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Angels who know everlasting deep joy today long to suffer painful death, lest their paradisal court privilege slave over master--welcome them over Him. The apple's alluring taste makes Eve cry: she shut up elysium's doors against her sons; two mulilated hands guide us back through the path wandered from, through her lost. The sun hides its dazzling corona; steep teeming cliffs crumble; mountains rip open; earthquakes, trembling skies, disturbed seas felt, seen. Hell's ghosts always waiting, eager to wound us cry over heavier chains--only man doesn't cry--he cries when he is born. |
An image of the Italian text from Visconti's 1840 edition |
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Notes: From V LXVII:227. This sonnet has been classified as devotional: B S1:24:97; R XXI:437-438; Valgrisi 24; MS L (Tordi 20v) and as erotic MS F (AB Italian Studies 21 [66], 52); R XXI:437-438. Translations: Roscoe 325; Anderson 304; Lefèvre-Deumier 100. It is to Michelangelo Buonarroti; one of a pair (see his "Non fur men lieti che turbati e tristi" ("No less delighted than disturbed and sad," No. 298, Saslow, 494). See also Clemens, Poetry of M, p 132. Key |
