Untimely sighs - Petrarch, Canzoniere, no. 12

The original Italian can be found here.

Translated a few months ago, with some changes added as I type it up here.

Petrarch, 12th poem in the Canzoniere

If bitter torment spared my life 
So long endured, and breathless spent,
That I can see, at world's end,
The tapered light, lady, of your eyes

The golden hair turned to white,
The garland put aside with robes of green,
The faded face, that would make me
Hesitate, though in pain, to cry:

Yet love would take away my fear
Of making clear that sacrifice
Performed in every hour, day, and year,

And if time with true desire vies,
At least that will give my tears
Succor for my untimely sighs.

I've been slowly reading through the Canzoniere using a Reclam paperback with parallel German translation. Not the most efficient way, when I don't really know Italian (although I know Latin and French and I use "these notes") and I'm still learning German. I've learned German words that I should in no way be using in everyday conversation, like Antlitz ("countenance"), but which I definitely do use. 

What speaks to me in this poem? Imagining a future where, instead of confessing your love to your beloved and living a life of happiness together, you portray yourself confessing not your love, but that you loved, and lived. Maybe this is too vulgar of an idea of poetry, but if you are producing a fantasy in verse, there is no real limit to what you can say, theoretically. You can imagine, and say, anything. But Petrarch has a limit, and it is revealed in a stark way here. He imagines surviving a life of love kept silent, and at the very end, revealing it, but after the flower of youth and the full torrent of adulthood. When even poetry is over ("The garland put aside"). For him, the fantasy is a "time" that "with true desire vies," which means, I think, that his desire has survived the fight with time, and is still intact as time is running out. That, even when he sees his beloved aged, it is not a love lost that is lamented, or a love that could have been won years ago but is now past its time, but a survival that, if not celebrated, is at least held up as something that can dull the pain. The signs remain, and are now untimely, but the tears that accompany them can be shed with the knowledge of this endurance, and, somehow, that can soothe. That might be the ultimate fantasy of this poem, that such a state of affairs would even take place.