For certain he hath seen all perfectness

This sonnet follows on its paired sonnet “My lady looks so gentle and so pure” (see commentary for the latter). DGR's “aesthetic” reading of his source text, marked most clearly in the first sonnet by an echo of Shelley, here comes forward, as so often with DGR, in a dramatic moment of “mistranslation” at lines 7-8. DGR uses a pictorial—indeed, an ekphrastic—figure to signal Beatrice's “perfect. . .beauty” where Dante's is vestmental.

DGR's source text was “Vede perfettamente ogni salute” in the third volume of Fraticell's Opere Minori di Dante Alighieri.

An early work, probably late 1840s.

The translation was first published in 1861 in The Early Italian Poets; it was reprinted in 1874 in Dante and his Circle.