Canzone

When shall we learn, what should be clear as day,

We cannot choose what we are free to love?

Although the mouse we banished yesterday

Is an enraged rhinoceros today,

Our value is more threatened than we know:

Shabby objections to our present day

Go snooping round its  outskirts; night and day

Faces, orations, battles, bait our will

As questionable forms and noises will;

Whole phyla of resentments every day

Give status to the wild men of the world

Who rule the absent-minded and this world.

We are created from and with the world

To suffer with and from it day by day:

Whether we meet in a majestic world

Of solid measurements or a dream world

Of swans and gold, we are required to love

All homeless objects that require a world.

Our claim to own our bodies and our world

Is our catastrophe. What can we know

But panic and caprice until we know

Our dreadful appetite demands a world

Whose order, origin, and purpose will

Be fluent satisfaction of our will?

Drift, Autumn, drift; fall, colours, where you will:

Bald melancholia minces through the world.

Regret, cold oceans, the lymphatic will

Caught in reflection on the right to will:

While violent dogs excite their dying day

To bacchic fury; snarl, though, as they will,

Their teeth are not a triumph for the will

But utter hesitation. What we love

Ourselves for is our power not to love,

To shrink to nothing or explode at will,

To ruin and remember that we know

What ruins and hyaenas cannot know.

If in this dark now I less often know

That spiral staircase where the haunted will

Hunts for its stolen luggage, who should know

Better than you, beloved, how I know

What gives security to any world.

Or in whose mirror I begin to know

The chaos of the heart as merchants know

Their coins and cities, genius its own day?

For through our lively traffic all the day,

In my own person I am forced to know

How much must be forgotten out of love,

How much must be forgiven, even love.

Dear flesh, dear mind, dear spirit, O dear love,

In the depths of myself blind monsters know

Your presence and are angry, dreading Love

That asks its image for more than love;

The hot rampageous horses of my will,

Catching the scent of Heaven, whinny: Love

Gives no excuse to evil done for love,

Neither in you, nor me, nor armies, nor the world

Of words and wheels, nor any other world.

Dear fellow-creature, praise our God of Love

That we are so admonished, that no day

Of conscious trial be a wasted day.

Or else we make a scarecrow of the day,

Loose ends and jumble of our common world,

And stuff and nonsense of our own free will;

Or else our changing flesh may never know

There must be sorrow if there can be love.