To Silvia

Silvia, do you recall

those days of mortal life,

when beauty sparkled in

your quick and gleaming eyes,

when, glad and pensive, the threshold

of youth you were to rise?

The quiet halls resounded,

and so the streets around,

to your perpetual chime,

while at your female chores intent

you sat, content

of vague tomorrows

in your mind.

It was the odorous May, and that

was how you spent the day.

Discarding sometimes

my beloved studies,

the toilsome papers where

my prime was being consumed,

the best of me,

up on the terrace of the family house

I?d set my ear

to the sound of your voice,

and to the hasty hand

that ran the tiring loom.

I?d view the peaceful sky,

the golden streets, the gardens,

down here the distant sea, up there the mount.

No mortal tongue can say

what in my breast I felt.

What sweet reflections,

what hopes, what choruses, oh Silvia!

How human life and destiny

appeared to us to be!

When I recall

that hope,

affections clutch me so

acute and inconsolable

that still my grief I cry.

Oh nature, nature, why

do you withhold what

first you promise?

Why do you so

deceive these sons of yours?

?Fore winter?s cold had dried the grass,

attacked and conquered

by some closed disease

you died, oh tender one. You did not see

the flowering of your days;

your heart was not caressed

by words of praise for your dark hair,

your loving and reserved looks;

and neither did you talk of love

with friends on days of feast.

Soon were to die my hopes alike:

to my years too

did fate deny a youth.

Alas, how you swept by,

companion dear of my fresh age,

my wept-for hope!

This is that world? These the delights,

the love, the works, the events

we so long reasoned of together?

This is the lot of human folk?

When truth appeared,

you fell, poor one,

and with your hand,

a frigid death,

a naked tomb

you showed me from afar.