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(Franco, to Venice and her distant lover.) Everything that brings solace and joy throughout these fields and lovely shores causes me pain and heavy, dismal grief. The sunny valleys, full of breezes and scents, the grasses, the branches, the birds, the cool springs that pour from crystalline, pure streams, the shady groves and cultivated hills, so delightful and so welcoming to climb, and easier the farther up one goes, and all the things that art, nature, and heaven with industrious hands have created here are savage and foreign deserts to me. No sweetness can assuage the bitterness I feel because of the painful departure I took from my dearly beloved native soil: leaving, I left my life behind, which, lying ignored at my cruel lover's feet, lies torn asunder and parted from me. And yet among these flowers and plants I go seeking it, and the tracks of that vile man who stands before me wherever I go. And I seem to see him, transforming himself now into a beech tree, now a fir, now a pine, now a laurel, now a myrtle, into all sorts of shapes. It seems to me that I can see him close by, and I reach out with eager hands to seize him, and try to bring my lips close, to kiss him. In this confusion I see and understand that, deluded by imagination and hope, I embrace and hold a tree trunk or a rock. If I see two little singing birds land together in joy on a branch, with the desire Love gently imprints in the heart, I realize that I count in vain on distance as a cure for my misery, in a place where no one assists me. And then two birds share sweet delight, coming together to enjoy that good that fulfils their desire and hope as one; in the groves and woods, one senses Love, driven from the company of men, among the animals, which love each other equally; mutual desire draws wild creatures to the sweet invitation of love's delights, with feeling shared equally between two hearts; in mountains, valleys, groves, banks, and shores, here and there, joined in tight embrace, pairs of wild beasts wander in twos, and man, chosen by heaven to be lord over all the other beasts of the earth, endowed with reason and with intellect, man, who by choice errs rarely or never, desiring sweet love, wages against himself such a continuous and abominable war that in the end it is impossible for him to love without finding his beloved's heart marked with desires that resist his own........ [ll. 13-69; pp. 219-221] |
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