Celestial Love
O mortal thing enthralled these longing eyes
When perfect peace in thy fair face I found;
But far within, where all is holy ground,
My soul felt Love, her comrade of the skies:
For she was born with God in Paradise;
Nor all the shows of beauty shed around
This fair false world her wings to earth have bound:
Unto the Love of Loves aloft she flies.
Nay, things that suffer death, quench not the fire
Of deathless spirits; nor eternity
Serves sordid Time, that withers all things rare.
Not love but lawless impulse is desire:
That slays the soul; our love makes still more fair
Our friends on earth, fairer in death on high.
This English translation of "Celestial Love" was composed by John Addington Symonds (1840-1893).
The Doom Of Beauty
Choice soul, in whom, as in a glass, we see,
Mirrored in thy pure form and delicate,
What beauties heaven and nature can create,
The paragon of all their works to be!
Fair soul, in whom love, pity, piety,
Have found a home, as from thy outward state
We clearly read, and are so rare and great
That they adorn none other like to thee!
Love takes me captive; beauty binds my soul;
Pity and mercy with their gentle eyes
Wake in my heart a hope that cannot cheat.
What law, what destiny, what fell control,
What cruelty, or late or soon, denies
That death should spare perfection so complete?
This English translation of "The Doom of Beauty" was composed by John Addington Symonds.
Joy May Kill
Too much good luck no less than misery
May kill a man condemned to mortal pain,
If, lost to hope and chilled in every vein,
A sudden pardon comes to set him free.
Thus thy unwonted kindness shown to me
Amid the gloom where only sad thoughts reign,
With too much rapture bringing light again,
Threatens my life more than that agony.
Good news and bad may bear the self-same knife;
And death may follow both upon their flight;
For hearts that shrink or swell, alike will break.
Let then thy beauty, to preserve my life,
Temper the source of this supreme delight,
Lest joy so poignant slay a soul so weak.
This English translation of "Joy May Kill" was composed by John Addington Symonds.
A che più debb'io
Why should I seek to ease intense desire
With still more ters and windy words of grief,
When heaven, Or late or soon, sends no relief
To souls whom love hath robed around with fire.
Why need my aching heart to death aspire
When all must die? Nay death beyond belief
Unto these eyes would be both sweet and brief,
Since in my sum of woes all joy expire!
Therefore because I cannot shun the blow
I rather seek, say who must rule my breast
Gliding between his gladness and his woe?
If only chains and bands can make me blest,
No marvel if alone and bare I go
An armed knight's captive and slave confessed.
Veggio nel tuo bel viso
From thy fair face I learn, o my loved lord,
That which no mortal tongue can rightly say;
The soul imprisoned in her house of clay,
Holpen by thee to God hath often soared:
And tho' the vulgar, vain, malignant horde
Attribute what their grosser wills obey,
Yet shall this fervent homage that I pay,
This love, this faith, pure joys for us afford.
Lo, all the lovely things we find on earth,
Resemble for the soul that rightly sees,
That source of bliss divine which gave us birth:
Nor have we first fruits or remembrances
Of heaven elsewhere, this, loving loyally,
I rise to God and make death sweet by thee.
36.
My lover stole my heart, just over there
- so gently! - and stole much more, my life as well.
And there, all promise, first his fine eyes fell
on me, and there his turnabout meant no.
He manacled me there; there let me go;
There I bemoaned my luck; with anguished eye
watched, from this very rock, his last goodbye
as he took myself from me, bound who knows where.
From "The Complete Poems of Michelangelo" - translated by John Frederick Nims - © 1998 by The University of Chicago
This sonnet and the following one, both left unfinished, sums up the relationship between Michelangelo and Gherardo Perini. They were translated by Richard Hooker.
Over here it was that my love stole from me,
In his mercy, my heart and, farther on, my life.
Here with his beautiful eyes he promised me help,
And with the same eyes here he stole it back.
Over here he bound me and here released me;
For myself I wept here, and with infinite sorrow
From this rock I saw him leave,
He who stole myself from me and never turned back.
I live in sin, dying to myself I live;
Life is no longer mine, but belongs to sin;
My good is from heaven, my evil I give to myself,
From my own unbound will, which has been stolen from me.
My freedom is a slave, my divinity has made itself
Mortal.
Oh, unhappy state!
To what misery, to what life I've been born!
83.
What in your handsome face I see, my lord,
I'm hard put to find words for, here below.
Often it lofts my soul to God, although
wearing, that soul, the body like a shroud.
And if the stupid, balefully staring crowd
mocks others for feelings after its own fashion,
no matter. I'm no less thankful for a passion
pulsing with love - faith, honor in accord.
There's a Fountain of Mercy brought our souls to being
which all Earth's beauty must in part resemble
(lesser things, less) for an eye alert to truth.
No other hint of heaven's here for our seeing,
hence, he that a love for you sets all a-tremble
already hovers in heaven, transcending death.
Read more love poems by Michelangelo in the following page.
Go to Michelangelo's page.
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