III. Belonging to the year 1506, when Michael Angelo quarrelled with Julius and left Rome in anger. The tree referred to in the last line is the oak of the Rovere family.
IV. Same date, and same circ.u.mstances. The autograph has these words at the foot of the sonnet: _Vostro Miccelangniolo, in Turchia._ Rome itself, the Sacred City, has become a land of infidels.
V. Ser Giovanni da Pistoja was Chancellor of the Florentine Academy.
The date is probably 1509. The _Sonetto a Coda_ is generally humorous or satiric.
VI. Written in one of those moments of _affanno_ or _stizzo_ to which the sculptor was subject. For the old bitterness of feeling between Florence and Pistoja, see Dante, _Inferno._
VII. Michael Angelo was ill during the summer of 1544, and was nursed by Luigi del Riccio in his own house, Shortly after his recovery he quarrelled with his friend, and wrote him this sonnet as well as a very angry letter.
VIII. p. 38. Cecchino Bracci was a boy of rare and surpa.s.sing beauty who died at Rome, January 8, 1544, in his seventeenth year. Besides this sonnet, which refers to a portrait Luigi del Riccio had asked him to make of the dead youth, Michael Angelo composed a series of forty-eight quatrains upon the same subject, and sent them to his friend Luigi.
Michelangelo the younger, thinking that _"l"ignoranzia degli uomini ha campo di mormorare,"_ suppressed the name Cecchino and changed _lui_ into _lei._ Date about 1544.
IX. Line 4: "The Archangel"s scales alone can weigh my grat.i.tude against your gift." Lines 5-8: "Your courtesy has taken away all my power of responding to it. I am as helpless as a ship becalmed, or a wisp of straw on a stormy sea."
X. Michael Angelo, when asked to make a portrait of his friend"s mistress, declares that he is unable to do justice to her beauty. The name _Mancina_ is a pun upon the Italian word for the left arm, _Mancino_. This lady was a famous and venal beauty, mentioned among the loves of the poet Molsa.
XI. Date, 1550.
XII. This and the three next sonnets may with tolerable certainty be referred to the series written on various occasions for Vittoria Colonna.
XIII. Sent together with a letter, in which we read: _l"aportatore di questa sara Urbino, che sta meco_. Urbino was M. A."s old servant, workman, and friend. See No. LXVIII. and note.
XIV. The thought is that, as the sculptor carves a statue from a rough model by addition and subtraction of the marble, so the lady of his heart refines and perfects his rude native character.
XV. This sonnet is the theme of Varchi"s _Lezione_. There is nothing to prove that it was addressed to Vittoria Colonna. Varchi calls it "_un suo altissimo sonetto pieno di quella antica purezza e dantesca gravita_."
XVI. The thought of the fifteenth is repeated with some variations. His lady"s heart holds for the lover good and evil things, according as he has the art to draw them forth.
XVIII. In the terzets he describes the temptations of the artist-nature, over-sensitive to beauty. Michelangelo the younger so altered these six lines as to destroy the autobiographical allusion.--Cp. No. XXVIII., note.
XIX. The lover"s heart is like an intaglio, precious by being inscribed with his lady"s image.
XX. An early composition, written on the back of a letter sent to the sculptor in Bologna by his brother Simone in 1507. M.A. was then working at the bronze statue of Julius II. Who the lady of his love was, we do not know. Notice the absence of Platonic _concetti_.
XXIII. It is hardly necessary to call attention to Michael Angelo"s oft-recurring Platonism. The thought that the eye alone perceives the celestial beauty, veiled beneath the fleshly form of the beloved, is repeated in many sonnets--especially in XXV., XXVIII.
XXIV. Composed probably in the year 1529.
XXV. Written on the same sheet as the foregoing sonnet, and composed probably in the same year. The thought is this: beauty pa.s.sing from the lady into the lover"s soul, is there spiritualised and becomes the object of a spiritual love.
XXVII. To escape from his lady, either by interposing another image of beauty between the thought of her and his heart, or by flight, is impossible.
XXVIII. Compare Madrigal VII. in ill.u.s.tration of lines 5 to 8. By the a.n.a.logy of that pa.s.sage, I should venture to render lines 6 and 7 thus:
He made thee light, and me the eyes of art; Nor fails my soul to find G.o.d"s counterpart.
x.x.x. Varchi, quoting this sonnet in his _Lezione_, conjectures that it was composed for Tommaso Cavalieri.
x.x.xI. Varchi a.s.serts without qualification that this sonnet was addressed to Tommaso Cavalieri. The pun in the last line, _Resto prigion d"un Cavalier armato_, seems to me to decide the matter, though Signor Guasti and Signor Gotti both will have it that a woman must have been intended. Michelangelo the younger has only left one line, the second, untouched in his _rifacimento_. Instead of the last words he gives _un cuor di virtu armato_, being over-scrupulous for his great-uncle"s reputation.
x.x.xII. Written at the foot of a letter addressed by Giuliano Bugiardini the painter, from Florence, to M.A. in Rome, August 5, 1532. This then is probably the date of the composition.
x.x.xIV. The metaphor of fire, flint, and mortar breaks down in the last line, where M.A. forgets that gold cannot strike a spark from stone.
x.x.xV. Line 9 has the word _Signor_. It is almost certain that where M.A. uses this word without further qualification in a love sonnet, he means his mistress. I have sometimes translated it "heart"s lord" or "loved lord," because I did not wish to merge the quaintness of this ancient Tuscan usage in the more commonplace "lady."
x.x.xVI. Line 3: _the lord, etc_. This again is the poet"s mistress. The drift of the sonnet is this: his soul can find no expression but through speech, and speech is too gross to utter the purity of his feeling. His mistress again receives his tongue"s message with her ears; and thus there is an element of sensuality, false and alien to his intention, both in his complaint and in her acceptation of it. The last line is a version of the proverb: _chi e avvezzo a dir bugie, non crede a nessuno_.
x.x.xVII. At the foot of the sonnet is written _Mandato_. The two last lines play on the words _signor_ and _signoria_. To whom it was sent we do not know for certain; but we may conjecture Vittoria Colonna.
x.x.xIX. The paper on which this sonnet is written has a memorandum with the date January 6, 1529. "On my return from Venice, I, Michelagniolo Buonarroti, found in the house about five loads of straw," etc. It belongs therefore to the period of the siege of Florence, when M.A., as is well known, fled for a short s.p.a.ce to Venice. In line 12, I have translated _il mie signiore, my lady_.
XL. No sonnet in the whole collection seems to have cost M.A. so much trouble as this. Besides the two completed versions, which I have rendered, there are several scores of rejected or various readings for single lines in the MSS. The Platonic doctrine of Anamnesis probably supplies the key to the thought which the poet attempted to work out.
XLI., XLII., XLIII., XLIV. There is nothing to prove that these four sonnets on Night were composed in sequence. On the contrary, the personal tone of XLI. seems to separate this from the other three.
XLIV. may be accepted as a palinode for XLIII.
XLV., XLVI. Both sonnets deal half humorously with a thought very prominent in M.A."s compositions--the effect of love on one who is old in years. Cp. XLVIII., L.
XLVII. The Platonic conception that the pure form of Beauty or of Truth, if seen, would be overwhelming in its brilliancy.
XLIX. The _dolcie pianto_ and _eterna pace_ are the tears and peace of piety. The _doloroso riso_ and _corta pace_ are the smiles and happiness of earthly love.
LII. Here is another version of this very beautiful sonnet.
No mortal thing enthralled these longing eyes When perfect peace in thy fair face I found; But far within, where all is holy ground, My soul felt Love, her comrade of the skies: For she was born with G.o.d in Paradise; Nor all the shows of beauty shed around This fair false world her wings to earth have bound; Unto the Love of Loves aloft she flies.
Nay, things that suffer death, quench not the fire Of deathless spirits; nor eternity Serves sordid Time, that withers all things rare.
Not love but lawless impulse is desire: That slays the soul; our love makes still more fair Our friends on earth, fairer in death on high.
LIII. This is the doctrine of the Symposium; the scorn of merely s.e.xual love is also Platonic.
LIV. Another sonnet on the theme of the Uranian as distinguished from the Vulgar love. See below, LVL., for a parallel to the second terzet.
LV. The date maybe 1532. The play on words in the first quatrain and the first terzet is Shakespearian.
LIX. Two notes, appended to the two autographs of this sonnet, show that M.A. regarded it as a _jeu d"esprit, "Per carnovale par lecito far qualche pazzia a chi non va in maschera." "Questo non e fuoco da carnovale, per vel mando di quaresima; e a voi mi rachomando. Vostro Michelagniolo."_
LXL. Date 1547. No sonnet presents more difficulties than this, in which M.A. has availed himself of a pa.s.sage in the _Cratylus_ of Plato. The divine hammer spoken of in the second couplet is the ideal pattern after which the souls of men are fashioned; and this in the first terzet seems to be identified with Vittoria Colonna. In the second terzet he regards his own soul as imperfect, lacking the final touches which it might have received from hers. See XIV. for a somewhat similar conceit.
LXIV. The image is that of a glowing wood coal smouldering away to embers amid its own ashes.
LXV. Date 1554. Addressed _A messer Giorgio Vasari, amico e pittor singulare_, with this letter: _Messer Giorgio, amico caro, voi direte ben ch" io sie vecchio e pazzo a voler far sonetti; ma perche molti dicono ch" io son rimbambito, ho voluto far l"uficio mio, ec. A d 19 di settembre 1554. Vostro Michelagniolo Buonarroti in Roma_.
LXVL, LXVII. These two sonnets were sent to Giorgio Vasari in 1555(?) with this letter: _Messer Giorgio, io vi mando dua sonetti; e benche sieno cosa sciocca, il fo perche veggiate dove io tengo i mie"