Lauretta's song

Lauretta's song is a plaintive love lyric in which a woman recalls a cherished first beloved, laments a later marriage governed by jealousy, and addresses the dead lover as she longs to be reunited with him. Its decisive tension is between the speaker's sense that she was made for love and delight, and the possessive life she now describes: a change of clothing and a bridal day have left her less free and less happy than before.

Performance and Storytelling Frame

After the company has supped in the garden, Filostrato continues the practice of the earlier queens by asking Lauretta to lead a dance and sing. Lauretta says that she knows no songs by other people and has none of her own especially suited to such a joyful company, but will sing one if he chooses. Filostrato insists that anything of hers will please. She begins in a sweet voice and a somewhat plaintive manner, while the other ladies answer her. The performance therefore takes place within a celebration, but its chosen song turns the company’s attention from communal pleasure to private sorrow.

The setting sharpens that contrast. Earlier, the company had spent time among the garden’s fountain, flowers, and animals, with some pursuing the fawns, kids, and rabbits, while Dioneo and Fiammetta sang and Filomena and Pamfilo played chess. At the end of the evening, Filostrato’s request for a song preserves the group’s established entertainment while giving Lauretta room for a distinctly different mood. The song is not presented as a detached poem: it is voiced before listeners who have been invited to hear both its grief and its account of love.

The Speaker’s Two Loves

The lyric opens with the speaker’s claim that no other unhappy maiden has as much cause to mourn. She describes herself as fashioned by the maker of heaven and the stars to be loving, lively, kind, and gracious, so that even earthly life might offer a glimpse of heavenly beauty. Yet, she says, men who do not understand her worth have met her with disdain. The opening thus makes her sorrow more than a complaint about lost affection: it is also a protest that her nature and value have gone unrecognized.

The speaker then remembers a first lover who held her dear and was captivated by her. She says that time passed as he devoted himself to wooing her, and that she did not refuse him; she considered him worthy of her. This remembered attachment is presented as mutual and welcomed. Against it, the lyric sets the arrival of a proud, haughty young man, who takes and keeps her while being consumed by what the song calls a false suspicion. His jealousy leaves her close to despair, in part because she understands herself as having been brought into the world for the good of many, rather than to be possessed by one solitary mate.

Marriage, Change, and Regret

The song locates the speaker’s turn toward unhappiness in a particular decision and its visible sign: she curses the hour when she agreed to change her clothing. In the darker garment she remembers being beautiful and glad; in the brighter one she now leads a weary life, and feels herself held in less esteem than before. The lyric does not explain the circumstances of the clothing change, but makes it the hinge between a happier past and a diminished present. Clothing, bridal status, and the speaker’s altered social condition converge in her lament over the marriage day.

Her regret is absolute. She calls the bridal day sorrowful and wishes she had died before experiencing the unhappy state that followed it. That severity contrasts with stories in the surrounding book in which women’s desires help shape marriage outcomes. Gillette de Narbonne, for instance, asks the king to give her Bertrand de Roussillon as the husband she has earned by curing him; Andrevuola and Gabriotto secretly become husband and wife so that death alone will not part them; and Caterina and Ricciardo Manardi are married after Messer Lizio da Valbona discovers them together. These different outcomes do not resolve the song’s speaker’s predicament. Instead, they make the lyric’s emphasis on a joyless bridal day especially stark: marriage can follow a woman’s expressed choice, a secret union, or a father’s intervention, but this speaker experiences it as the beginning of constraint and sorrow.

The Dead Beloved and the Song’s Ending

In its closing movement, the speaker turns away from the jealous man who possesses her and addresses the earlier beloved, now seated in heaven before the one who fashioned them both. She insists that she cannot forget him for another, even if she dies, and asks him to take pity on her and help bring her to him. The request changes the scale of the lament: what began as a complaint about unreturned or misunderstood worth ends as a wish for reunion beyond earthly life.

That ending also gives the song its governing contrast. The first beloved belongs to a past in which affection was freely offered and accepted; the living husband belongs to a present organized by jealousy and exclusive possession; the dead lover becomes the imagined recipient of a final appeal. Lauretta’s plaintive delivery and the ladies’ answering presence frame that appeal as a performance shared with the company, even though its voice remains intensely personal. The song’s sorrow comes from holding these conditions together: the speaker still understands herself as capable of love and delight, but sees her present marriage as having narrowed the life she once hoped to live.