How often, fleeing others, even from myself I’ve fled
and come to this dear hiding place, to water with my eyes
the grasses and my breast, piercing the local air with sighs;

or gone alone to gloomy spots far from the light of day,
pursuing in my troubled thoughts her whom Death snatched away,
my chief delight; how many times I’ve cried out to be dead!

Up from the Sorgue’s bright depths, and sitting on its bank, I see
… a nymph? … some other goddess? Now she moves. I watch her pass:
a living woman treading through the flowers and the grass.
She turns her face toward me, and I know she pities me.