ROME — In youthful, sorrowful poetry just translated from Polish, Pope John Paul II pays tribute to his mother, who died when he was 8 years old.

The Italian publishing house Edizioni Studium on Sept. 15 issued Karol Wojtyla: The Youthful Poems, a collection of verse, translated into Italian, that the young Pole who was to become pope wrote at age 19.

At the time, Wojtyla was enrolled in Jagiellonian University in Krakow, studying philosophy, the Polish language and literature. It was 1939, at the outbreak of World War II.

During the Nazi occupation of Poland, which began in September of that year, he was forced to leave the university and work in a quarry and chemicals factory while studying for the priesthood. In an underground seminary, he became involved in the theater as an actor and a playwright.

“A multiplicity of ideas, presentiments and visions were born and matured in the youthful poems,” the introduction to the new collection says. “The young Wojtyla felt fully aware of being a poet, of having a poetic vocation.”

All the poetry, including a cycle of 17 sonnets and a Magnificat, is infused with a sense of Wojtyla's strong religious faith.

The collection opens with a poem to his mother, Emilia Kaczorowska, who died 10 years earlier in 1929 at the age of 45, a week before her son's ninth birthday. In the poem, entitled “On Your White Tomb,” he wrote:

On your white tomb I kneel with my sadness O, how much time has passed already And yet today it seems little to me.

On your white tomb O Mother — love extinguished — My mouth whispers exhausted:

Give eternal repose.

Amid gathering fears of a German invasion of Poland, Wojtyla wrote a poem called “The Early Morning Song” in which he said: “And when the gigantic Goliath arises/to shatter my youth/I beseech Zion, Pestilence:/Come with salvation.”

The invasion came in September 1939. In a poem dated “Autumn 1939” and entitled “And When David Arrived at His Motherland,” Wojtyla wrote:

“O land, my land! You have given me the tithe/in precocious song and in youth;/I am satiated with your bread, I delight in your wine/until the wind of autumn cuts off my desires/as with a rush, in a blow of the sword.”

This isn't the Pope's first book of poetry.

In 2003, he wrote a personal and pastoral recollection of his years as bishop and archbishop of Krakow. Get Up, Let Us Be Going! came out in Europe in May, and an American edition is to be published this fall.

Collections of later poems, plays and essays on philosophy and theology written by John Paul before he was elected pope in 1978 also have been reissued in recent years.

His best-selling work is Crossing the Threshold of Hope, a long interview on theological questions with Italian journalist Vittorio Messori, which came out in 1994 and sold 20 million copies worldwide.

John Paul is reported to be working on another book to be published next year on the two totalitarian movements of the 20th century — Nazism and communism.