So my youth has reached its end!Related posts:
I've no store of strength to spend,
My head is white, my teeth are black;
Thin red water in my veins
Warms me little, nor sustains
Sinews dissolute and slack.
Adieu, my lyre; adieu, my dears,
Darling girls of careless years,
Adieu; my frolic days have fled,
And after all youth's jubilee,
There's nothing now will comfort me
But a good fire, and wine, and bed.
Ma douce jouvence est passée,
Ma première force est cassée;
J'ai la dent noire et le chef blanc;
Mes nerfs sont dissous, et mes veines,
Tant j'ai le corps froid, ne sont pleines
Que d'une eau rousse en lieu de sang.
Adieu ma lyre! adieu fillettes,
Jadis mes douces amourettes!
Adieu, je sens venir ma fin;
Nul passetemps de ma jeunesse
Ne m'accompagne en la vieillesse
Que le feu, le lit et le vin.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Wednesday, September 11, 2024
Companions of Old Age
Morris Bishop, Ronsard: Prince of Poets (1940; rpt. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1959), pp. 113-114 (Odes 4.13, lines 1-12):