TRANSLATED FROM RONSARD

Nature withheld Cassandra in the skies

For more adornment a full thousand years;

She took their cream of Beauty’s fairest dyes,

And shap’d and tinted her above all Peers:

Meanwhile Love kept her dearly with his wings,

And underneath their shadow fill’d her eyes

With such a richness that the cloudy Kings

Of high Olympus utter’d slavish sighs.

When from the Heavens I saw her first descend

My heart took fire, and only burning pains

They were my pleasures- they my Life’s sad end;

Love pour’d her beauty into my warm veins...

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