Bestir thee, Love, and get thee to my Sire

Bestir thee, Love, and get thee to my Sire is the opening line of a canzonet written for Lisa, who is tormented by a love she has been unable to confess to Don Pedro. The song gives her longing a voice by addressing Love as a messenger: what Lisa cannot safely say herself, the personified force of love is asked to carry to the king. Its words move from fear and shame toward disclosure, and its performance turns a hidden feeling into a communication that changes what can happen next.

Text and dramatic setting

The canzonet is commissioned through Minuccio d'Arezzo after Lisa confides in him. She has fixed her affection on Don Pedro, but fearfulness has kept her from declaring it directly. Minuccio pledges his help and promises that she will hear welcome news within three days; he then asks Mico da Siena to make the words. The song is therefore not an independent lyric detached from the story: it is composed in response to Lisa's particular predicament and intended to reach the person she loves.

Its opening makes that purpose explicit. Lisa calls on Love to go to her Sire and tell him of her suffering, asking the messenger to reveal what she herself has concealed. The address gives the emotion an imagined route: inward pain becomes a message entrusted to another. The opening also establishes the lyric's central tension. Lisa longs to disclose her desire, yet her fear has prevented direct speech, so she asks Love to perform the act of declaration for her.

From concealment to appeal

The song repeatedly presents silence as an obstacle Lisa cannot overcome by ordinary means. She says that, since she first fell in love, Love has not given her the courage to declare her longing to her lord. Nor, she says, has Love allowed her to communicate through a glance, a sign, or a written message. These alternatives make the silence concrete: the difficulty is not simply that Lisa has not spoken, but that every possible channel of approach seems closed to her.

Against that blockage, the lyric builds an appeal rather than a demand. Lisa asks Love to explain her torment and make her beloved aware of it. Her fear of dying from the pain of longing is set beside the possibility that the king might respond compassionately if he knew what she endured. The argument turns on disclosure: what appears hopeless while hidden might become bearable once spoken. The song does not claim that love has already been returned; it asks for the chance that knowledge may make a response possible.

Images and remembered encounter

The canzonet gives emotional suffering a bodily and almost consuming force. Lisa describes her heart as inflamed by her lord, and her longing as pain so fierce that she fears death. Fire and illness-like distress make the emotion legible as an ordeal, while the repeated language of fear and shame explains why that ordeal has remained private. The lyric's intensity thus has two sides: love presses toward confession, but apprehension continually holds it back.

In its final appeal, Lisa asks Love to remind the king of the day she saw him carrying shield and lance among the other knights. The recollection supplies a specific beginning for the feeling that the rest of the song describes. It also gives the messenger something more particular to carry than a general declaration: a remembered encounter, and the moment Lisa says her heart became deeply enamoured. The movement from that scene to the present plea traces the distance between the first sight of the beloved and the still-unspoken desire that followed.

Performance and consequence

Minuccio sets the words to a soft, plaintive air suited to their subject. On the third day he sings the canzonet to his viol in Don Pedro's hall while the king is still at meat. The song arrests the attention of those present, and Don Pedro appears more attentive than anyone. When the performance ends, he asks where the song came from and for whom it was made. Minuccio keeps Lisa's identity from the assembled company, then tells the king privately after the meal, recounting what he has learned from her.

The king responds with compassion for Lisa and sends Minuccio back to comfort her with news that he will visit her that day towards Vespers. Lisa receives the message in private and hears the song performed for her; her joy is so strong that she shows unmistakable signs of improvement as she awaits the visit. The lyric's plot function follows the form of its appeal: composed from her concealed words, carried by a singer, and heard by the king, it gives her desire a path from secrecy to an answer. The song does not itself settle the course of their relationship, but it makes the encounter Lisa had feared to initiate possible.