Solitary bird, you sing
from the crest of the ancient tower
to the landscape, while day dies:
while music wanders the valley.
Spring brightens
the air around, exults in the fields,
so the heart is moved to see it.
Flocks are bleating, herds are lowing:
more birds happily make a thousand
circles in the clear sky, all around,
celebrating these happy times:
you gaze pensively, apart, at it all:
no companions, and no flight,
no pleasures call you, no play:
you sing, and so see out
the year, the sweet flowering of your life.

      Ah, how like
your ways to mine! Pleasure and Joy
youth’s sweet companions,
and, Love, its dear friend,
sighing, bitter at passing days,
I no longer care for them, I don’t know why:
indeed I seem to fly far from them:
seem to wander, a stranger
in my native place,
in the springtime of my life.
This day, yielding to evening now,
is a holiday in our town.
You can hear a bell ring in the clear sky,
you can hear the cannon’s iron thunder,
echoing away, from farm to farm.
Dressed for the festival
young people here
leave the houses, fill the streets,
to see and be seen, with happy hearts.
I go out, alone,
into the distant country,
postpone all delight and joy
to some other day: and meanwhile
my gaze takes in the clear air,
brings me the sun that sinks and vanishes
among the distant mountains,
after the cloudless day, and seems to say,
that the beauty of youth diminishes.

      You, lonely bird, reaching the evening
of this life the stars grant you,
truly, cannot regret
your existence: since your every
action is born of nature.
But I, if I can’t
evade through prayer,
the detested threshold of old age,
when these eyes will be dumb to others,
and the world empty, and the future
darker and more irksome than the present,
what will I think of such desires?
Of these years of mine? Of what happened?
Ah I’ll repent, and often,
un-consoled, I’ll gaze behind me.