He also sent him sonnets, sometimes admirable, often obscure, and some of which were soon recited in literary circles and known all over Italy.[1] The following sonnet has been styled "the finest lyric poem that Italy produced in the sixteenth century":[2]
"With your beautiful eyes I see a gentle light, which my blind eyes can see no longer. Your feet assist me to bear a load which my crippled feet can support no longer. I feel that, through your mind, I am raised to heaven. My will is centred in your will. My thoughts are formed in your heart and my words in your breath. Abandoned to myself, I am like the moon, which is invisible in the sky as long as the sun shines.[3]
Still more celebrated is this other sonnet, one of the finest poems which has ever been written in honour of perfect friendship:
"If a chaste love, if a superior devotion, if an equal fortune exist between two lovers, if cruel fate in striking
- ↑ Varchi commented on two of them in public, and published them in his "Due Lezzioni." Michael Augelo made no secret of his love. He spoke of it to Bartolommeo Angiolini and Sebastiano del Piombo. No one was astonished at such friendships. When Cecchino del Bracci died, Riccio proclaimed his love and despair from the housetops. "Ah! friend Donato!" he said. "Our Cecchino is dead. All Rome is in tears. Michael Angelo is making the drawing of a monument for me. I beg you to compose an epitaph and send me a consoling letter. My mind is drowned in sorrow. Patience! Each hour I live with a thousand thousand dead! O God! how Fortune has changed her face!" (letter to Donato Giannotti, January 1544). "I bear a thousand souls of lovers in my breast," Michael Angelo makes Cecchino say in one of his funereal epigrams ("Poems," Frey's edition, lxxiii, 12).
- ↑ Scheffler.
- ↑ "Poems," cix, 19. {See Appendix, xiii.)
