Poetry of du Bellay by Joachim du Bellay
Joachim du Bellay was a prominent French poet of the 16th century, known for his contributions to the literary movement called the Pléiade. This group, which he co-founded with fellow poets Pierre de Ronsard and Jean-Antoine de Baïf, sought to elevate the French language and literature by drawing inspiration from ancient Greek and Roman traditions. Du Bellay's poetry often reflects themes of nostalgia, beauty, and the tension between past and present, particularly evident in his notable works such as "L'Olive," "Les Antiquités de Rome," and "The Regrets."
His writing is characterized by a blend of elegiac and satirical tones, with a sophisticated use of mythological references and a distinct personal style. Du Bellay’s adoption of the sonnet form, particularly his cycle of sonnets focused on a singular love object, marked a significant innovation in French poetry. Despite his ambitions, his time in Rome, working for his cardinal cousin, led to disillusionment, which heavily influenced his later works that critique the corruption within the Church. Overall, du Bellay's legacy is that of a masterful poet whose innovations helped shape the modern landscape of French poetry.
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Poetry of du Bellay by Joachim du Bellay
First published: 1549-1559; includes L’Olive, 1549; Vers Lyriques, 1549; Recueil de poésies, 1549; La Musagnoeomachie, 1550; XIII Sonnets de l’honnête amour, 1552; Les Antiquités de Rome, 1558 (partial translation, 1591, as Ruines of Rome); Les Regrets, 1558 (The Regrets, 1984); Poemata, 1558; Le Poète courtisan, 1559
Type of work: Poetry
The Work:
Orphaned early in his short life, Angevin nobleman Joachim du Bellay wrote some of the finest elegiac and satiric poetry in the French language, although much of it was imitated or simply translated from ancient Greek, Roman, and Italian sources. While studying works from those traditions with the Hellenist Jean Dorat at the latter’s Collège de Coqueret, de Bellay and his friends Pierre de Ronsard and Jean-Antoine de Baïf founded the group of seven writers later known as the Pléiade, borrowing the name from a famous school of ancient Greek poets in Alexandria. The group’s name referred to the seven daughters of Atlas in Greek mythology, transformed into a constellation of stars. The Pléiade became the most famous French poetic school between the medieval Troubadours and the nineteenth century Romantics.
Fearing that he and his friends would be overshadowed by Thomas Sébillet, who advocated a radical renewal of French language and literature in his Art Poétique (1548), the ambitious du Bellay rushed into print with a similar program in his polemical essay La Défense et illustration de la langue française (1549; The Defence and Illustration of the French Language, 1939). At the time, French was still considered an inferior language to Latin, which was used widely in the Catholic Church and for instruction in universities. Du Bellay advocated revitalizing the French language by reviving archaic words, inventing new words, and imitating what he considered the most prestigious literary forms, such as satire as well as the Italian sonnet (Petrarch) and the Latin epic (Vergil), ode (Horace), and elegy (Ovid). These would replace the medieval French ballades, lais, virelais, rondeaux, and chansons, with their playful, personal, and often comical subjects.
During the first half of the sixteenth century, humanist scholars had used their study of ancient languages to retranslate the Bible and to call many teachings of the Catholic Church into question. Some poets, such as Clément Marot and Marguerite de Navarre, sympathized with the Huguenots (Protestants), although without leaving the Church. The Pléiade poets, however, remained loyal Catholics. Their poetry compartmentalizes pagan and Christian mythology and imagery, often placing them together without feeling any doctrinal contradiction. In their popularized Neoplatonism, they represented the idealized lady to whom their poems were dedicated as the window that offered a glimpse of ideal beauty and perfection, without intending to solicit sexual favors or advocate adultery. Thus, they continued the word-games of medieval courtly love.
To illustrate the renewed French literature and language he had recommended in his essay, du Bellay published L’Olive, a cycle of fifty sonnets, of which more than half were of neo-Petrarchan inspiration. Fifteen years earlier, the poets Clément Marot and Mellin de Saint-Gelais had introduced the sonnet (a fourteen-line poem with a fixed rhyme scheme, typically abba, abba, ccd, ede) to France, but du Bellay was the first to introduce a cycle of sonnets focused on a single love object. (The poems to Lesbia of the ancient Roman Catullus, and the fourteenth century French poet Guillaume de Machaut’s Le Voir Dit—although not sonnets—were among other precursors.) Despite its predominantly literary inspiration and its frequent Petrarchan antitheses, the world of L’Olive richly and sensuously blends mythological references, notations of color and sound, nature images, and intellectual subtlety. The title refers to a (probably imaginary) woman; to the wisdom of the goddess Athena (the olive was her tree); and to du Bellay’s main model, Petrarch, who had made the laurel tree famous by celebrating a woman named Laura. Published together with L’Olive were the Vers Lyriques. Here, du Bellay seems to achieve a more personal tone. Typical topics are the rapid flight of time and the fragility of all worldly goods.
An expanded edition of L’Olive, with sixty-five additional sonnets, appeared in 1550. Here the poet turns to the Christian religion to seek and find solace for the loss of his lady. At this moment, Petrarchism becomes transformed by a fervent Platonism, as in the famous sonnet 113. The poet is liberated from the problems of time and earthly beauty by the soul’s winged ascent to re-experience (reconnaître) the eternal ideas of Beauty, Goodness, and Truth. A striking example of du Bellay’s syncretism (the blending of diverse religions) appears in sonnet 114 of L’Olive, where Platonic terms infiltrate a text from Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Romans.
Unexpectedly, du Bellay’s second cousin, Cardinal Jean du Bellay, summoned him to go to Rome as the cardinal’s private secretary. The young poet was thrilled by the idea of living in a city whose civilization had so inspired him. Because the cardinal was the French king’s main ambassador to Rome, which was then the center not only of Catholic power but also of French political efforts to dominate its great rival Spain, du Bellay no doubt dreamed of playing an influential role in history. Instead, he found himself used as a household manager and errand boy. He also was disgusted by the venality, sexual license, and political corruption of the highest Church officials of the time. He could not safely publish such reactions until he returned to France, but then, in 1558, his two poetic masterpieces, both sonnet cycles, appeared: Les Antiquités de Rome and The Regrets.
The first, Les Antiquités de Rome, celebrates and laments the vanished glories of ancient Roman civilization; the ruins of Rome are compared to fallen giants vanquished by the gods. The second, The Regrets, virulently satirizes the corruption of the modern Papacy and dramatizes his own bitter disillusionment. Both reintroduce the alexandrine (twelve-syllable) verse into French, where it would dominate poetry until the early twentieth century and theater until late in the nineteenth century.
The Regrets, a collection of 191 sonnets, contains du Bellay’s greatest elegiac and satirical poetry, mature and original. Its purpose was to ease the sorrow of his exile and, by an act of poetic creation, to forget his unpleasant, demanding job and his misfortunes such as loneliness and worsening deafness. However, this attempt often failed, as sonnet 6 reveals:
Alas, where is my scorn for Fortune’s blows?
This poem displays many characteristic features of du Bellay’s style. It is quite impersonal, despite the frequent use of the first-person singular. Characters other than the poet are often conventional figures from pagan mythology (Fortune, the Muses). The statements are nearly all negations, which express loss, suffering, and confusion. However, one could construct no coherent biography from the feelings expressed, and no precise landscape from the vague, stock details (night, the bank of a stream, the moon). Du Bellay’s tone is usually intensely self-conscious and, often, as here, he paradoxically writes a poem about being unable to find anything to write because he is so deeply depressed. Both personally and historically, in his world the past was always better than the present, where there is no hope. He consistently expresses a flagrantly elitist attitude—Horace’s “odi profanum vulgus et arceo” (I detest and shun the common herd)—but finds no energy except in memories, anger, disgust at others, and in the formal rigor of his word structures.
Du Bellay frequently develops the message of a sonnet in the last line, often through irony, causing the reader’s imagination to yield in silence to the creative impulse it has received. Antithesis, however, is the usual instrument of du Bellay’s wit. It appears as a procedure of composition as well as a device of style. The sonnet itself is an antithetical form, and the subject matter of du Bellay’s poetry lends itself to antithetical treatment. Thus in sonnet 6 he contrasts his past life and poetic manner in the quatrains to his present in the tercets. The great myth that does dominate the poems is, of course, that of the exile: Ulysses or Jason, or both together, as in the famous sonnet 31:
Happy Ulysses who ploughed the seaways
Typically for du Bellay, the mythological references clash ironically with their context. Jason, who won the Golden Fleece, lost his children when his abandoned wife Medea killed them for revenge. Both Jason and Ulysses were seafaring conquerors, but the sonnet’s last line unfavorably compares Rome’s ocean air (connoting military domination of the seas and the empire) to the little freshwater (eau douce) streams of du Bellay’s village, Liré.
In 1557, du Bellay returned to France to flattering acclaim but also legal difficulties, which, with increasing illness, embittered his last three years. Le Poète courtisan, a kind of satirical last will and testament, appeared in 1559, offering ironic advice to the would-be court poet on how to succeed where he himself had failed. In it, du Bellay antithetically takes up again the arguments of The Defence and Illustration of the French Language. He then died suddenly on January 1, 1560. The judgment of posterity, however, sees in du Bellay one of France’s greatest satiric and lyric poets, second only to Ronsard in his own age and an uncontested master of the sonnet. His innovations helped found modern French poetry.
Bibliography
Du Bellay, Joachim. “The Regrets,” with “The Antiquities of Rome,” “Three Latin Elegies,” and “The Defense and Enrichment of the French Language.” Edited and translated by Richard Helgerson. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. A bilingual edition, with plain prose translations of du Bellay’s major works, as well as copious notes, a bibliography, and useful indexes. The excellent introduction is the best starting point for studies of du Bellay.
Katz, Richard A. The Ordered Text: The Sonnet Sequences of du Bellay. New York: Peter Lang, 1985. Carefully brings to light the intricate structures of du Bellay’s major collections of poems (L’Olive, Les Regrets, Les Antiquités de Rome), which all blend elegy (lament), satire (ironic personal attacks), and encomium (praise of influential or potential patrons). The poet’s mixed admiration and envy of his close friend Pierre de Ronsard emerges starkly.
Keating, L. Clark. Joachim du Bellay. New York: Twayne, 1971. Thoughtful, original, and sensitive in relating du Bellay’s biography and inner life to the literature, philosophy, religion, and politics of his times. Outlines and analyzes the major works.
Shapiro, Norman R., and Hope Glidden, eds. Lyrics of the French Renaissance: Marot, du Bellay, Ronsard. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002. English versions by Shapiro, introduction by Glidden, notes by Glidden and Shapiro. Shapiro’s translations of some 150 poems by du Bellay and his contemporaries faithfully imitate the form of the originals and capture English equivalents of sixteenth century French expressions. The introduction surveys French Renaissance verse; detailed notes accompany some poems.