To any animal dwelling of earth,
If it is not a race that hates the sun,
The time for travailling is in the day;
But then when Heaven enkindles its stars
Some return home or will roost in the wood
So at least to repose till it is dawn.

But I, whence beautifully rises the dawn
That shakes the shadows encircling the earth,
Arousing all the creatures in each wood,
Have never concord of sighs with the sun;
Yet when I see atwinkle all the stars
I begin weeping and wishing for day.

When the evening stalks the lucid day
And does our darkness to others give dawn,
Then pensively I gaze at the cruel stars
Which did compound me of sensible earth;
And I blaspheme the day I saw the sun,
For which I seem as one raised in a wood.

I think there never pastured in a wood
Any rough beast by night or by the day
As she for whom I cry by shade and sun;
Nor does the dead sleep exhaust it, nor dawn,
Whence, though a mortal body of the earth,
Does my desire, stedfast, light from the stars.

Ere I return to you, lustering stars,
Or tumble down to the amorous wood,
Leaving the body being triturate earth,
May I see in her pity; a sole day
Can retrieve many years, and before dawn
Could make me rich, in the night of the sun.

With her be I from the lingering sun,
And let others not see us, save the stars,
Solely a night, and never be the dawn;
Be she never transformed into green wood
Nor escape from my arms as on the day
Apollo followed her down upon earth.

But I will be in earth, and in dry wood;
This way, the day shall be filled with small stars
Before so sweet a dawn shall see the sun.

~Francesco Petrarca, Canzoniere 22

Note: I am usually reticent to pose my thoughts on these poems by the force of prose as well as by verse, but I wish to suggest that the essence of this poem is in the sol/sole pun (sol or solo = only; sole = sun), a double meaning which is not difficult to retain in English. What F.P. writes in sz. 5 is `a sole day', while in sz. 6 he contradicts himself, `solely a night.' Actually, this second line is a double contradiction because, though the line began punningly invoking the sun, it ends with a abjuration of the dawn. In this way P. elevates the distance of his relationship into a linguistic paradox, while, in stanza 6, concomitantly expressing his devotion in a way that rather oversteps the boundaries both of courtly love and almost all of the Canzoniere itself. To me this counterpoint of hyperbole is designed to illustrate the divide between eternal ideas and things which are more secular. A futher inversion is that P. habitually compares Laura to the sun, as indeed he does in staza 3, line 5. But this identification in stanza 5 becomes a pathology, which is an interesting use of the sestina form since P. does not offer any harmonious resolution to this revaluation of the end-word `sole.' I hope you like my translation; I would be curious for any thoughts on whether my English `free verse' is pleasing or grating to the ear. I have tried to convey some of the sound of the Italian language in the verse but I am unsure if these efforts are not productive of an excess of gum.