290. ‘Come va ’l mondo! or mi diletta et piace’

How this world alters! What once displeased

me most delights me, now, and pleases:

now I see my pain was my salvation,

I warred a while for my eternal rest.

O hope, O desire, always deceiving,

a hundred times more so for lovers!

O how much worse if she’d yielded to me,

who now lies in earth, but sits in heaven!

But blind love and my dull mind

led me astray so, that my living journey

forced me to go towards her death,

Blessed is she who turned my course

towards the better path, and carefully reined in

the burning impious will, so I did not perish.