This sonnet dates from the same period at Rome, or possibly from his
return. It has a different note. It is the most personal and passionate
of all his writings, in which so much was inspired by personal regret.
On this account it has a special literary interest as the most _modern_
thing of the Renaissance. It would be far less surprising to find this
written by one of the young republicans under the Second Empire (for
instance) than to find a couplet of Malherbe's straying into our time.
_THE SONNET OF EXILE._
_France, Mère des arts, des armes, et des loix,
Tu m'as nourry long temps du laict de ta mamelle:
Ores, comme un aigneau qui sa nourisse appelle,
Je remplis de ton nom les antres et les bois,
Si tu m'as pour enfant advoué quelquefois
Que ne me respons-tu maintenant, ô cruelle?
France, France, respons à ma triste querelle:
Mais nul, sinon Echo, ne respond à ma voix._
_Entre les loups cruels j'erre parmy la plaine
Je sens venir l'hyver, de qui la froide haleine
D'une tremblante horreur fait hérisser ma peau.
Las! tes autres agneaux n'ont faute de pasture,
Ils ne craignent le loup, le vent, ny la froidure;
Si ne suis-je pourtant le pire du troppeau._
THE SONNET "HEUREUX QUI COMME ULYSSE."
(_The 31st of the "Regrets"_).
It was of a large gray house, moated, a town beside it, yet not far from
woods and standing in rough fields, pure Angevin, Tourmélière, the Manor
house of Liré, his home, that Du Bellay wrote this, the most dignified
and perhaps the last of his sonnets. The sadness which is the permanent,
though sometimes the unrecognized, moderator of his race, which had
pierced through in his latter misfortunes, and which had tortured him to
the cry that has been printed on the preceding page, here reached a
final and a most noble form: something much higher than melancholy, and
more majestic than regret. He turned to his estate, the mould of his
family, a roof, the inheritance of which had formed his original burden
and had at last crushed him; but he turned to it with affection. If one
may use so small a word in connection with a great poet, the gentleman
in him remembered an ancestral repose.
There is very much in the Sonnet to mark that development of French
verse in which Du Bellay played so great a part. The inversion of the
sentence, a trick which gives a special character to all the later
formal drama is prominent: the convention of contrast, the purely
classical allusion, are mixed with a spirit that is still spontaneous
and even naïf. But every word is chosen, and it is especially noteworthy
to discover so early that restraint in epithet which is the charm but
also the danger of what French style has since become. Of this there are
two examples here: the eleventh line and the last, which rhymes with it.
To contrast slate with marble would be impossible prose save for the
exact adjective "_fine_," which puts you at once into Anjou. The last
line, in spite of its exquisite murmur, would be grotesque if the "_air
marin_" were meant for the sea-shore. Coming as it does after the
suggestions of the Octave it gives you suddenly sea-faring: Ulysses,
Jason, his own voyages, the long way to Rome, which he knew; and in the
"_douceur Angevine_" you have for a final foil to such wanderings, not
only in the meaning of the words, but in their very sound, the hearth
and the return.
_THE SONNET "HEUREUX QUI COMME ULYSSE"_
_Heureux qui comme Ulysse a fait un beau voyage
Ou comme cestuy là qui conquit la Toison
Et puis est retourné, plein d'usage et raison,
Vivre entre ses parents le reste de son age!
Quand revoirai-je, hélas, de mon petit village
Fumer la cheminée: et en quelle saison
Revoirai-je le clos de ma pauvre maison,
Qui m'est une province, et beaucoup d'avantage?_
_Plus me plaist le séjour qu'ont basty mes aieux
Que des palais Romains le front audacieux:
Plus que le mabre dur me plaist l'ardoise fine,
Plus mon Loyre gaulois que le Tybre Latin,
Plus mon petit Lyré que le Mont Palatin,
Et plus que l'air marin la doulceur Angevine._