Sweetest, powerful
lord of my deepest mind:
terrible, but dear
gift of the heavens: companion
of my darkest days,
Thought, that often stirs inside me.

      Who does not talk of your secret
nature? Who does not know its power
among us? Yet often, since human
language gains its own impetus
from your action, it often seems strange
to those who listen to what you create.

      How lonely my mind
has become, since you
took it as your home!
All my other thoughts vanish,
swift as flashes of lightning
all around: Like a tower
on an empty plain,
you stand alone, gigantic, among them.

      What are earthly affairs,
what is all life to me,
compared with you!
What intolerable tedium,
our leisure, familiar trades,
the vain hopes of vain pleasure,
beside that joy,
the heavenly joy that comes from you!

      Just as a traveller is happy
to turn his eyes from bare rock
in the rugged Apennines,
towards some far green sunlit field,
so I turn willingly from harsh, dry
mundane conversations, as if
towards a happy garden, and your space
restores my senses again.

      It seems well nigh incredible
I’ve endured this wretched life,
and this foolish world,
for so long without you:
almost impossible to comprehend
how others can sigh
with desire for anything
except what resembles you.

      Fear of death has never entered
my heart, since I first learned
from experience what life was.
That final necessity
this strange world sometimes praises,
yet abhors and trembles at,
seems like a jest to me today:
and if danger threatens, I pause
and smile, to contemplate its menace.

      I’ve always despised
cowards, and ungenerous
spirits. Now any shameful act
stings me at once:
examples of human baseness
stir my soul, at once, to scorn.
I feel myself greater
than this insolent age
that nourishes itself on empty hope,
in love with gossip, hostile to virtue:
foolish, it asks for sense,
without seeing how life
becomes more and more senseless.
I scorn human judgement: and tread down
that fickle crowd, hostile
to true thought, who despise your worth.

      What allegiance does not yield
to that from which you rise?
Indeed what other allegiance
but this has power among mortals?
Avarice, pride, hatred, disdain,
love of honour, power,
what are they but whims
compared to this? Only one allegiance
is alive to us: eternal law
has only decreed one
over-ruling lord of the human heart.

      Life has no worth or meaning
except in this, which is all to us:
which alone absolves fate
for placing mortals here
to suffer, with no other purpose:
in this one allegiance,
life is more noble than death,
if not to fools, to hearts that are not base,

      Sweet thought, because of your joys,
to have endured our human troubles,
and suffered this mortal life
for many years, has not been in vain:
and expert though I am in pain,
I’d still be prepared
to take to the road for such a purpose:
since I’ve never journeyed,
weary, through the sands,
among the venomous snakes,
and reached you, without my pain
being eased by your great blessing.

      What a world, what a new
immensity, what a paradise it is
to which your marvellous enchantment
seemed to lift me! Where I used
to wander in that strange light,
forgetting my earthly state,
and everything of our reality,
among the dreams, I think,
that immortals know. Alas, you are,
in the end, a dream, sweet thought,
one that adorns truth for the most part:
yet a dream, a clear illusion. But you,
among nature’s happy illusions,
are divine: because you are so strong,
and vital, that you can endure tenaciously
against truth, and even adapt to truth,
and not dissolve, till you meet with death.

      O my thought, it’s true, that you,
the only vital part of my days,
delightful cause of infinite pain,
will sometime be quenched with me in death:
you whose signs I feel alive in my soul,
such that you’ll be my lord for ever.
Other noble illusions
often fail in the face
of truth. The more I turn
to gaze at her,
of whom I love to speak with you,
the greater grows the delight,
the greater the delirium, I breathe.
Angelic beauty!
Wherever I look, among the lovely faces,
they are only painted images
of your face. It seems to me, you
are the sole fount of every other
loveliness, of every true beauty.

      When, since I first saw you,
were you not the ultimate goal
of my deepest cares? What part of the day
passed when I did not think of you?
How often did my dreams lack
your sovereign image? Lovely as a dream,
angelic form,
in earthly place,
in the high realms of the universe,
what do I ask for, or hope to see
that is more beautiful than your eyes,
or own that is sweeter than thought of you?