No More Learning

Your glance entered my heart and blood, just like

A flash of lightning through the clouds. I burned

Hot and cold, in a lasting fever, well-earned

By the mortal wound of your glance's piercing flight.

If your fair hand had not made a sign to me then,

White hand that makes you a daughter of the swan,

I'd have died, Helen, of the rays from your eyes:

But that gesture towards me saved a soul in pain:

Your eye was pleased to carry away the prize,

Yet your hand rejoiced to grant me life again.

Note: Ronsard plays on the identification of Helen with Helen of Troy, born of Leda, and Jupiter disguised as a swan.

Sonnets Pour Helene Book I: XIX

So often forging peace, so often fighting,

So often breaking up, and then re-forming,

So often blaming Love, so often praising,

So often searching out, so often fleeing,

So often hiding ourselves, so often revealing,

So often under the yoke, so often freeing,

Making our promises and then retracting,

Are signs that Love strikes at our very being.

A sign of love is this loving inconstancy.

If in a moment feeling both hate and pity,

Vowing, un-vowing, oaths sworn and un-sworn,

Hoping that's hopeless, comfort that's comfortless,

Are true love signs, then our love's of the best,

Since we are always at peace, or at war.

Sonnets Pour Helene Book I: L

Though the human spirit gives itself noble airs

In Plato's doctrine, who calls it divine influx,

Without the body it would do nothing much,

While vainly praising its origin up there.

The soul sees through the senses, imagines, hears,

Has from the body's powers its acts and looks:

The spirit once embodied has wit, makes books,

Matter makes it more perfect and more fair.

You love the spirit, now, and yet, without reason,

You say that all passion's defiled by the body.

To say so is merely a fault of imagination

That takes what is false for true reality:

And recalls the ancient myth of Ixion,

Who fed on air, and loved a cloud's deceit.

Note: Ixion tried to seduce Juno, but Jupiter substituted a cloud for her person. Ronsard refers to Neo-Platonic metaphysics in criticising Plato's 'Idealism'. Compare John Donne's poem 'The Ecstasie'. Donne like Marvell seems to have been influenced by Ronsard and his peers.
Sonnets Pour Helene Book II: XLII

In these long winter nights when the idle Moon

Steers her chariot so slowly on its way,

When the cockerel so tardily calls the day,

When night to the troubled soul seems years through:

I would have died of misery if not for you,

In shadowy form, coming to ease my fate,

Utterly naked in my arms, to lie and wait,

Sweetly deceiving me with a specious view.

The real you is fierce, of pitiless cruelty:

The false you one enjoys, in true intimacy,

I sleep beside your ghost, rest by an illusion:

Nothing's denied me. So kind sleep deceives

My loving sorrows with your false reality.

In love there is no harm in self-delusion.

Sonnets Pour Helene Book II: XLIII

When you are truly old, beside the evening candle,

Sitting by the fire, winding wool and spinning,

Murmuring my verses, you'll marvel then, in saying,

'Long ago, Ronsard sang me, when I was beautiful. '

There'll be no serving-girl of yours, who hears it all,

Even if, tired from toil, she's already drowsing,

Fails to rouse at the sound of my name's echoing,

And blesses your name, then, with praise immortal.

I'll be under the earth, a boneless phantom,

At rest in the myrtle groves of the dark kingdom:

You'll be an old woman hunched over the fire,

Regretting my love for you, your fierce disdain,

So live, believe me: don't wait for another day,

Gather them now the roses of life, and desire.

Note: W. B. Yeats' free adaptation is the well-known poem 'When you are old and grey and full of sleep' (In 'The Rose'). The myrtle groves are those of the Underworld in Classical mythology.

Sonnets Pour Helene Book II: XLIX

That night Love drew you down into the ballroom

To dance a sweet love-ballet with subtle art,

Your eyes though it was evening, brought the day

Like so many lightning flashes through the gloom.

A dance divine, that, time after time, resumed,

Broke, and re-formed again, circling every way,

Merged and then parted, turned, then turned away,

Mirroring the curves Meander's course assumed.

Now rounded, now stretched out, now narrowing,

Now tapering, now triangular, now forming

Ranks like flights of Cranes in frost-escaping line.

I'm wrong, you didn't dance: your feet were fluttering

Over the surface of the ground, your body altering,

Its nature transformed that night to the divine.

Note: The Meander was the river in Asia Minor (Menderes Nehri in modern Turkey) noted for its sinuous curves.