(1490?-1539)
Like one who in dreams receives pleasure,
his pleasure proceeding from delirium,
so imagination with its figments
vainly invents its pleasures in me.
No good thing is inscribed on my sad heart,
except what I gain from my thoughts;
of all the good things that have happened to me
only the imaginary part is alive.
My heart fears to go forward,
seeing that its pain is lying in ambush,
and so it retires in an instant
to contemplate its past happiness.
Oh, what a fleeting shadow of help it is,
that what is best in me is nothing?
I am like one who lives in the desert,
by the world and its affairs forgotten,
and I see by chance
a good friend approaching, whom he had taken for dead.
At first he fears this strange occurrence,
but after he had made quite sure,
he begins to rejoice as he thinks of the past,
very much alive with new feeling.
But when this friend soon goes away,
since his business requires him to depart,
solitude begins to be new to him;
he does not reconcile himself to the mountain grasses,
he lacks all taste for the wasteland,
and he trembles each time he enters his cave.
(Date unavailable--early 16th century)