Giovanni Quirino. “Sonnet (to Dante Alighieri). He commends the work of Dante's Life, then drawing to its close; and deplores his own deficiencies.”

This is the penultimate work in The Early Italian Poets and it forms a pair with the poem that responds to it, the sonnet attributed to Dante “The King by whose rich grace His servants be”. Both comprise a strong and clearly programmatic conclusion to the volume, which DGR has all along treated as an aesthetic manifesto. (See also the commentary for the final paired sonnet.)

DGR's source text for his translation was in Fraticelli's Opere minori di Dante Alighieru (I. 156-157), where it is tentatively attributed, incorrectly, to Dante.

An early translation, probably late 1840s.

The Early Italian Poets; it was reprinted in 1874 in Dante and his Circle.