Sonnets and madrigals of Michelangelo Buonarroti

SONNETS AND MADRIGALS OF MICHELANGELO BUONARROTI RENDERED INTO ENGLISH VERSE BY WILLIAM WELLS NEWELL WITH ITALIAN TEXT INTRODUCTION AND NOTES
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN AND COMPANY MDCCCC
Copyright 1900 by William Wells Newell All rights reserved
MICHELANGELO AS POET
The verse, essentially lyric, owed its inspiration to experience. A complete record would have constituted a biography more intimate than any other. But such memorial does not exist; of early productions few survive; the extant poems, for the most part, appear to have been composed after the sixtieth year of their author.
In the most striking of the compositions devoted to the memory of Vittoria Colonna Michelangelo speaks of her influence as the tool by which his own genius had been formed, and which, when removed to heaven and made identical with the divine archetype, left no earthly substitute. That the language was no more than an expression of the fact is shown by the alteration which from this time appears in his verse. Poetry passes over into piety; artistic color is exchanged for the monotone of religious emotion. One may be glad that the old age, of whose trials he has left a terrible picture, found its support and alleviation; yet the later poems, distressing in their solemnity, pietistic in their self-depreciation, exhibit a declining poetic faculty, and in this respect are not to be ranked with their forerunners.
It does not detract from his worth as a lyrical writer, that the range of the themes is narrow, a limitation sufficiently explained by the conditions. The particular sentiment for the expression of which he needed rhyme was sexual affection. In the verse, if not in the art, “all thoughts, all passions, all delights” are ministers of that emotion. Michelangelo is as much a poet of love as Heine or Shelley.
The sonnets were intended not to be sung, but to be read; this purpose may account for occasional deficiencies of music. The beauty of the idea, the abundance of the thought, the sincerity of the emotion, cause them to stand in clear contrast to the productions of contemporary versifiers.