D’un alto monte onde si scorge il mare, by Isabella di Morra

Today we read D’un alto monte onde si scorge il mare, by Isabella di Morra. Picture it: you are a young, smart girl who adores her father because, among other things, he gives you a literary education. Which is not at all to be taken as a given when you live in the early 1500s. You are surrounded by unruly and frankly nasty brothers, who envy your father’s attentions for you. Then you father runs afoul of the powers that be, and has to flee to Paris. You are left alone with your brothers, who confine you by the early age of ten to live inside your castle, perched atop a steep cliff. Your life is reduced to writing poetry for yourself, hating the place of your imprisonment, and longing for your father’s return. This is what the sonnet describes: Isabella looking out to the sea from her lonely, hated cliff, searching the horizon for ships that might bring her, if not her father, at least news of him. But her father never came home, even after his pardon: he preferred to climb the ranks at the court in Paris, and abandoned his family back in the sticks. This veritable Rapunzel had her one little joy in the literary correspondence she maintained with another poet, Diego Sandoval, a neighbouring noble. Their letters had to be sneaked in by her tutor, to avoid suspicions. But of course their brothers got wind of them, immediately suspected a tryst, and thought nothing of killing her to restore the “family honour.” Such was the short, unhappy life of Isabella. The original: D’un alto monte onde si scorge il mare
miro sovente io, tua figlia Isabella,
s’alcun legno spalmato in quello appare,
che di te, padre, a me doni novella.

Ma la mia adversa e dispietata stella
non vuol ch’alcun conforto possa entrare
nel tristo cor, ma, di pietà rubella,
la calda speme in pianto fa mutare.

Ch’io non veggo nel mar remo né vela
(così deserto è lo infelice lito)
che l’onde fenda o che la gonfi il vento.

Contra Fortuna alor spargo querela
ed ho in odio il denigrato sito,
come sola cagion del mio tormento.\ The music in this episode is Vivaldi’s Double Violin Concerto in D minor, Op. 3 No. 11, played by the Advent Chamber Orchestra with David Parry and Roxana Pavel Goldstein (under creative commons from the Al Goldstein collection).