Explore "Se L' Onorata Fronde, Che Prescrive" by Francesco Petrarca on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
TO STRAMAZZO OF PERUGIA, WHO INVITED HIM TO WRITE POETRY.
If the world-honour'd leaf, whose green defies / The wrath of Heaven when thunders mighty Jove, / Had not to me prohibited the crown / Which wreathes of wont the gifted poet's brow, / I were a friend of these your idols too, / Whom our vile age so shamelessly ignores: / But that sore insult keeps me now aloof / From the first patron of the olive bough: / For Ethiop earth beneath its tropic sun / Ne'er burn'd with such fierce heat, as I with rage / At losing thing so comely and beloved.
Resort then to some calmer fuller fount, / For of all moisture mine is drain'd and dry, / Save that which falleth from mine eyes in tears.
MACGREGOR.