Saturday 30 July 2011

When life was sweet because you call'd them sweet


Lo dì che han detto a' dolci amici addio. - Dante
Amor, con quanto sforzo oggi mi vinci! - Petrarca


Come back to me, who wait and watch for you:--
Or come not yet, for it is over then,
And long it is before you come again,
So far between my pleasures are and few.
While, when you come not, what I do I do
Thinking "Now when he comes," my sweetest "when":
For one man is my world of all the men
This wide world holds; O love, my world is you.
Howbeit, to meet you grows almost a pang
Because the pang of parting comes so soon;
My hope hangs waning, waxing, like a moon
Between the heavenly days on which we meet:
Ah me, but where are now the songs I sang
When life was sweet because you call'd them sweet?


Ironically, the person whose absence is, as you may have guessed, prompting this thinly-disguised rash of posts about lost love and hopeless parting never, in fact, called my songs sweet, but quite the opposite, on several occasions; and vice versa, too. But this is a nice poem all the same.

2 comments:

Min said...

'Better to have loved & lost ...'
Bonne courage, Clerk.
And thank you for your beautiful, thought-provoking and most elegantly written blog which has permitted me to re-visit so many much-loved places/poems/reflections: reading it has been such a treat. Chapeau!

Clerk of Oxford said...

Thank you, I appreciate that very much!