Al poco giorno

I.
To short day and a great circle of shadow
am I come, alas, and to whitening of hills,
when the color is lost in the grass:
but my desire does not change its green,
so rooted is it in the hard stone
which speaks and feels as if it were a woman.

II.
Similarly this strange woman
is frozen like snow in shadow:
because she is not moved, unless like stone
by the sweet weather which warms the hills
and makes them turn from white to green
because it covers them with little flowers and grass.

III.
When she has on her head a garland of grass,
she draws from our mind every other woman:
because the yellow hair is mixed with the green,
so prettily, that Love come there to stand in the shadow,
Who has locked me within the little hills,
more firmly than mortar locks stone.

IV.
Her beauty has more power than precious stone,
and her wound cannot be cured by herb grass:
thus have I fled over plains and hills,
to escape that woman;
but from her glow I can find no shadow,
from either hill or wall or leafy green.

V.
I have already seen her dressed in green,
so made that she would have moved to stone
the love which I bear even to her shadow:
wherefore I have desired her in lovely meadow grass,
to be in love as ever was a lady,
and closed around by highest hills.

VI.
But the rivers will surely return to the hills
before this soft green wood
catch fire, as a beautiful woman usually makes
of me: for I would consent to sleep in stone
all my life and wander foraging in grass,
only to see where her clothes make shadow.

VII.
Whenever the hills make a darker shadow,
under a lovely green, the young lady
makes it disappear, as a man stone ‘neath grass.

-Dante Alighieri