Du Bellay on Beauty

Joachim du Bellay · Mystic Verse and Insights Series · 2 pages

Two pages carrying a single sonnet by Joachim du Bellay, number xiii of L'Olive augmentée (1549), printed in the original sixteenth-century French with *two English translations set side by side* in a footnote — a close one by A.S. Kline and a looser one by J. Robin — so that a reader can weigh one against the other.

The sonnet argues from the brevity of life to the direction the soul should be facing. If our life is less than a single day measured against eternity, and the turning year drives our days away without hope of return, and everything born is perishable, then the poet asks his imprisoned soul what it is dreaming of, and why the darkness of our day should please it when it has well-feathered wings on its back for flying to a clearer dwelling. The last six lines answer with a place rather than an argument, repeated insistently — there is the good that every spirit desires, there the rest to which all the world aspires, there love, there pleasure still. The closing turn is the reason the poem sits in this series: the soul, guided to the highest heaven, will there recognise the Idea of the beauty which the poet adores in this world — the Platonic pattern of which earthly beauty is the copy.

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