Adapted from the Vita Nuova of Dante by Percy Bysshe Shelley

This brief excerpt is Shelley’s loose translation of a section from Dante's *Vita Nuova*, where the speaker attempts—though he acknowledges his failure—to capture the moment his beloved smiles. The smile is so remarkable that both words and memory fall short. It’s a love poem that ultimately explores the boundaries of language.

Reverent and quietly awestruck. The speaker doesn't exude grand passion — he's truly at a loss, and that sense of helplessness comes across as sincere instead of theatrical. The three lines convey a stillness that feels almost like a moment of devotion.

Dante Alighieri wrote the *Vita Nuova* around 1294, combining Italian sonnets, canzoni, and prose commentary to explore his love for Beatrice Portinari. This work had a huge impact on European poetry that followed. Shelley, who was fluent in Italian, engaged with Dante throughout his brief life, most notably in *The Triumph of Life*, which he left unfinished when he died in 1822. This fragment loosely adapts a passage where Dante's speaker admits that Beatrice's smile overwhelms both his tongue and memory. Shelley replaces her name with Mary, likely referring to Mary Godwin (who would later become Mary Shelley), with whom he had been involved since 1814. This fragment didn’t get published during Shelley's lifetime; it surfaced later in Harry Buxton Forman's 1876 edition of his collected works, joining the many brief pieces he left in manuscript form.