Sonnets Pour Helene Book II: XLII
by Pierre de Ronsard
Translated by A. S. Kline 2004
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.
Update on the Sonnet From An American Point of View
by Drew Eceu
Wise is the sonneteer who clothed in verse
will choose his cloth for what its swath will bear,
like Esther who addressed the Persian curse
or Joseph wearing bloody camo gear.
Wise is the sonneteer who no one sees
but high or low 'll cut an ernest ell.
Fain would he wave his weave with such as these,
no juster tailor found near shore nor dell.
Why at his back the words were thick and worn,
Ronsard, Camões, Pushkin, Rilke, Borges,
Keats, Hopkins, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, torn,
Petrarca, Tasso, and the two Dantes.
How arduous he works at fulling mill,
a Daniel still say I, and dyeing twill.
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