Love poems

“Vere fur queste gioie e questi ardori / ond’io piansi e cantai con vario carme” (Rime, 1, 1-2): Thus begins the opening sonnet of Tasso’s love poems, reiterating the “real joys and sorrows”, the sincerity of the passions of which he sings, denying that they are first and foremost a literary exercise, although on the basis of his actual life, it was the literary that prevailed. Stemming from the mid 1580s, the collected love poems include his compositions for Lucrezia Bendidio and Laura Peperara, a large section of unrelated poems, and over a hundred compositions written at the behest of others, friends and rulers, as was typical of the courtly custom to which Tasso adhered. There are also poems about love in the other sections of Tasso’s huge output of lyric poetry, and among his eulogistic poems there are surprisingly daring and sensual marriage poems (Rime, 569). On the whole, however, his love poems fall within the Petrarchan tradition, and Bembo’s classicizing approach, with Tasso’s innovations pertaining less to theme than to his ability to create an exquisite musical quality, as in his large collection of splendid madrigals. Below is one of the most famous (Rime, 324):

Qual rugiada o qual pianto.

quai lagrime eran quelle

che sparger vidi dal notturno manto

e dal candido volto de le stelle?

E perché seminò la bianca luna

di cristalline stelle un puro nembo

a l’erba fresca in grembo?

Perché ne l’aria bruna

s’udian, quasi dolendo, intorno intorno

gir l’aure insino al giorno?

Fur segni forse de la tua partita

vita de la mia vita?

[What dew or what weeping, what tears were those that I saw scatter from the noctural mantle and from the candid faces of the stars? And why did the white moon sow a pure cloud of crystalline stars in the bosom of the fresh grass? Why in the night air were heard, as in pain, all around, the winds blowing till dawn? Were these signs, perhaps, of your departure, life of my life?]