Such is thy pleasure, Love

Such is thy pleasure, Love is a song of ecstatic love whose joy is both physically visible and verbally uncontainable, yet whose source must remain secret. Sung by Pamfilo before the company, it turns private happiness into a performance that can be heard and admired without being understood; the narrator notes that the listeners do not guess the truth behind it.

Performance and Occasion

At the close of an evening of supper, singing, and dancing, the queen asks Pamfilo to sing, following the custom of her predecessors. He obliges with a song that begins, “Such is thy pleasure, Love,” declaring the speaker happy even while burning in love. The placement matters: a private passion is voiced in a communal gathering, where its emotional force is available to everyone but its personal occasion is not.

Joy Made Visible, Feeling Held Back

The song gives happiness a bodily sign: what glows in the heart overflows and appears in the speaker’s face. Yet outward radiance does not make the feeling fully legible. The speaker says that he cannot depict it with a finger or release it adequately in song, and that even if he could, disclosure might turn joy into sorrow. The lyric thus makes concealment part of love’s pleasure as well as its constraint: the feeling can be displayed in a face and celebrated in verse, while its source remains guarded.

The final stanza intensifies that tension through the image of an embrace reaching an unexpectedly exalted object of devotion. The speaker marvels that his arms could attain what he has long held and that his face could reach so fair a shrine. The sacred language elevates the beloved, while the speaker’s astonishment keeps the achievement precarious: the happiness seems almost too fortunate to have been believed possible. His closing insistence on hiding the source of his bliss answers the earlier fear that speaking it aloud could undo it.

The Hidden Reference

After the song, the company attends closely to its words and tries to infer what Pamfilo means to conceal. Some imagine different explanations, but none discovers the truth. A note attached to the passage identifies the lyric as an apparent allusion to Boccaccio’s love for Fiammetta, whose passion the note says was returned. That interpretation makes the song’s concealment structural as well as lyrical: its listeners encounter the signs of fulfilled love, but the personal reference remains inaccessible to them.

Place in the Decameron

The song’s speaker describes not longing alone but happiness already attained: his arms have reached the beloved, and love has led him to a place of joy. In that respect, the lyric differs from the surrounding storytelling, where love may meet shame, family opposition, danger, or separation before reaching security. Stories elsewhere in the book show lovers making private unions public, as when Ricciardo and Caterina’s encounter leads to marriage, or when a threatened love is resolved by consent and reconciliation. Pamfilo’s song instead suspends its private fulfillment inside a performance: its emotional truth is sung openly, while the identity of its beloved remains unspoken.