338. ‘Lasciato ài, Morte, senza sole il mondo’

Death, you have left the world without a sun

dark and cold, Love blind and unarmed,

Graciousness naked, and Beauty ill,

me disconsolate, with my heavy burden,

Courtesy banned, and Honesty in the deep.

I alone grieve, but not only I have cause,

that the brightest seed of virtue’s gone:

with the first value quenched, where is there another?

The air, and earth, and sea should weep

for the human race, that without her

is a field without flowers, a ring with no gem.

The world did not know her while she lived:

I knew, I who am left to my weeping,

and Heaven, so beautified by her I weep for.