Donc, si vous me croyez, Mignonne,
Tandis que vostre âge fleuronne
En sa plus vert nouveauté,
Cueillez, cueillez vostre jeunesse;
Comme à cette fleur, la vieillesse
Fera ternir vostre beauté.
May-day comes alike in England and in France. Herrick and Jean
Passerat, poets of Devonshire and of Champagne, are equally determined
that two fair sluggards, who love their pillows better than the dewy
grass, shall rise from bed, and share with them the sparkling rapture
of the early dawn. Herrick’s verse, laden with the freshness of the
Spring, rings imperatively in Corinna’s sleepy ears:--
Get up, get up, for shame! The blooming Morn
Upon her wings presents the god unshorn.
See how Aurora throws her fair
Fresh-quilted colours through the air.
Get up, sweet Slug-a-bed, and see
The dew bespangling herb and tree.
And then--across the gayety of the song--the deepening note of
persuasion strikes a familiar chord:--
Come, let us go, while we are in our prime;
And take the harmless folly of the time!
We shall grow old apace, and die
Before we know our liberty.
Passerat is no less insistent. The suitors of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries seem to have dedicated the chill hours of early
morning to their courtship. Nor was the custom purely pastoral and
poetic. When Lovelace makes his appointments with Clarissa Harlowe at
five A. M., the modern reader--if Richardson has a modern reader--is
wont to think the hour an unpropitious one; but to Herrick and to the
Pléiade it would have seemed rational enough.
Laissons le lit et le sommeil
Ceste journée:
Pour nous, l’Aurore au front vermeil
Est desjà née
sings the French poet beneath his lady’s window; adding, to overcome
her coyness--or her sleepiness--the old dominant argument:--
Ce vieillard, contraire aus amans,
Des aisles porte,
Et en fuyant, nos meilleurs ans
Bien loing emporte.
Quand ridée un jour tu seras,
Mélancholique, tu diras:
J’estoy peu sage,
Qui n’usoy point de la beauté
Que si tost le temps a osté
De mon visage.
No less striking is the similarity between the reproachful couplets
in which the singers of England and of France delight in denouncing
their unfaithful fair ones, or in confessing with harmonious sighs
the transient nature of their own emotions. Inconstancy is the
breath of love’s nostrils, and the inspiration of love’s songs, which
enchant us because they express an exquisite sentiment in its brief
moment of ascendency. The tell-tale past, the dubious future, are
alike discreetly ignored. Love in the drama and in the romance plays
rather a heavy part. It is too obtrusively omniscient. It is far too
self-assertive. Yet the average taxpayer, as has been well remarked, is
no more capable of a grand passion than of a grand opera. The utmost
he can achieve is some fair, fleeting hour, and with the imperative
gladness of such an hour the love-song thrills sympathetically. It is
not _its_ business to
recapture
That first fine careless rapture.
It does not essay the impossible.