Sleep and love

When the lamp of Cynthia late
Rises in her silver state,
Through her brother’s roseate light,
Blushing on the brows of night;
Then the pure ethereal air
Breathes with zephyr blowing fair;
Clouds and vapours disappear.
As with chords of lute or lyre,
Soothed the spirits now respire,
And the heart revives again
Which once more for love is fain.
But the orient evening star
Sheds with influence kindlier far
Dews of sweet sleep on the eye
Of o’er-tired mortality.

Oh, how blessed to take and keep
Is the antidote of sleep!
Sleep that lulls the storms of care
And of sorrow unaware,
Creeping through the closed doors
Of the eyes, and through the pores
Breathing bliss so pure and rare
That with love it may compare.

Then the god of dreams doth bring
To the mind some restful thing,
Breezes soft that rippling blow
O’er ripe cornfields row by row,
Murmuring rivers round whose brim
Silvery sands the swallows skim,
Or the drowsy circling sound
Of old mill-wheels going round,
Which with music steal the mind
And the eyes in slumber bind.
When the deeds of love are done
Which bland Venus had begun,
Languor steals with pleasant strain
Through the chambers of the brain,
Eyes ’neath eyelids gently tired
Swim and seek the rest desired.
How deliriously at last
Into slumber love hath passed!
But how sweeter yet the way
Which leads love again to play!

From the soothed limbs upward spread
Glides a mist divinely shed,
Which invades the heart and head:
Drowsily it veils the eyes,
Bending toward sleep’s paradise,
And with curling vapour round
Fills the lids, the senses swound,
Till the visual ray is bound
By those ministers which make
Life renewed in man awake.

Underneath the leafy shade
Of a tree in quiet laid,
While the nightingale complains
Singing of her ancient pains,
Sweet it is still hours to pass,
But far sweeter on the grass
With a buxom maid to play
All a summer’s holiday.
When the scent of herb and flower
Breathes upon the silent hour,
When the rose with leaf and bloom
Spreads a couch of pure perfume,
Then the grateful boon of sleep
Falls with satisfaction deep,
Showering dews our eyes above,
Tired with honeyed strife of love.

In how many moods the mind
Of poor lovers, weak and blind,
Wavers like the wavering wind!
As a ship in darkness lost,
Without anchor tempest-tossed,
So with hope and fear imbued
It roams in great incertitude
Love’s tempestuous ocean-flood.

from Carmina Burana (early 13th century)

trans John Addington Symonds (1840–1893)

in Wine, Women, and Song: Mediaeval Latin Students’ Songs

Thanks to Project Gutenberg, without which I might never have stumbled across this fine translation of one of the finest secular Latin poems of the Middle Ages.

(Latin text here.)


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