A youngling maid am I and full of glee

A youngling maid am I and full of glee is a canzonet sung by Neifile as the ninth day draws to its close. Its young speaker moves through May meadows, finding in flowers likenesses of her beloved; she gathers and kisses them, makes them into a wreath, and confides her feelings to them. The poem’s decisive movement is from private longing to reciprocal presence: her sighs travel to the man she loves, and he comes to her before she can despair.

Occasion and lyrical voice

After supper, the company resumes its customary dances and sings songs that are more entertaining in their words than accomplished in their music. Filostrato then asks Neifile to sing one in her own name. Her canzonet answers with a first-person voice, but it gives no personal history or specific meeting to explain the love it describes. Instead, it presents a compact sequence of feelings and gestures: the speaker delights in the season, recognizes her beloved in the flowers, and finds that her tender signs of longing bring him near.

The opening establishes both the speaker’s youth and her buoyancy: “A youngling maid am I and full of glee, / Am fain to carol in the new-blown May.” May is not merely a date in the scene; it supplies the poem’s atmosphere of fresh growth and gladness. The speaker’s pleasure in singing belongs to the same emotional world as the flowers she goes on to admire. Her love is not introduced as anguish or danger, but as a happiness that gives her reason to carol.

Flowers made into images of the beloved

The speaker names flowers by their colors and forms: vermeil, golden, and white blossoms, roses set with thorns, and snowy lilies. As she walks through the meadows, she likens each one to the face of the man who has taken her heart and will keep it. The variety of the flowers lets the beloved’s image appear repeatedly across the landscape; the poem does not isolate him in a portrait but lets the speaker encounter him, by likeness, among the things she sees.

That comparison leads to an intimate ritual. When she finds a flower that seems especially like him, she gathers it, kisses it, and talks with it. She discloses to the flower her store of “wish and woe,” then places it with the others in a wreath bound with her golden hair. The gestures make the flowers more than decoration: they become the speaker’s chosen audience and the material center of her devotion. Her hair binds the gathered likenesses into a single garland, bringing the beloved’s many floral reflections close to her own body.

Sight, scent, and the passage of sighs

The poem next distinguishes the pleasure of seeing a flower from the further effect of its scent. Looking at a blossom gives the speaker a delight like seeing the man whose love has inflamed her; its fragrance works on her in a way she says words cannot express. The progression from sight to scent extends the beloved’s presence beyond resemblance. The flower recalls him to the eye, while its perfume produces an effect that exceeds the speaker’s capacity to explain.

The poem’s own answer to that limit is the sigh. Yet these sighs do not burst from her breast as fierce storms, as the speaker says happens with other ladies. They issue warm and mild and travel straight to her loved one. The contrast defines the particular emotional register of the song: longing is real, but it is not represented as violent or overwhelming. Its movement is gentle, direct, and communicative. The sighs carry what the speaker cannot put into words, making the body’s expression a bridge between the lovers.

A love answered before despair

The final turn makes the song’s tenderness reciprocal. Hearing the sighs moves the beloved to give pleasure in return; when the speaker is on the verge of calling for him lest she despair, he comes. The canzonet therefore ends not with absence but with the answer to anticipated absence. Its sequence—from flower, to kiss and confidences, to scent, to sigh, to arrival—has carried the speaker’s affection outward until it reaches the person addressed by it.

The ending also clarifies the balance between desire and reassurance. The speaker imagines a moment close to despair, but the man’s coming forestalls it. The poem does not explain how he hears or interprets the sighs, or describe what happens after his arrival; it closes on the assurance of his response. The company commends Neifile’s song, and, as much of the night has passed, Filostrato sends everyone to rest. At the end of the ninth day, the canzonet leaves the gathering with an image of love made legible through ordinary spring things and answered in time.