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Title: Love's crucifix

nine sonnets and a canzone

Author: Francesco Petrarca

Contributor: Alice Meynell

Illustrator: W. Graham Robertson

Translator: Agnes Tobin

Release date: April 23, 2026 [eBook #78533]

Language: English

Original publication: London: W. Heinemann, 1902

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78533

Credits: Richard Tonsing and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.)

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# LOVE’S CRUCIFIX · NINE SONNETS AND A CANZONE · FROM PETRARCH BY AGNES TOBIN · WITH A PREFACE BY ALICE MEYNELL · ILLUSTRATED BY GRAHAM ROBERTSON

LONDON      WILLIAM HEINEMANN      1902
All rights reserved

## In Vita—in Morte—di Madonna Laura

The Sonnets of Petrarch did as much as the Divina Commedia of Dante to establish the language of Italy. The two poets were Tuscans, and Tuscan—rather than any other of the many forms of the “soft bastard Latin”—became, because of them, classical. It is true that such an influence as this has not been so important in Italy as it would have been in a literary nation. The day of Dante and Petrarch past, it is not possible—even though her novels and her ingenious rhythms set the literary fashions during a couple of centuries—to name Italy a literary nation. Nevertheless it was fortunate that Tuscan became “Italian,” for of all dialects of the Peninsula (and Lombardy by itself counts many) it has the most dignity, and has trained its speakers in the most orderly habits of grammar. Although other kinds of Italian have their præterite and their proper subjunctive tenses, their speakers evade them (as do the French in their own tongue), whereas the Tuscan does not keep them for print, but has them in daily use on the highways and in the vineyards. Hard to translate into equivalent verse is this most polysyllabic Tuscan; not only for the obvious reason that a thing said tersely in ten syllables of a polysyllabic language must needs be said at greater length, and therefore generally most languidly, in ten syllables of a monosyllabic language such as the English. The chief difficulty is rather in the slender and sometimes weak graces of antithesis in the original; the language justifies these, affords them room, gives them opportunity and attitude. Turned into English, they take a slight rigidity, and no longer seem so well worth while. Nevertheless it is possible to translate Petrarch, and the translator’s chief quality has to be good faith. Petrarch is full of good faith; because of this he does not deserve the name of sentimentalist which James Russell Lowell gives him. The good faith of a vulgar man may be sentimental, not that of so distinguished and so simple and so entire a nature as this. Petrarch’s integrity is somewhat like that of an Italian melodist; in neither case is there a very great nature, but in both cases there is a whole one, a clear one; the sentiment explores its (not remote) depths, and employs its (not inaccessible) powers. This is it, and it is all, we are convinced as we read; and it is a beautiful all, and not only fond but tender.

Petrarch’s good faith uses the conventions of the fourteenth century; the dream, for instance. Nothing could be more unlike the dream of sleep than is the dream of convention. In the dream of sleep is that capacity for more than merely mortal wonder or grief which, I think, but three writers have seized awake; and they are all modern: Charlotte Brontë, who says, “Suffering brewed in merely mortal measure tastes not as this suffering tasted;” Robert Louis Stevenson, who gives his grotesque dream of a dog; and Coventry Patmore in his “Eurydice”:

Is it the portent of a restless grave,
O’er which the eternal sadness gathers fast?

This is another thing. Compare it with the gentle convention and arbitrary fiction—the machinery—of Petrarch’s “dreams.”

It is, by the way, chiefly in these dreams, in morte di Madonna Laura, that Laura speaks. Thus Petrarch in his romance speaks for her, and she remains one of the most nearly silent figures in history. The twenty-one years of Petrarch’s love for her in her lifetime give us little more than the picture of her beauty, and of her manners, severe or kind. And the secret which Petrarch never knew—whether he had touched her heart—she took with her to her discreet and honourable grave. She keeps it from the world. In the sonnets after her death Petrarch is obliged to respect her secret. She had yielded him an ambiguous smile; he duly causes her to speak to him ambiguous tendernesses in his “dreams.”

Surviving Laura twenty-six sorrowful years, Petrarch could look back upon her maturity from his day of old age. She had been a little—she became greatly—his junior. Death matches lovers in her own way. One would think that the malice of burlesque might have spared the years of Dr. Johnson’s wife, because of the fact that he lived so long as to make her a more equal mate, and loved her and prayed for her soul when he was a much older man than she ever was a woman. Petrarch’s love-story has no doubt been burlesqued by the modern sense of humour; he, in his day, foresaw and feared no mockery. What he feared was theological rebuke, and he argued the matter out with his conscience until he died.

Alice Meynell.

## LOVE’S CRUCIFIX

Short is the light and quick upon its ways
Which gives me back my Lady who is dead.
O sweet brief comfort quickly come and fled!
No harm can touch me while the vision stays.
Love who has bound me to the cross delays
And trembles when he hears her footsteps led
To my soul’s threshold: “Ah! the wounds that bled
So deep will bleed again,” he softly says.
A lady to her home she proudly comes,
Startling the blackwinged thoughts that brood and weigh;
Her dreaming eyes put all dark things to rout.
The soul, which so much brightness overcomes,
Gives a faint, yearning sigh: “O blessèd day,
When you looked back and found a pathway out!”

## DAWN

When down grey steps of dawn comes bright Aurora
With rosy face and hair of shimmering gold,
Resemblance thrills me, till, growing faint and cold,
I whisper low: “Nay, surely there is Laura.”
Happy Tithonus! You know, to a breath,
The time your Sweet will stay; you have no quarrel
With fate like mine. When shall I touch my laurel,
Twined in his crown of poppies by dumb Death?
The parting is but a redoubled gain,
When, at the close of one day’s measured pain,
You hold her fast again, quite, quite the same.
My nights are sad, alas, my days are vain,
Because of her who all my thoughts has ta’en,
And left me nothing of her but a name.

## RECOGNITION

Transfigured soul, so often you come back
To break my endless night of pain and doubt
With those clear eyes that Death has not put out,
But lit with fire immortal; Ah! I lack
The words to tell the turning of the rack
When I begin to find again about
Old haunts your beauty’s presence, quick to rout
Despair, and softly lighting memory’s track.
Years I went singing of you up and down,
Now I go mourning for you through the land
In heavy loneliness. My Day, my Crown,
One splendid joy great sorrow cannot drown:
That when you come I know and understand
Your walk, your voice, your face, your hair, your gown.

## THE DREAM

On food in which my Lord doth so abound,
Mourning and tears, I nourish my tired heart;
And often I grow faint and often start,
Musing how that this wound is most profound.
She comes, whose like the age has never found;
Soft splendours from her star-bound tresses dart;
She sits, as though we never more must part,
Gently upon the bed to which I’m bound:
Laying the hands which I so much desired
Upon my eyes, and speaking words, a tide
Of sweetness, things no human lips have said.
“What use” she says “in knowing, if you grow tired?
Do not cry any more. Have you not cried
Enough for me? You see I am not dead.”

## THE GARDEN OF PARADISE

Raising myself to realms whose splendours cloud
Her whom I seek and find not on this earth,
There, among those of the third circle’s girth,
Marv’lling I met her, lovelier and less proud.
She took my hand and said: “Desire speaks loud
And true; thou wilt be with me here in mirth
Of endless music, me, thy foe, whose birth
And dawn of youth found long ere night a shroud.
My bliss no mortal brain can understand;
For thee alone, and what thou lov’st so much,
I wait, my wondrous veil which lies down there.”
Why did she fade away and drop my hand?
The poignant sweetness of her heavenly touch
Had almost loosed my soul on that soft air.

## THE WATCHER

If I could tell how tender are the sighs
Of that most lovely Lady who was mine
And now is set in heaven for a sign,
And yet seems here, lives, feels, walks, loves and cries,
A giant in your breast desire would rise!
She comes, by some swift sympathy divine,
Whenever on my lonely road I pine,
Faint or turn back, pause where the wrong road lies:
“Straight up, towards Heaven, is the way to go;”
Her soft phrase, low and wistful, ends in prayer,
In thoughts celestial that are all her own:
And then I vow the mighty things I dare,
Strong in the sweetness which doth pierce me so,
Yea, would have power to draw tears from a stone.

## LOVE AND PITY

You have discoloured, Death, the loveliest face
That ever was, and quenched the loveliest eyes;
Forcing the locks and breaking all the ties
Of a keen soul in a most lovely case.
An instant all my good doth blast: O base!
On those soft lips your heavy finger lies,
That spoke so sweet, and you endure my cries.
I wander blind with tears from place to place.
’Tis true my Lady comes to help me, then,
When Love and Pity lead her by the hand:
No other succour holdeth life for me.
And if her speech and if her gesture grand
I could impart, I would transform not men,
But tigers, bears, and monsters of the sea.

## THE WATERS OF SORGA

How often, flying to my dim retreat,
From others and if may be my own soul,
I saw the slow tears beat my breast and feet
And touch the tender grass! How often whole
Soft Summer days, O Life! your own days, sweet
And long and gay, I trod by ways of dole,
Seeking my high delight, whom Death’s deceit
Had seized on where his lethal waters roll.
Goddess or nymph, in some immortal guise,
I saw her come from Sorga’s clearest deeps
To sit upon the bank; with hungry eyes
I watched her tread the field-flowers where they creep,
Which as from mortal lady’s foot did rise;
And to her eyes a grief for me did leap.

## THE LAUREL THRONE

That which for light and perfume quite outbraved
The perfume-breathing and most luminous East,
From fruit and flower to bud and bough the least,
That paragon of beauty which had saved
All glory to the West now gently waved,
My laurel sweet, and danced as at a feast;
Under its boughs my Lord and Lady ceased
Their wistful talk and found the peace they craved.
Then I the nest of all my thoughts most white
Fixed in my soul’s fair tree, and, fire and ice,
I thrilled and flamed with joy, and made my moan.
The laurel ruled the world by its own right,
When God, to make more bright His Paradise,
Took it!—ah me! It ever was His own.

## THE PASSING OF SLEEP

When my most constant comforter and stay,
To rest my tired heart which so long has bled,
Seats herself on the left side of my bed
And talks to me in the old dear tranquil way;
White with great awe and yearning low I say:
“Whence comest thou now, O happy soul so calm?”
A little bough of palm,
And a laurel bough, she draws from her soft breast,
And says: “Upon this quest
I left the Paradise garden and Heavenly lands:
Only to comfort thee and touch thy hands.”
Humbly I thank her in gesture and in word;
And then I ask: “O heavenly sweet and wise,
How knowest thou my state?” and she replies:
“The moan of thy insatiate heart is heard,
It beats through infinite spaces like a bird,
Flutters through Heaven, and troubles all my peace.
Nay, griev’st thou that I cease
To make one in this miserable strife,
And have been rapt into a larger life?
Thou wouldst be happy if thou loved’st me true,
As in all looks and words thou seem’st to do.”
“I wanted so to ask,” I answer then,
“What was the meaning of those two green boughs?”
And she: “The one to which thy love allows
All honour answers thee by thine own pen.
The palm is victory; I was a child still when,
Vanquishing the world and self on difficult height,
I proved to both my right,
Through mercy of that Lord Who gave me force.
Do thou too have recourse
To Him, if near to fall;
So we may both be with Him after all.”
“Is this the golden knot, this the blond head,”
I ask, “which still constrain my heart? Are these
The lovely eyes that were my sun?” “Nay, please,
Be not blind with the blind,” she, faintly red,
“Nor think their thoughts. For dust, ay me, long dead
Is what thou seest, I an immortal thing.
This semblance I do bring
To comfort thee: but thou some day shalt see
How lovelier she can be
And dearer even, who, once by love made bold,
To save thy soul and hers seemed dumb and cold.”
I answer: “I mourn only my hard fate,
Who here remain in torture of black night,
As certain always of thy heavenward flight,
As of a thing I see within my gate.
For how should Nature’s God and Nature weight
A girl’s young heart with such stupendous dower,
If the Eternal Power
Had not been set on seeing her reach that goal?
A rarest soul,
Who lived among us with that lofty look,
And then such sudden flight to Heaven took!
But I, what should I do but ever weep,
Who without thee am nothing? Ah, I would
That I had died a tiny child who could
Have passed without a love-wound to his sleep!”
And she: “Why dost thou stir thy soul so deep?
Better it were to raise from earth thy wings;
And mortal things,
And woes of thy sweet phantom-earnest tales,
Weigh in well balanced scales,
And follow me, if that thou lov’st me so;
Gathering these boughs forever where they grow!”
I weep; and she my tears
With her own hands does stay: and then she sighs
Softly, and then she cries
Remonstrance that would make the stones to weep:
And after that she goes away, with Sleep.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

- Fixed typos; non-standard spelling and dialect retained.

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