Italy! though words are vain
The mortal wounds to close,
Unnumber'd, that thy beauteous bosom stain,
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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,
...

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

You who hear the sound, in scattered rhymes,
of those sighs on which I fed my heart,
in my first vagrant youthfulness,
...